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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Classic French Course in English, by 
+William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Classic French Course in English
+
+Author: William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+Release Date: October 14, 2007 [EBook #23033]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE IN ENGLISH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Vachuska, Chuck Greif and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+=_THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES._=
+
+CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE
+
+IN ENGLISH.
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON.
+
+  NEW YORK:
+  CHAUTAUQUA PRESS,
+  C. L. S. C. DEPARTMENT,
+  805 BROADWAY.
+  1886.
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1886,
+
+BY PHILLIPS & HUNT.
+
+_OTHER VOLUMES IN THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES_
+
+  BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
+
+  *PREPARATORY GREEK COURSE IN ENGLISH       $1.00
+  **PREPARATORY LATIN COURSE IN ENGLISH       1.00
+  *** COLLEGE GREEK COURSE IN ENGLISH         1.00
+  ****COLLEGE LATIN COURSE IN ENGLISH         1.00
+
+_The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of
+six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not
+involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every
+principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended._
+
+ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
+BY RAND, AVERY, & COMPANY.
+BOSTON.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The preparation of the present volume proposed to the author a task more
+difficult far than that undertaken in any one of the four preceding
+volumes of the group, THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES, to which it belongs.
+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 greater difficulty seen thus to inhere already in the nature itself
+of the task proposed for accomplishment, was gravely increased by the
+much more severe compression deemed to be in the present instance
+desirable. The room placed at the author's disposal for a display of
+French literature was less than half the room allowed him for the
+display of either the Greek or the Latin.
+
+The plan, therefore, of this volume, imposed the necessity of
+establishing from the outset certain limits, to be very strictly
+observed. First, it was resolved to restrict the attention bestowed upon
+the national history, the national geography, and the national language,
+of the French, to such brief occasional notices as, in the course of the
+volume, it might seem necessary, for illustration of the particular
+author, from time to time to make. The only introductory general matter
+here to be found will accordingly consist of a rapid and summary review
+of that literature, as a whole, which is the subject of the book. It was
+next determined to limit the authors selected for representation to
+those of the finished centuries. A third decision was to make the number
+of authors 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.
+
+It is proposed to follow the present volume with a volume similar in
+general character, devoted to German literature.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+I.
+                                                                  PAGE
+FRENCH LITERATURE                                             1
+
+II.
+
+FROISSART                                                    18
+
+III.
+
+RABELAIS                                                     28
+
+IV.
+
+MONTAIGNE                                                    44
+
+V.
+
+LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (LA BRUYÈRE; VAUVENARGUES)                  66
+
+VI.
+
+LA FONTAINE                                                  81
+
+VII.
+
+MOLIÈRE                                                      92
+
+VIII.
+
+PASCAL                                                      115
+
+IX.
+
+MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ                                           134
+
+X.
+
+CORNEILLE                                                   151
+
+XI.
+
+RACINE                                                      166
+
+XII.
+
+BOSSUET, BOURDALOUE, MASSILLON                              182
+
+XIII.
+
+FÉNELON                                                     205
+
+XIV.
+
+MONTESQUIEU                                                 225
+
+XV.
+
+VOLTAIRE                                                    238
+
+XVI.
+
+ROUSSEAU                                                    255
+
+XVII.
+
+THE ENCYCLOPÆDISTS                                          282
+
+XVIII.
+
+EPILOGUE                                                    288
+
+INDEX                                                       293
+
+
+
+
+CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE 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 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 sombre 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 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 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 centre 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 metre 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 early 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
+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
+Saint 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 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 lifetime
+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 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 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 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 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 centre 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, earth-shaking explosion would
+follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called,--the
+usurpation, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte,--literature was well-nigh
+extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpassingly brilliant,
+of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, 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 afterwards 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 at length would 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 has already passed the limit
+within which our choice of authors for representation is necessarily
+confined.
+
+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 Shakspeare--was largely
+the pregnant cause of this attempted emancipation of the French literary
+mind from the burden 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, 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 farther 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, if the truth must be told, diffuses himself too widely to
+do his best possible work. He has, however, 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,--extracts, however, not unfrequently
+marred by wretched translation. 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 he belongs by
+character and by sympathy 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 traveller 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 other 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 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 a 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 had been able to 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 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:--
+
+     There was much pressing at this time, through eagerness to take the
+     king; and those who were nearest to him, and knew him, cried out,
+     "Surrender yourself, surrender yourself, or you are a dead man!" In
+     that part of the field was a young knight from St. Omer, who was
+     engaged by a salary in the service of the King of England; his name
+     was Denys de Morbeque; who for five years had attached himself to
+     the English, on account of having been banished in his younger days
+     from France, for a murder committed in an affray at St. Omer. It
+     fortunately happened for this knight, that he was at the time near
+     to the King of France, when he was so much pulled about. He, by
+     dint of force, for he was very strong and robust, pushed through
+     the crowd, and said to the king, in good French, "Sire, sire,
+     surrender yourself!" The king, who found himself very disagreeably
+     situated, turning to him, asked, "To whom shall I surrender myself?
+     to whom? Where is my cousin, the Prince of Wales? If I could see
+     him, I would speak to him."--"Sire," replied Sir Denys, "he is not
+     here; but surrender yourself to me, and I will lead you to
+     him."--"Who are you?" said the king. "Sire, I am Denys de Morbeque,
+     a knight from Artois; but I serve the King of England because I
+     cannot belong to France, having forfeited all I possessed there."
+     The king then gave him his right-hand glove, and said, "I surrender
+     myself to you." There was much crowding and pushing about; for
+     every one was eager to cry out, "I have taken him!" Neither the
+     king nor his youngest son Philip were able to get forward, and free
+     themselves from the throng....
+
+     The Prince [of Wales] asked them [his marshals] if they knew any
+     thing of the King of France: they replied, "No, sir, not for a
+     certainty; but we believe he must be either killed or made
+     prisoner, since he has never quitted his battalion." The prince
+     then, addressing the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cobham, said, "I beg
+     of you to mount your horses, and ride over the field, so that on
+     your return you may bring me some certain intelligence of him." The
+     two barons, immediately mounting their horses, left the prince, and
+     made for a small hillock, that they might look about them. From
+     their stand they perceived a crowd of men-at-arms on foot, who were
+     advancing very slowly. The King of France was in the midst of them,
+     and in great danger; for the English and Gascons had taken him from
+     Sir Denys de Morbeque, and were disputing who should have him, the
+     stoutest bawling out, "It is I that have got him."--"No, no,"
+     replied the others: "we have him." The king, to escape from this
+     peril, said, "Gentlemen, gentlemen, I pray you conduct me and my
+     son in a courteous manner to my cousin the prince; and do not make
+     such a riot about my capture, for I am so great a lord that I can
+     make all sufficiently rich." These words, and others which fell
+     from the king, appeased them a little; but the disputes were always
+     beginning again, and they did not move a step without rioting. When
+     the two barons saw this troop of people, they descended from the
+     hillock, and, sticking spurs into their horses, made up to them. On
+     their arrival, they asked what was the matter. They were answered,
+     that it was the King of France, who had been made prisoner, and
+     that upward of ten knights and squires challenged him at the same
+     time, as belonging to each of them. The two barons then pushed
+     through the crowd by main force, and ordered all to draw aside.
+     They commanded, in the name of the prince, and under pain of
+     instant death, that every one should keep his distance, and not
+     approach unless ordered or desired so to do. They all retreated
+     behind the king; and the two barons, dismounting, advanced to the
+     king with profound reverences, and conducted him in a peaceable
+     manner to the Prince of Wales.
+
+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):--
+
+     When evening was come, the Prince of Wales gave a supper in his
+     pavilion to the King of France, and to the greater part of the
+     princes and barons who were prisoners. The prince seated the King
+     of France, and his son the Lord Philip, at an elevated and
+     well-covered table: with them were Sir James de Bourbon, the Lord
+     John d'Artois, the earls of Tancarville, of Estampes, of Dammartin,
+     of Graville, and the Lord of Partenay. The other knights and
+     squires were placed at different tables. The prince himself served
+     the king's table, as well as the others, with every mark of
+     humility, and would not sit down at it, in spite of all his
+     entreaties for him so to do, saying that "he was not worthy of such
+     an honor, nor did it appertain to him to seat himself at the table
+     of so great a king, or of so valiant a man as he had shown himself
+     by his actions that day." He added, also, with a noble air, "Dear
+     sir, do not make a poor meal, because the Almighty God has not
+     gratified your wishes in the event of this day; for be assured that
+     my lord and father will show you every honor and friendship in his
+     power, and will arrange your ransom so reasonably, that you will
+     henceforward always remain friends. In my opinion, you have cause
+     to be glad that the success of this battle did not turn out as you
+     desired; for you have this day acquired such high renown for
+     prowess, that you have surpassed all the best knights on your side.
+     I do not, dear sir, say this to flatter you; for all those of our
+     side who have seen and observed the actions of each party, have
+     unanimously allowed this to be your due, and decree you the prize
+     and garland for it." At the end of this speech, there were murmurs
+     of praise heard from every one; and the French said the prince had
+     spoken nobly and truly, and that he would be one of the most
+     gallant princes in Christendom if God should grant him life to
+     pursue his career of glory.
+
+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 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 enamoured 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 not unfitly so
+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:--
+
+     Count Gaston Phoebus de Foix, of whom I am now speaking, was at
+     that time fifty-nine years old; and I must say, that although I
+     have seen very many knights, kings, princes, and others, I have
+     never seen any so handsome, either in the form of his limbs and
+     shape, or in countenance, which was fair and ruddy, with gray and
+     amorous eyes, that gave delight whenever he chose to express
+     affection. He was so perfectly formed, one could not praise him too
+     much. He loved earnestly the things he ought to love, and hated
+     those which it was becoming him so to hate. He was a prudent
+     knight, full of enterprise and wisdom. He had never any men of
+     abandoned character with him, reigned prudently, and was constant
+     in his devotions. There were regular nocturnals from the Psalter,
+     prayers from the rituals to the Virgin, to the Holy Ghost, and
+     from the burial service. He had every day distributed as alms, at
+     his gate, five florins in small coin, to all comers. He was liberal
+     and courteous in his gifts, and well knew how to take when it was
+     proper, and to give back where he had confidence. He mightily loved
+     dogs above all other animals, and during the summer and winter
+     amused himself much with hunting....
+
+     When he quitted his chamber at midnight for supper, twelve servants
+     bore each a lighted torch before him, which were placed near his
+     table, and gave a brilliant light to the apartment. The hall was
+     full of knights and squires, and there were plenty of tables laid
+     out for any person who chose to sup. No one spoke to him at his
+     table, unless he first began a conversation. He commonly ate
+     heartily of poultry, but only the wings and thighs; for in the
+     daytime, he neither ate nor drank much. He had great pleasure in
+     hearing minstrels; as he himself was a proficient in the science,
+     and made his secretaries sing songs, ballads, and roundelays. He
+     remained at table about two hours, and was pleased when fanciful
+     dishes were served up to him, which having seen, he immediately
+     sent them to the tables of his knights and squires.
+
+     In short, every thing considered, though I had before been in
+     several courts of kings, dukes, princes, counts, and noble ladies,
+     I was never at one that pleased me more, nor was I ever more
+     delighted with feats of arms, than at this of the Count de Foix.
+     There were knights and squires to be seen in every chamber, hall,
+     and court, going backwards and forwards, and conversing on arms and
+     amours. Every thing honorable was there to be found. All
+     intelligence from distant countries was there to be learnt, for the
+     gallantry of the count had brought visitors from all parts of the
+     world. It was there I was informed of the greater part of those
+     events which had happened in Spain, Portugal, Arragon, Navarre,
+     England, Scotland, and on the borders of Languedoc; for I saw,
+     during my residence, knights and squires arrive from every nation.
+     I therefore made inquiries from them, or from the count himself,
+     who cheerfully conversed with me.
+
+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.
+
+We take now a somewhat long forward step, in going, as we do, at once
+from Froissart to Rabelais. Comines, lying between, 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 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 the
+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 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
+to 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 Motteux; 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:--
+
+     Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious
+     pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my
+     writings), Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's which is
+     entitled, "The Banquet," whilst he was setting forth the praises of
+     his schoolmaster Socrates (without all question the prince of
+     philosophers), amongst other discourses to that purpose said that
+     he resembled the Sileni. Sileni of old were little boxes, like
+     those we now may see in the shops of apothecaries, painted on the
+     outside with wanton toyish figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled
+     geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts,
+     and other such counterfeited pictures, at pleasure, to excite
+     people unto laughter, as Silenus himself, who was the foster-father
+     of good Bacchus, was wont to do; but within those capricious
+     caskets called Sileni, were carefully preserved and kept many rich
+     and fine drugs, such as balm, ambergreese, amomon, musk, civet,
+     with several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great
+     price. Just such another thing was Socrates; for to have eyed his
+     outside, and esteemed of him by his exterior appearance, you would
+     not have given the peel of an onion for him, so deformed he was in
+     body, and ridiculous in his gesture.... Opening this box, you would
+     have found within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than
+     human understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning,
+     invincible courage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of
+     mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible disregard of all that
+     for which men commonly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel,
+     toil, and turmoil themselves.
+
+     Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble
+     tend? For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly
+     fools of ease and leisure,... are too ready to judge, that there is
+     nothing in them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and
+     recreative lies;... therefore is it, that you must open the book,
+     and seriously consider of the matter treated in it. Then shall you
+     find that it containeth things of far higher value than the box did
+     promise; that is to say, that the subject thereof is not so
+     foolish, as by the title at the first sight it would appear to be.
+
+     ...Did you ever see a dog with a marrow-bone in his mouth?... Like
+     him, you must, by a sedulous lecture [reading], and frequent
+     meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow; that is, my
+     allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be
+     signified by these Pythagorical symbols;... the most glorious
+     doctrines and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth our
+     religion, as matters of the public state and life economical.
+
+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?
+
+     Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was
+     couching his Iliad and Odyssey, had any thought upon those
+     allegories which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius,
+     Phornutus, squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again
+     from them? If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come
+     near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little
+     dreamed of by Homer, as the gospel sacraments were by Ovid, in his
+     Metamorphoses; though a certain gulligut friar, and true
+     bacon-picker, would have undertaken to prove it, if, perhaps, he
+     had met with as very fools as himself, and, as the proverb says, "a
+     lid worthy of such a kettle."
+
+     If you give any credit thereto, why do not you the same to these
+     jovial new Chronicles of mine? Albeit, when I did dictate them, I
+     thought thereof no more than you, who possibly were drinking the
+     whilst, as I was. For, in the composing of this lordly book, I
+     never lost nor bestowed any more, nor any other time, than what was
+     appointed to serve me for taking of my bodily refection; that is,
+     whilst I was eating and drinking. And, indeed, that is the fittest
+     and most proper hour, wherein to write these high matters and deep
+     sentences; as Homer knew very well, the paragon of all philologues,
+     and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace calls him,
+     although a certain sneaking jobbernol alleged that his verses
+     smelled more of the wine than oil.
+
+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 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' 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 the allegorical sense hidden deep
+underneath the monstrous mass of the Rabelaisian buffoonery. A more
+judicial 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:--
+
+     And, therefore, to make an end of this Prologue, even as I give
+     myself to an hundred thousand panniers-full of fair devils, body
+     and soul,... in case that I lie so much as one single word in this
+     whole history; after the like manner, St. Anthony's fire burn you,
+     Mahoom's disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your
+     side, and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize
+     upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender
+     and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into
+     you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into
+     sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly
+     believe all that I shall relate unto you in this present Chronicle.
+
+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":--
+
+     The story requireth that we relate that which happened unto six
+     pilgrims, who came from Sebastian near to Nantes; and who, for
+     shelter that night, being afraid of the enemy, had hid themselves
+     in the garden upon the chickling peas, among the cabbages and
+     lettuces. Gargantua, finding himself somewhat dry, asked whether
+     they could get any lettuce to make him a salad; and, hearing that
+     there were the greatest and fairest in the country,--for they were
+     as great as plum trees, or as walnut trees,--he would go thither
+     himself, and brought thence in his hand what he thought good, and
+     withal carried away the six pilgrims, who were in so great fear
+     that they did not dare to speak nor cough. Washing them, therefore,
+     first at the fountain, the pilgrims said one to another, softly,
+     "What shall we do? We are almost drowned here amongst these
+     lettuce: shall we speak? But, if we speak, he will kill us for
+     spies." And, as they were thus deliberating what to do, Gargantua
+     put them, with the lettuce, into a platter of the house, as large
+     as the huge tun of the White Friars of the Cistertian order; which
+     done, with oil, vinegar, and salt, he ate them up, to refresh
+     himself a little before supper, and had already swallowed up five
+     of the pilgrims, the sixth being in the platter, totally hid under
+     a lettuce, except his bourbon, or staff, that appeared, and nothing
+     else. Which Grangousier [Gargantua's father] seeing, said to
+     Gargantua, "I think that is the horn of a shell snail: do not eat
+     it."--"Why not?" said Gargantua; "they are good all this month:"
+     which he no sooner said, but, drawing up the staff, and therewith
+     taking up the pilgrim, he ate him very well, then drank a terrible
+     draught of excellent white wine. The pilgrims, thus devoured, made
+     shift to save themselves, as well as they could, by drawing their
+     bodies out of the reach of the grinders of his teeth, but could
+     not escape from thinking they had been put in the lowest dungeon of
+     a prison. And, when Gargantua whiffed the great draught, they
+     thought to have drowned in his mouth, and the flood of wine had
+     almost carried them away into the gulf of his stomach.
+     Nevertheless, skipping with their bourbons, as St. Michael's
+     palmers used to do, they sheltered themselves from the danger of
+     that inundation under the banks of his teeth. But one of them, by
+     chance, groping, or sounding the country with his staff, to try
+     whether they were in safety or no, struck hard against the cleft of
+     a hollow tooth, and hit the mandibulary sinew or nerve of the jaw,
+     which put Gargantua to very great pain, so that he began to cry for
+     the rage that he felt. To ease himself, therefore, of his smarting
+     ache, he called for his tooth-picker, and, rubbing towards a young
+     walnut-tree, where they lay skulking, unnestled you my gentlemen
+     pilgrims. For he caught one by the legs, another by the scrip,
+     another by the pocket, another by the scarf, another by the band of
+     the breeches; and the poor fellow that had hurt him with the
+     bourbon, him he hooked to him by [another part of his clothes]....
+     The pilgrims, thus dislodged, ran away.
+
+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, differs from 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 Liliput 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 the form of an abbey, but 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 everybody to eat, and nobody to prepare:--
+
+     All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but
+     according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of
+     their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labor,
+     sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None
+     did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor
+     to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all
+     their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this
+     one clause to be observed,--
+
+
+     DO WHAT THOU WILT.
+
+
+     ...By this liberty they entered into a very laudable emulation, to
+     do all of them what they saw did please one. If any of the gallants
+     or ladies should say, Let us drink, they would all drink. If any
+     one of them said, Let us play, they all played. If one said, Let us
+     go a walking into the fields, they went all.... There was neither
+     he nor she amongst them, but could read, write, sing, play upon
+     several musical instruments, speak five or six several languages,
+     and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and prose.
+     Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so
+     dextrous and skilful both on foot and a horseback, more brisk and
+     lively, more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of
+     weapons than were there. Never were seen ladies so proper and
+     handsome, so miniard and dainty, less forward, or more ready with
+     their hand, and with their needle, in every honest and free action
+     belonging to that sex, than were there. For this reason, when the
+     time came, that any man of the said abbey, either at the request of
+     his parents, or for some other cause, had a mind to go out of it,
+     he carried along with him one of the ladies, namely her who had
+     before that accepted him as her lover, and they were married
+     together.
+
+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, 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:--
+
+     Fail not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian,
+     and Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists;
+     and by frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of that
+     other world, called the microcosm, which is man. And at some of the
+     hours of the day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy
+     Scriptures: first, in Greek, the New Testament, with the Epistles
+     of the Apostles; and then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In brief,
+     let me see thee an abyss and bottomless pit of knowledge....
+
+     ...It behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to
+     cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and, by faith formed in
+     charity, to cleave unto him, so that thou mayst never be separated
+     from him by thy sins. Suspect the abuses of the world. Set not thy
+     heart upon vanity, for this life is transitory; but the Word of the
+     Lord endureth forever.
+
+"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:--
+
+     He had threescore and three tricks to come by it [money] at his
+     need, of which the most honorable and most ordinary was in manner
+     of thieving, secret purloining, and filching, for he was a wicked,
+     lewd rogue, a cozener, drinker, roysterer, rover, and a very
+     dissolute and debauched fellow, if there were any in Paris;
+     otherwise, and in all matters else, the best and most virtuous man
+     in the world; and he was still contriving some plot, and devising
+     mischief against the serjeants and the watch.
+
+     At one time he assembled three or four especial good hacksters and
+     roaring boys; made them in the evening drink like Templars,
+     afterwards led them till they came under St. Genevieve, or about
+     the college of Navarre, and, at the hour that the watch was coming
+     up that way,--which he knew by putting his sword upon the pavement,
+     and his ear by it, and, when he heard his sword shake, it was an
+     infallible sign that the watch was near at that instant,--then he
+     and his companions took a tumbrel or garbage-cart, and gave it the
+     brangle, hurling it with all their force down the hill, and then
+     ran away upon the other side; for in less than two days he knew all
+     the streets, lanes, and turnings in Paris, as well as his _Deus
+     det._
+
+     At another time he laid, in some fair place where the said watch
+     was to pass, a train of gunpowder, and, at the very instant that
+     they went along, set fire to it, and then made himself sport to see
+     what good grace they had in running away, thinking that St.
+     Anthony's fire had caught them by the legs.... In one of his
+     pockets he had a great many little horns full of fleas and lice,
+     which he borrowed from the beggars of St. Innocent, and cast them,
+     with small canes or quills to write with, into the necks of the
+     daintiest gentlewomen that he could find, yea, even in the church;
+     for he never seated himself above in the choir, but always in the
+     body of the church amongst the women, both at mass, at vespers, and
+     at sermon.
+
+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":--
+
+     By the means of a little Pantagruelism (which, you know, is _a
+     certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune_), you see
+     me now ["at near seventy years of age," his translator says], hale
+     and cheery, as sound as a bell, and ready to drink, if you will.
+
+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!
+
+
+
+
+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 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, divided into 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:--
+
+     That men by various ways arrive at the same end; Whether the
+     governor of a place ought himself to go out to parley; Of liars; Of
+     quick or slow speech; A proceeding of some ambassadors; Various
+     events from the same counsel; Of cannibals; That we laugh and cry
+     from the same thing; Of smells; That the mind hinders itself; Of
+     thumbs; Of virtue; Of coaches; Of managing the will; Of cripples;
+     Of experience.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 self-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
+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:--
+
+     Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset
+     forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to
+     myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no
+     consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My
+     powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to
+     the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that,
+     having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein
+     recover some traits of my conditions and humors, and by that means
+     preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of
+     me. Had my intention been to seek the world's favor, I should
+     surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties. I desire therein
+     to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary
+     manner, without study and artifice; for it is myself I paint. My
+     defects are therein to be read to the life, and my imperfections
+     and my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me.
+     If I had lived among those nations which (they say) yet dwell under
+     the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure thee I would
+     most willingly have painted myself quite fully, and quite naked.
+     Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book. There's no reason
+     thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a
+     subject. Therefore, farewell.
+
+     From Montaigne, the 12th of June, 1580.
+
+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 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, Shakspeare 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, "Of 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:--
+
+     For a boy of quality, then, I say, I would also have his friends
+     solicitous to find him out a tutor who has rather a well-made than
+     a well-filled head, seeking, indeed, both the one and the other,
+     but rather of the two to prefer manners and judgment to mere
+     learning, and that this man should exercise his charge after a new
+     method.
+
+     'Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their
+     pupil's ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the
+     business of the pupil is only to repeat what the others have said:
+     now, I would have a tutor to correct this error, and that, at the
+     very first, he should, according to the capacity he has to deal
+     with, put it to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste
+     things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes
+     opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving him to open it for
+     himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent and speak,
+     but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.... Let him
+     make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and
+     accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet
+     rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own.... 'Tis a sign of
+     crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
+     condition it was swallowed: the stomach has not performed its
+     office, unless it have altered the form and condition of what was
+     committed to it to concoct....
+
+     Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift every thing he reads,
+     and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon
+     trust. Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to
+     him than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of
+     opinions be propounded to, and laid before, him; he will himself
+     choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt.
+
+     "Che, non men che saper, dubbiar m'aggrata." DANTE, _Inferno_, xl.
+     93.
+
+     ["That doubting pleases me, not less than knowing." LONGFELLOW'S
+     _Translation_.]
+
+     For, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own
+     reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who
+     follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is
+     inquisitive after nothing. "Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se
+     vindicet." ["We are under no king; let each look to
+     himself."--SENECA, _Ep._ 33.] Let him, at least, know that he
+     knows. It will be necessary that he imbibe their knowledge, not
+     that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no matter if he
+     forget where he had his learning, provided he know how to apply it
+     to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every one, and are
+     no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after;
+     'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both
+     he and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several
+     sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they
+     find them; but themselves afterward make the honey, which is all
+     and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the
+     several fragments he borrows from others he will transform and
+     shuffle together, to compile a work that shall be absolutely his
+     own; that is to say, his judgment: his instruction, labor, and
+     study tend to nothing else but to form that.... Conversation with
+     men is of very great use, and travel into foreign countries;... to
+     be able chiefly to give an account of the humors, manners, customs,
+     and laws of those nations where he has been, and that we may whet
+     and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against those of others....
+
+     In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those
+     who live only in the records of history: he shall, by reading those
+     books, converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages.
+
+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 had myself 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
+mould 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 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:--
+
+     In my infancy, and before I began to speak, he [my father]
+     committed me to the care of a German,... totally ignorant of our
+     language, but very fluent, and a great critic, in Latin. This man,
+     whom he had fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained
+     with a very great salary, for this only end, had me continually
+     with him: to him there were also joined two others, of inferior
+     learning, to attend me, and to relieve him, who all of them spoke
+     to me in no other language but Latin. As to the rest of his family,
+     it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself nor my mother, man
+     nor maid, should speak any thing in my company, but such Latin
+     words as every one had learned only to gabble with me. It is not to
+     be imagined how great an advantage this proved to the whole family:
+     my father and my mother by this means learned Latin enough to
+     understand it perfectly well, and to speak it to such a degree as
+     was sufficient for any necessary use, as also those of the servants
+     did, who were most frequently with me. In short, we Latined it at
+     such a rate, that it overflowed to all the neighboring villages,
+     where there yet remain, that have established themselves by custom,
+     several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools. As for what
+     concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood
+     either French or Perigordin ["Perigordin" is Montaigne's name for
+     the dialect of his province, Perigord (Gascony)], any more than
+     Arabic; and, without art, book, grammar, or precept, whipping, or
+     the expense of a tear, I had, by that time, learned to speak as
+     pure Latin as my master himself, for I had no means of mixing it up
+     with any other.
+
+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 _reveillé_ that broke the slumbers of this
+hopeful young heir of Montaigne:--
+
+     Some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of
+     children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them
+     violently and over-hastily from sleep, wherein they are much more
+     profoundly involved than we, he [the father] caused me to be
+     wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never
+     unprovided of a musician for that purpose.... The good man, being
+     extremely timorous of any way failing in a thing he had so wholly
+     set his heart upon, suffered himself at last to be overruled by the
+     common opinions:... he sent me, at six years of age, to the College
+     of Guienne, at that time the best and most flourishing in France.
+
+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:--
+
+     A woman, fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread,
+     cried and lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her
+     throat, where she thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious
+     fellow that was brought to her, seeing no outward tumor nor
+     alteration, supposing it to be only a conceit taken at some crust
+     of bread that had hurt her as it went down, caused her to vomit,
+     and, unseen, threw a crooked pin into the basin, which the woman no
+     sooner saw, but, believing she had cast it up, she presently found
+     herself eased of her pain....
+
+     Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field, have, I make
+     no question, heard the story of the falconer, who, having earnestly
+     fixed his eyes upon a kite in the air, laid a wager that he would
+     bring her down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it
+     was said; for _the tales I borrow, I charge upon the consciences of
+     those from whom I have them_.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+     Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of
+     Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to
+     receive the enemy's charge, "by reason that" (I shall here steal
+     Plutarch's own words, which are better than mine) "he by so doing
+     deprived himself of the violent impression the motion of running
+     adds to the first shock of arms, and hindered that clashing of the
+     combatants against one another, which is wont to give them greater
+     impetuosity and fury, especially when they come to rush in with
+     their utmost vigor, their courages increasing by the shouts and the
+     career; 'tis to render the soldiers' ardor, as a man may say, more
+     reserved and cold." This is what he says. But, if Cæsar had come by
+     the worse, why might it not as well have been urged by another,
+     that, on the contrary, the strongest and most steady posture of
+     fighting is that wherein a man stands planted firm, without motion;
+     and that they who are steady upon the march, closing up, and
+     reserving their force within themselves for the push of the
+     business, have a great advantage against those who are disordered,
+     and who have already spent half their breath in running on
+     precipitately to the charge? Besides that, an army is a body made
+     up of so many individual members, it is impossible for it to move
+     in this fury with so exact a motion as not to break the order of
+     battle, and that the best of them are not engaged before their
+     fellows can come on to help them.
+
+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. This 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 subjoined, you will have the
+sensation of coming suddenly upon a treasure-trove of coined proverbial
+wisdom:--
+
+     Our minds are never at home, but ever beyond home.
+
+     I will take care, if possible, that my death shall say nothing that
+     my life has not said.
+
+     Life in itself is neither good nor bad: it is the place of what is
+     good or bad.
+
+     Knowledge should not be stuck on to the mind, but incorporated in
+     it.
+
+     Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our
+     nature.
+
+     Age wrinkles the mind more than the face.
+
+     Habit is a second nature.
+
+     Hunger cures love.
+
+     It is easier to get money than to keep it.
+
+     Anger has often been the vehicle of courage.
+
+     It is more difficult to command than to obey.
+
+     A liar should have a good memory.
+
+     Ambition is the daughter of presumption.
+
+     To serve a prince, you must be discreet and a liar.
+
+     We learn to live when life has passed.
+
+     The mind is ill at ease when its companion has the colic.
+
+     We are all richer than we think, but we are brought up to go
+     a-begging.
+
+     The greatest masterpiece of man is... to be born at the right time.
+
+We append a saying of Montaigne's not found in Mr. St. John's
+collection:--
+
+     There is no so good man who so squares all his thoughts and actions
+     to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten
+     times in his life.
+
+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, 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:--
+
+     You sow your fruits [crops] that he [the king] may ravage them; you
+     furnish and fill your houses that he may have something to steal;
+     you bring up your daughters that he may slake his luxury; you bring
+     up your sons that he may take them to be butchered in his wars, to
+     be the ministers of his avarice, the executors of his vengeance;
+     you disfigure your forms by labor [your own selves you inure to
+     toil] that he may cocker himself in delight, and wallow in nasty
+     and disgusting pleasure.
+
+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 is
+boldly, and not presumptuously, paralleled by Mr. St. John 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
+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:--
+
+     I gently turn aside, and avert my eyes from the stormy and cloudy
+     sky I have before me, which, thanks be to God, I regard without
+     fear, but not without meditation and study, and amuse myself in the
+     remembrance of my better years:--
+
+     "Animus quod perdidit, optat, Atque in præterita se totus imagine
+     versat."
+
+       PETRONIUS, c. 128.
+
+     ["The mind desires what it has lost, and in fancy flings itself
+     wholly into the past."]
+
+     Let childhood look forward, and age backward: is not this the
+     signification of Janus' double face? Let years haul me along if
+     they will, but it shall be backward; as long as my eyes can discern
+     the pleasant season expired, I shall now and then turn them that
+     way; though it escape from my blood and veins, I shall not,
+     however, root the image of it out of my memory:--
+
+     "Hoc est Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui."
+
+       MARTIAL, x. 23, 7.
+
+     ["'Tis to live twice to be able to enjoy former life again."]
+
+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:--
+
+     I have enjoined myself to dare to say all that I dare to do; even
+     thoughts that are not to be published, displease me; the worst of
+     my actions and qualities do not appear to me so evil, as I find it
+     evil and base not to dare to own them....
+
+     ...I am greedy of making myself known, and I care not to how many,
+     provided it be truly.... Many things that I would not say to a
+     particular individual, I say to the people; and, as to my most
+     secret thoughts, send my most intimate friends to my book.... For
+     my part, if any one should recommend me as a good pilot, as being
+     very modest, or very chaste, I should owe him no thanks [because
+     the recommendation would be false].
+
+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:--
+
+     In farewells, we oftener than not heat our affections towards the
+     things we take leave of: I take my last leave of the pleasures of
+     this world; these are our last embraces.
+
+Mr. Emerson, in his "Representative Men," makes Montaigne stand for The
+Sceptic. Sceptic 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
+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,
+speaking as "moral philosopher," in his "Essays," 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 Shakspeare. 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 "The Great Eastern" overlay 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 if he
+had 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. 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 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
+prepared, 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.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: 1613-1680 (La Bruyère: 1646 (?)-1696; Vauvenargues:
+1715-1747).
+
+
+In La Rochefoucauld 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 the "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. 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 sceptical 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 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:"--
+
+     No. 11. The passions often beget their contraries. Avarice
+     sometimes produces prodigality, and prodigality avarice: we are
+     often firm from weakness, and daring from timidity.
+
+     No. 13. Our self-love bears more impatiently the condemnation of
+     our tastes than of our opinions.
+
+How much just detraction from all mere natural human greatness is
+contained in the following penetrative maxim!--
+
+     No. 18. Moderation is a fear of falling into the envy and contempt
+     which those deserve who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it
+     is a vain parade of the strength of our mind; and, in short, the
+     moderation of men in their highest elevation is a desire to appear
+     greater than their fortune.
+
+What effectively quiet satire in these few words!--
+
+     No. 19. We have strength enough to bear the ills of others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 20. The steadfastness of sages is only the art of locking up
+     their uneasiness in their hearts.
+
+Of course, had it lain in the author's chosen line to do so, he might,
+with as much apparent truth, have pointed out, 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:--
+
+     No. 22. Philosophy triumphs easily over troubles passed and
+     troubles to come, but present troubles triumph over it.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 34. If we had no pride, we should not complain of that of
+     others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 39. Interest [self-love] speaks all sorts of languages, and
+     plays all sorts of parts, even that of disinterestedness.
+
+     No. 49. We are never so happy, or so unhappy, as we imagine.
+
+     No. 78. The love of justice is, in most men, only the fear of
+     suffering injustice.
+
+What a subtly unsoldering distrust the following maxim introduces into
+the sentiment of mutual friendship!--
+
+     No. 83. What men have called friendship, is only a partnership, a
+     mutual accommodation of interests, and an exchange of good offices:
+     it is, in short, only a traffic, in which self-love always proposes
+     to gain something.
+
+     No. 89. Every one complains of his memory, and no one complains of
+     his judgment.
+
+How striking, from its artful suppression of strikingness, is the first
+following, and what a wide, easy sweep of well-bred satire it
+contains!--
+
+     No. 93. Old men like to give good advice, to console themselves for
+     being no longer able to give bad examples.
+
+     No. 119. We are so much accustomed to disguise ourselves to others,
+     that, at last, we disguise ourselves to ourselves.
+
+     No. 127. The true way to be deceived, is to think one's self
+     sharper than others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 132. It is easier to be wise for others, than to be so for
+     one's self.
+
+How pitilessly this inquisitor pursues his prey, "the human soul, into
+all its useless hiding-places!--
+
+     No. 138. We would rather speak ill of ourselves, than not talk of
+     ourselves.
+
+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:"--
+
+     No. 139. One of the causes why we find so few people who appear
+     reasonable and agreeable in conversation, is, that there is
+     scarcely any one who does not think more of what he wishes to say,
+     than of replying exactly to what is said to him. The cleverest and
+     the most compliant think it enough to show an attentive air; while
+     we see in their eyes and in their mind a wandering from what is
+     said to them, and a hurry to return to what they wish to say,
+     instead of considering that it is a bad way to please or to
+     persuade others, to try so hard to please one's self, and that to
+     listen well is one of the greatest accomplishments we can have in
+     conversation.
+
+If we are indignant at the maxims following, it is probably rather
+because they are partly true than, because they are wholly false:--
+
+     No. 144. We are not fond of praising, and, without interest, we
+     never praise any one. Praise is a cunning flattery, hidden and
+     delicate, which, in different ways, pleases him who gives and him
+     who receives it. The one takes it as a reward for his merit: the
+     other gives it to show his equity and his discernment.
+
+     No. 146. We praise generally only to be praised.
+
+     No. 147. Few are wise enough to prefer wholesome blame to
+     treacherous praise.
+
+     No. 149. Disclaiming praise is a wish to be praised a second time.
+
+     No. 152. If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others
+     could not hurt us.
+
+     No. 184. We acknowledge our faults in order to atone, by our
+     sincerity, for the harm they do us in the minds of others.
+
+     No. 199. The desire to appear able often prevents our becoming so.
+
+     No. 201. Whoever thinks he can do without the world, deceives
+     himself much; but whoever thinks the world cannot do without him,
+     deceives himself much more.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 214. Valor, in private soldiers, is a perilous calling, which
+     they have taken to in order to gain their living.
+
+Here is, perhaps, the most current of all La Rochefoucauld's maxims:--
+
+     No. 218. Hypocrisy is a homage which vice renders to virtue.
+
+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!--
+
+     No. 226. Too great eagerness to requite an obligation is a kind of
+     ingratitude.
+
+     No. 298. The gratitude of most men is only a secret desire to
+     receive greater favors.
+
+     No. 304. We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive
+     those whom we bore.
+
+     No. 318. Why should we have memory enough to retain even the
+     smallest particulars of what has happened to us, and yet not have
+     enough to remember how often we have told them to the same
+     individual?
+
+The first following maxim satirizes both princes and courtiers. It might
+be entitled, "How to insult a prince, and not suffer for your
+temerity":--
+
+     No. 320. To praise princes for virtues they have not, is to insult
+     them with impunity.
+
+     No. 347. We find few sensible people, except those who are of our
+     way of thinking.
+
+     No. 409. We should often be ashamed of our best actions, if the
+     world saw the motives which cause them.
+
+     No. 424. We boast of faults the reverse of those we have: when we
+     are weak, we boast of being stubborn.
+
+Here, at length, is a maxim that does not depress,--that animates you:--
+
+     No. 432. To praise noble actions heartily, is in some sort to take
+     part in them.
+
+The following is much less exhilarating:--
+
+     No. 454. There are few instances in which we should make a bad
+     bargain, by giving up the good that is said of us, on condition
+     that nothing bad be said.
+
+This, also:--
+
+     No. 458. Our enemies come nearer to the truth, in the opinions they
+     form of us, than we do ourselves.
+
+Here is a celebrated maxim, vainly "suppressed" by the author, after
+first publication:--
+
+     No. 583. In the adversity of our best friends, we always find
+     something which does not displease us.
+
+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.
+
+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:--
+
+     Every thing has been said; and one comes too late, after more than
+     seven thousand years that there have been men, and men who have
+     thought.
+
+La Bruyère has something to say, and that at length unusual for him, of
+pulpit eloquence. We select a few specimen sentences:--
+
+     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 amusement, 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
+     pronounces against. The orator pleases some, displeases others, and
+     has an understanding with all in one thing,--that as he does not
+     seek to render them better, so they do not think of becoming
+     better.
+
+The almost cynical acerbity of the preceding is ostensibly relieved of
+an obvious application to certain illustrious contemporary examples
+among preachers by the following open allusion to Bossuet and
+Bourdaloue:--
+
+     The Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] and Father Bourdaloue make me think
+     of Demosthenes and Cicero. Both of them, masters of pulpit
+     eloquence, have had the fortune of great models; the one has made
+     bad critics, the other, bad imitators.
+
+Here is a happy instance of La 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:--
+
+     An honest man who says, Yes, or No, deserves to be believed; his
+     character swears for him.
+
+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:--
+
+     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 Bruyère 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 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:--
+
+     Corneille subjects us to his characters and to his ideas; Racine
+     accommodates himself to ours. The one paints men as they ought to
+     be; the other paints them as they are. There is more in the former
+     of what one admires, and of what one ought even to imitate; there
+     is more in the latter of what one observes in others, or of what
+     one experiences in one's self. The one inspires, astonishes,
+     masters, instructs; the other pleases, moves, touches, penetrates.
+     Whatever there is most beautiful, most noble, most imperial, in the
+     reason is made use of by the former; by the latter, whatever is
+     most seductive and most delicate in passion. You find in the
+     former, maxims, rules, and precepts; in the latter, taste and
+     sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of Corneille; you are
+     more shaken and more softened in those of Racine. Corneille is more
+     moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make Sophocles his
+     model; the other owes more to Euripides.
+
+* * *
+
+Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La 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 when he went to the wars. His culture
+always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know
+Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his
+accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the
+small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost
+immediately after he abandoned a military career which had been fruitful
+to him of hardship, but not of promotion. In spite of all that was thus
+against him, Vauvenargues, in those years, few and evil, that were his,
+thought finely and justly enough to earn for himself a lasting place in
+the literary history of his nation. He was in the eighteenth century of
+France, without being of it. You have to separate him in thought from
+the infidels and the "philosophers" of his time. He belongs in spirit to
+an earlier age. His moral and intellectual kindred was with such as
+Pascal, far more than with such as Voltaire. Vauvenargues is, however, a
+writer for the few, instead of for the many. His fame is high, but it is
+not wide. Historically, he forms a stepping-stone of transition to a
+somewhat similar nineteenth-century name, that of Joubert. A very few
+sentences of his will suffice to indicate to our readers the quality of
+Vauvenargues. Self-evidently, the following antithesis drawn by him
+between Corneille and Racine is subtly and ingeniously thought, as well
+as very happily expressed--this, whatever may be considered to be its
+aptness in point of literary appreciation:--
+
+     Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them;
+     Racine's inspire them without saying them.
+
+Here is a good saying:--
+
+     It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising.
+
+There is worldly wisdom also here:--
+
+     He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account,
+     practises a large and noble economy.
+
+Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is
+recalled by this:--
+
+     The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.
+
+So much for Vauvenargues.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+LA FONTAINE.
+
+1621-1695.
+
+
+La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the
+firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any
+nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet
+as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever
+among the French, by long proof more secure, than is La Fontaine's, of
+universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the
+most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain
+thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true
+poetry,--this surely is an achievement entitling La Fontaine to
+monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.
+
+Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at 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 debauched manners in
+life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to
+condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation.
+As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking
+friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any
+sterling worth of character felt in him, as by an exhaustless,
+easy-going good-nature, that, despite his social insipidity, made La
+Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy
+to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La
+Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait
+in his character would he perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed
+not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude,
+no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man
+in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring
+personal regard. The mirror of _bonhomie_ (easy-hearted
+good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost
+untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's
+case. On his amiable side--a full hemisphere or more of the man--it sums
+him up completely. Twenty years long, this mirror of _bonhomie_ was
+domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the
+celebrated Madame de la 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 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 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, 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 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, we shall use Elizur
+Wright's translation,--a meritorious one, still master of the field
+which, near fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here
+expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to forty-four. The additions are
+not ungraceful, but they encumber somewhat the Attic neatness and
+simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly
+broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines--lines of
+six feet--obligatory in French verse. He rhymes irregularly, at choice,
+and makes his verses long or short, as pleases him. The closing verse of
+the present piece is, in accordance with the intended majesty of the
+representation, an Alexandrine.
+
+          The Oak one day said to the Reed,
+      "Justly might you dame Nature blame:
+      A wren's weight would bow down your frame;
+          The lightest wind that chance may make
+          Dimple the surface of the lake
+          Your head bends low indeed,
+      The while, like Caucasus, my front
+      To meet the branding sun is wont,
+      Nay, more, to take the tempest's brunt.
+
+          A blast you feel, I feel a breeze.
+      Had you been born beneath my roof,
+      Wide-spread, of leafage weather-proof,
+          Less had you known your life to tease;
+          I should have sheltered you from storm.
+          But oftenest you rear your form
+      On the moist limits of the realm of wind.
+      Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned."
+          "Your pity," answers him the Heed,
+      "Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain;
+      I more than you may winds disdain.
+          I bend, and break not. You, indeed,
+      Against their dreadful strokes till now
+      Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow:
+      But wait we for the end."
+                                Scarce had he spoke,
+      When fiercely from the far horizon broke
+      The wildest of the children, fullest fraught
+      With terror, that till then the North had brought.
+          The tree holds good; the reed it bends.
+          The wind redoubled might expends,
+      And so well works that from his bed
+      Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head
+      Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead.
+
+In the fable of the "Rat retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies
+the monks. "With French _finesse_, he hits his mark by expressly
+avoiding it. "What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No,
+but a Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always
+ready with his help to the needy!"
+
+      The sage Levantines have a tale
+          About a rat that weary grew
+      Of all the cares which life assail,
+          And to a Holland cheese withdrew.
+      His solitude was there profound,
+      Extending through his world so round.
+      Our hermit lived on that within;
+      And soon his industry had been
+      With claws and teeth so good,
+          That in his novel heritage,
+          He had in store for wants of age,
+      Both house and livelihood.
+      What more could any rat desire?
+          He grew fat, fair, and round.
+          God's blessings thus redound
+      To those who in his vows retire.
+      One day this personage devout,
+      Whose kindness none might doubt,
+      Was asked, by certain delegates
+      That came from Rat United States,
+      For some small aid, for they
+      To foreign parts were on their way,
+      For succor in the great cat-war:
+      Ratopolis beleaguered sore,
+          Their whole republic drained and poor,
+      No morsel in their scrips they bore.
+          Slight boon they craved, of succor sure
+      In days at utmost three or four.
+      "My friends," the hermit said,
+      "To worldly things I'm dead.
+      How can a poor recluse
+      To such a mission be of use?
+      What can he do but pray
+      That God will aid it on its way?
+      And so, my friends, it is my prayer
+      That God will have you in his care."
+      His well-fed saintship said no more,
+      But in their faces shut the door.
+          What think you, reader, is the service,
+      For which I use this niggard rat?
+          To paint a monk? No, but a dervise.
+      A monk, I think, however fat,
+      Must be more bountiful than that.
+
+The fable entitled "Death and the Dying" is much admired for its union
+of pathos with wit. "The Two Doves" is another of La Fontaine's more
+tender inspirations. "The Mogul's Dream" is a somewhat ambitious flight
+of the fabulist's muse. On the whole, however, the masterpiece among the
+fables of La Fontaine is that of "The Animals Sick of the Plague." Such
+at least is the opinion of critics in general. The idea of this fable is
+not original with La Fontaine. The homilists of the middle ages used a
+similar fiction to enforce on priests the duty of impartiality in
+administering the sacrament, so called, of confession. We give this
+famous fable as our closing specimen of La Fontaine:--
+
+                The sorest ill that Heaven hath
+            Sent oil this lower world in wrath,--
+            The plague (to call it by its name),
+                    One single day of which
+                Would Pluto's ferryman enrich,
+            Waged war on beasts, both wild and tame.
+            They died not all, but all were sick:
+            No hunting now, by force or trick,
+            To save what might so soon expire.
+            No food excited their desire:
+            Nor wolf nor fox now watched to slay
+            The innocent and tender prey.
+                            The turtles fled,
+            So love and therefore joy were dead.
+            The lion council held, and said,
+            "My friends, I do believe
+            This awful scourge for which we grieve,
+            Is for our sins a punishment
+            Most righteously by Heaven sent.
+            Let us our guiltiest beast resign,
+            A sacrifice to wrath divine.
+            Perhaps this offering, truly small,
+            May gain the life and health of all.
+            By history we find it noted
+            That lives have been just so devoted.
+            Then let us all turn eyes within,
+            And ferret out the hidden sin.
+            Himself, let no one spare nor flatter,
+            But make clean conscience in the matter.
+            For me, my appetite has played the glutton
+            Too much and often upon mutton.
+            What harm had e'er my victims done?
+                            I answer, truly, None.
+            Perhaps, sometimes, by hunger pressed,
+                  I've eat the shepherd with the rest.
+                  I yield myself if need there be;
+                  And yet I think, in equity,
+            Each should confess his sins with me;
+            For laws of right and justice cry,
+            The guiltiest alone should die."
+            "Sire," said the fox, "your majesty
+            Is humbler than a king should be,
+            And over-squeamish in the case.
+                  What! eating stupid sheep a crime?
+                  No, never, sire, at any time.
+
+            It rather was an act of grace,
+            A mark of honor to their race.
+            And as to shepherds, one may swear,
+                    The fate your majesty describes,
+            Is recompense less full than fair
+                    For such usurpers o'er our tribes."
+
+                    Thus Renard glibly spoke,
+            And loud applause from listeners broke.
+            Of neither tiger, boar, nor bear,
+            Did any keen inquirer dare
+            To ask for crimes of high degree;
+                    The fighters, biters, scratchers, all
+            From every mortal sin were free;
+                    The very dogs, both great and small,
+                    Were saints, as far as dogs could be.
+
+                    The ass, confessing in his turn,
+            Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:
+            "I happened through a mead to pass;
+            The monks, its owners, were at mass:
+            Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass,
+                    And, add to these the devil, too,
+                    All tempted me the deed to do.
+            I browsed the bigness of my tongue:
+            Since truth must out, I own it wrong."
+            On this, a hue and cry arose,
+            As if the beasts were all his foes.
+            A wolf, haranguing lawyer-wise,
+            Denounced the ass for sacrifice,--
+            The bald-pate, scabby, ragged lout,
+            By whom the plague had come, no doubt.
+            His fault was judged a hanging crime.
+                    What! eat another's grass? Oh, shame!
+            The noose of rope, and death sublime,
+                    For that offence were all too tame!
+                    And soon poor Grizzle felt the same.
+
+            Thus human courts acquit the strong,
+            And doom the weak, as therefore wrong.
+
+It is suitable to add, in conclusion, that La Fontaine is a crucial
+author for disclosing the irreconcilable difference that exists, at
+bottom, between the Englishman's and the Frenchman's idea of poetry. No
+English-speaker, heir of Shakspeare and Milton, will ever be able to
+satisfy a Frenchman with admiration such as he can conscientiously
+profess for the poetry of La Fontaine.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+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 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 of 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 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
+(Shakspeare),--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 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 mould, 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:--
+
+     M. JOURDAIN. I have the greatest desire in the world to be learned;
+     and it vexes me more than I can tell, that my father and mother
+     did not make me learn thoroughly all the sciences when I was young.
+
+     PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY. This is a praiseworthy feeling. _Nam sine
+     doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago._ You understand this, and you
+     have, no doubt, a knowledge of Latin?
+
+     M. JOUR. Yes; but act as if I had none. Explain to me the meaning
+     of it.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The meaning of it is, that, without science, life is an
+     image of death.
+
+     M. JOUR. That Latin is quite right.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Have you any principles, any rudiments, of science?
+
+     M. JOUR. Oh, yes! I can read and write.
+
+     PROP. PHIL. With what would you like to begin? Shall I teach you
+     logic?
+
+     M. JOUR. And what may this logic be?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. It is that which teaches us the three operations of the
+     mind.
+
+     M. JOUR. What are they--these three operations of the mind?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The first, the second, and the third. The first is to
+     conceive well by means of universals; the second, to judge well by
+     means of categories; and the third, to draw a conclusion aright by
+     means of the figures Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio, Baralipton,
+     etc.
+
+     M. JOUR. Pooh! what repulsive words! This logic does not by any
+     means suit me. Teach me something more enlivening.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Will you learn moral philosophy?
+
+     M. JOUR. Moral philosophy?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Yes.
+
+     M. JOUR. What does it say, this moral philosophy?
+
+     PROF. PHIL.It treats of happiness, teaches men to moderate their
+     passions, and--
+
+     M. JOUR. No, none of that. I am devilishly hot-tempered, and
+     morality, or no morality, I like to give full vent to my anger
+     whenever I have a mind to it.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Would you like to learn physics?
+
+     M. JOUR. And what have physics to say for themselves?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Physics are that science which explains the principles
+     of natural things and the properties of bodies; which discourses of
+     the nature of the elements, of metals, minerals, stones, plants,
+     and animals; which teaches us the cause of all the meteors, the
+     rainbow, the _ignis fatuus,_ comets, lightning, thunder,
+     thunderbolts, rain, snow, hail, and whirlwinds.
+
+     M. JOUR. There is too much hullaballoo in all that, too much riot
+     and rumpus.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Very good.
+
+     M. JOUR. And now I want to intrust you with a great secret. I am in
+     love with a lady of quality, and I should be glad if you would help
+     me to write something to her in a short letter which I mean to drop
+     at her feet.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Very well.
+
+     M. JOUR. That will be gallant, will it not?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Undoubtedly. Is it verse you wish to write to her?
+
+     M. JOUR. Oh, no! not verse.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. You only wish prose?
+
+     M. JOUR. No. I wish for neither verse nor prose.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. It must be one or the other.
+
+     M. JOUR.Why?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Because, sir, there is nothing by which we can express
+     ourselves except prose or verse.
+
+     M. JOUR. There is nothing but prose or verse?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. No, sir. Whatever is not prose, is verse; and whatever
+     is not verse, is prose.
+
+     M. JOUR.And when we speak, what is that, then?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Prose.
+
+     M. JOUR. What! when I say, "Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give
+     me my nightcap," is that prose?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Yes, sir.
+
+     M. JOUR. Upon my word, I have been speaking prose these forty years
+     without being aware of it; and I am under the greatest obligation
+     to you for informing me of it. Well, then, I wish to write to her
+     in a letter, "Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of
+     love;" but I would have this worded in a genteel manner, and turned
+     prettily.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Say that the fire of her eyes has reduced your heart to
+     ashes; that you suffer day and night for her, tortures--
+
+     M. JOUR. No, no, no, I don't any of that. I simply wish for what I
+     tell you,--"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of
+     love."
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Still, you might amplify the thing a little.
+
+     M. JOUR. No, I tell you, I will have nothing but these very words
+     in the letter; but they must be put in a fashionable way, and
+     arranged as they should be. Pray show me a little, so that I may
+     see the different ways in which they can be put.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. They may be put first of all, as you have said, "Fair
+     Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of love;" or else, "Of
+     love die make me, fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes;" or, "Your
+     beautiful eyes of love make me, fair Marchioness, die;" or, "Die of
+     love your beautiful eyes, fair Marchioness, make me;" or else, "Me
+     make your beautiful eyes die, fair Marchioness, of love."
+
+     M. JOUR. But of all these ways, which is the best?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The one you said,--"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful
+     eyes make me die of love."
+
+     M. JOUR. Yet I have never studied, and I did all right off at the
+     first shot.
+
+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 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:--
+
+     TRISSOTIN. Sonnet to the Princess Urania on her Fever, Your
+     prudence sure is fast asleep, That thus luxuriously you keep And
+     lodge magnificently so Your very hardest-hearted foe.
+
+     BÉLISE. Ah! what a pretty beginning!
+
+     ARMANDE. What a charming turn it has!
+
+     PHILAMINTE. He alone possesses the talent of making easy verses.
+
+     ARM. We must yield to _prudence fast asleep_.
+
+     BÉL. _Lodge one's very hardest-hearted foe_ is full of charms for
+     me.
+
+     PHIL. I like _luxuriously_ and _magnificently_: these two adverbs
+     joined together sound admirably.
+
+     BÉL. Let us hear the rest.
+
+     TRISS. Your prudence sure is fast asleep, That thus luxuriously you
+     keep And lodge magnificently so Your very hardest-hearted foe.
+
+     ARM. _Prudence fast asleep._
+
+     BÉL. _To lodge one's foe._
+
+     PHIL. _Luxuriously_ and _magnificently_.
+
+     TRISS. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say, From out your
+     chamber, decked so gay, Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,
+     Bold she assails your lovely life.
+
+     BÉL. Ah! gently. Allow me to breathe, I beseech you.
+
+     ARM.Give us time to admire, I beg.
+
+     PHIL. One feels, at hearing these verses, an indescribable
+     something which goes through one's inmost soul, and makes one feel
+     quite faint.
+
+     ARM. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say, From out your chamber,
+     decked so gay--
+
+     How prettily _chamber, decked so gay_, is said here! And with what
+     wit the metaphor is introduced!
+
+     PHIL. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say.
+
+     Ah! in what an admirable taste that _whate'er men say _is! To my
+     mind, the passage is invaluable.
+
+     ARM. My heart is also in love with _whate'er men say_.
+
+     BÉL. I am of your opinion: _whate'er men say_ is a happy
+     expression.
+
+     ARM. I wish I had written it.
+
+     BÉL. It is worth a whole poem.
+
+     PHIL. But do you, like me, thoroughly understand the wit of it?
+
+     ARM. _and_ BÉL. Oh! Oh!
+
+     PHIL. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say. Although another
+     should take the fever's part, pay no attention; laugh at the
+     gossips.
+
+      Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,
+      Whate'er men say, whate'er men say.
+
+This _whate'er men say_, says a great deal more than it seems. I do not
+know if every one is like me, but I discover in it a hundred meanings.
+
+     BÉL. It is true that it says more than its size seems to imply.
+
+     PHIL. (_to_ TRISSOTIN). But when you wrote this charming _whate'er
+     men say_, did you yourself understand all its energy? Did you
+     realize all that it tells us? And did you then think that you were
+     writing something so witty?
+
+     TRISS. Ah! ah!
+
+     ARM. I have likewise the _ingrate_ in my head,--this ungrateful,
+     unjust, uncivil fever that ill-treats people who entertain her.
+
+     PHIL. In short, both the stanzas are admirable. Let us come quickly
+     to the triplets, I pray.
+
+     ARM. Ah! once more, _whate'er men say_, I beg.
+
+     TRISS. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BÉL. _Whate'er men say!_
+
+     TRISS. From out your chamber, decked so gay,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BÉL. _Chamber decked so gay!_
+
+     TRISS. Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BÉL. That _ingrate_ fever!
+
+     TRISS. Bold she assails your lovely life.
+
+     PHIL. _Your lovely life!_
+
+     ARM. _and_ BÉL. Ah!
+
+     TRISS. What! reckless of your ladyhood, Still fiercely seeks to
+     shed your blood,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BÉL. Ah!
+
+     TRISS. And day and night to work you harm. When to the baths
+     sometime you've brought her, No more ado, with your own arm Whelm
+     her and drown her in the water.
+
+     PHIL. Ah! It is quite overpowering.
+
+     BÉL. I faint.
+
+     ARM. I die from pleasure.
+
+     PHIL. A thousand sweet thrills seize one.
+
+     ARM. _When to the baths sometime you've brought her,_
+
+     BÉL. _No more ado, with your own arm_
+
+     PHIL. _Whelm her and drown her in the water._ With your own arm,
+     drown her there in the baths.
+
+     ARM. In your verses we meet at each step with charming beauty.
+
+     BÉL. One promenades through them with rapture.
+
+     PHIL. One treads on fine things only.
+
+     ARM. They are little lanes all strewn with roses.
+
+     TRISS. Then, the sonnet seems to you--
+
+     PHIL. Admirable, new; and never did any one make any thing more
+     beautiful.
+
+     BÉL. (_to_ HENRIETTE). What! my niece, you listen to what has been
+     read without emotion! You play there but a sorry part!
+
+     HEN. We each of us play the best part we can, my aunt; and to be a
+     wit does not depend on our will.
+
+     TRISS. My verses, perhaps, are tedious to you.
+
+     HEN. No. I do not listen.
+
+     PHIL. Ah! Let us hear the epigram.
+
+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 Molière's time a fashionable study rendered
+such by the contemporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents
+the limitations imposed upon her sex:--
+
+     ARM. It is insulting our sex too grossly to limit our intelligence
+     to the power of judging of a skirt, of the make of a garment, of
+     the beauties of lace, or of a new brocade.
+
+     BÉL. We must rise above this shameful condition, and bravely
+     proclaim our emancipation.
+
+     TRISS. Every one knows my respect for the fairer sex, and that, if
+     I render homage to the brightness of their eyes, I also honor the
+     splendor of their intellect.
+
+     PHIL. And our sex does you justice in this respect: but we will
+     show to certain minds who treat us with proud contempt, that women
+     also have knowledge; that, like men, they can hold learned
+     meetings--regulated, too, by better rules; that they wish to unite
+     what elsewhere is kept apart, join noble language to deep learning,
+     reveal nature's laws by a thousand experiments; and, on all
+     questions proposed, admit every party, and ally themselves to none.
+
+     TRISS. For order, I prefer peripateticism.
+
+     PHIL. For abstractions, I love platonism.
+
+     ARM. Epicurus pleases me, for his tenets are solid.
+
+     BÉL. I agree with the doctrine of atoms; but I find it difficult to
+     understand a vacuum, and I much prefer subtile matter.
+
+     TRISS. I quite agree with Descartes about magnetism.
+
+     ARM. I like his vortices.
+
+     PHIL. And I, his falling worlds.
+
+     ARM. I long to see our assembly opened, and to distinguish
+     ourselves by some great discovery.
+
+     TRISS. Much is expected from your enlightened knowledge, for nature
+     has hidden few things from you.
+
+     PHIL. For my part, I have, without boasting, already made one
+     discovery; I have plainly seen men in the moon.
+
+     BÉL. I have not, I believe, as yet quite distinguished men, but I
+     have seen steeples as plainly as I see you.
+
+     ARM. In addition to natural philosophy, we will dive into grammar,
+     history, verse, ethics, and politics.
+
+     PHIL. I find in ethics charms which delight my heart; it was
+     formerly the admiration of great geniuses: but I give the
+     preference to the Stoics, and I think nothing so grand as their
+     founder.
+
+"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
+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 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:--
+
+     ORGON (_to_ CLÉANTE). Brother, pray excuse me: you will kindly
+     allow me to allay my anxiety by asking news of the family. (_To_
+     DORINE, _a maid-servant_.) Has every thing gone on well these last
+     two days? What has happened? How is everybody?
+
+     DOR. The day before yesterday our mistress was very feverish from
+     morning to night, and suffered from a most extraordinary headache.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. Tartuffe! He is wonderfully well, stout and fat, with blooming
+     cheeks and ruddy lips.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. In the evening she felt very faint, and the pain in her head
+     was so great that she could not touch any thing at supper.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. He ate his supper by himself before her, and very devoutly
+     devoured a brace of partridges, and half a leg of mutton hashed.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. She spent the whole of the night without getting one wink of
+     sleep: she was very feverish, and we had to sit up with her until
+     the morning.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. Overcome by a pleasant sleepiness, he passed from the table to
+     his room, and got at once into his warmed bed, where he slept
+     comfortably till the next morning.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. At last yielding to our persuasions, she consented to be bled,
+     and immediately felt relieved.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. He took heart right valiantly, and fortifying his soul against
+     all evils, to make up for the blood which our lady had lost, drank
+     at breakfast four large bumpers of wine.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. Now, at last, they are both well; and I will go and tell our
+     lady how glad you are to hear of her recovery.
+
+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:--
+
+     MADAME PERNELLE. I can never believe, my son, that he would commit
+     so base an action.
+
+     ORG. What?
+
+     PER. Good people are always subject to envy.
+
+     ORG. What do you mean, mother?
+
+     PER. That you live after a strange sort here, and that I am but too
+     well aware of the ill will they all bear him.
+
+     ORG. What has this ill will to do with what I have just told you?
+
+     PER. I have told it you a hundred times when you were young, that
+     in this world virtue is ever liable to persecution, and that,
+     although the envious die, envy never dies.
+
+     ORG. But what has this to do with what has happened to-day?
+
+     PER. They have concocted a hundred foolish stories against him.
+
+     ORG. I have already told you that I saw it all myself.
+
+     PER. The malice of evil-disposed persons is very great.
+
+     ORG. You would make me swear, mother! I tell you that I saw his
+     audacious attempt with my own eyes.
+
+     PER. Evil tongues have always some venom to pour forth; and here
+     below, there is nothing proof against them.
+
+     ORG. You are maintaining a very senseless argument. I saw it, I
+     tell you,--saw it with my own eyes! what you can call s-a-w, saw!
+     Must I din it over and over into your ears, and shout as loud as
+     half a dozen people?
+
+     PER. Gracious goodness! appearances often deceive us! We must not
+     always judge by what we see.
+
+     ORG. I shall go mad!
+
+     PER. We are by nature prone to judge wrongly, and good is often
+     mistaken for evil.
+
+     ORG. I ought to look upon his desire of seducing my wife as
+     charitable?
+
+     PER. You ought to have good reasons before you accuse another, and
+     you should have waited till you were quite sure of the fact.
+
+     ORG. Heaven save the mark! how could I be more sure? I suppose,
+     mother, I ought to have waited till--you will make me say something
+     foolish.
+
+     PER. In short, his soul is possessed with too pure a zeal; and I
+     cannot possibly conceive that he would think of attempting what you
+     accuse him of.
+
+     ORG. If you were not my mother, I really don't know what I might
+     now say to you, you make me so savage.
+
+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:--
+
+     LOY. (to DORINE _at the farther part of the stage_). Good-day, my
+     dear sister; pray let me speak to your master.
+
+     DOR. He is with friends, and I do not think he can see any one just
+     now.
+
+     LOY. I would not be intrusive. I feel sure that he will find
+     nothing unpleasant in my visit: in fact, I come for something which
+     will be very gratifying to him.
+
+     DOR. What is your name?
+
+     LOY. Only tell him that I come from Mr. Tartuffe, for his benefit.
+
+     DOR. (to ORGON). It is a man who comes in a civil way from Mr.
+     Tartuffe, on some business which will make you glad, he says.
+
+     CLÉ. (to ORGON). You must see who it is, and what the man wants.
+
+     ORG. (to CLÉANTE). He is coming, perhaps, to settle matters between
+     us in a friendly way. How, in this case, ought I to behave to him?
+
+     CLÉ. Don't show any resentment, and, if he speaks of an agreement,
+     listen to him.
+
+     LOY. (to ORGON). Your servant, sir! May heaven punish whoever
+     wrongs you! and may it be as favorable to you, sir, as I wish!
+
+     ORG. (_aside to_ CLÉANTE). This pleasant beginning agrees with my
+     conjectures, and argues some sort of reconciliation.
+
+     LOY. All your family was always dear to me, and I served your
+     father.
+
+     ORG. Sir, I am sorry and ashamed to say that I do not know who you
+     are, neither do I remember your name.
+
+     LOY. My name is Loyal; I was born in Normandy, and am a royal
+     bailiff in spite of envy. For the last forty years I have had the
+     good fortune to fill the office, thanks to Heaven, with great
+     credit; and I come, sir, with your leave, to serve you the writ of
+     a certain order.
+
+     ORG. What! you are here--
+
+     LOY. Gently, sir, I beg. It is merely a summons,--a notice for you
+     to leave this place, you and yours; to take away all your goods and
+     chattels, and make room for others, without delay or adjournment,
+     as hereby decreed.
+
+     ORG. I! leave this place?
+
+     LOY. Yes, sir; if you please. The house incontestably belongs, as
+     you are well aware, to the good Mr. Tartuffe. He is now lord and
+     master of your estates, according to a deed I have in my keeping.
+     It is in due form, and cannot be challenged.
+
+     DAMIS (_to_ MR. LOYAL). This great impudence is, indeed, worthy of
+     all admiration.
+
+     LOY. (_to_ DAMIS). Sir, I have nothing at all to do with you.
+     (_Pointing to_ ORGON.) My business is with this gentleman. He is
+     tractable and gentle, and knows too well the duty of a gentleman to
+     try to oppose authority.
+
+     ORG. But--
+
+     LOY. Yes, sir: I know that you would not, for any thing, show
+     contumacy; and that you will allow me, like a reasonable man, to
+     execute the orders I have received....
+
+The scene gives in conclusion some spirited by-play 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:--
+
+     ORG. Well, mother, you see whether I am right; and you can judge of
+     the rest by the writ. Do you at last acknowledge his rascality?
+
+     PER. I am thunderstruck, and can scarcely believe my eyes and ears.
+
+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:--
+
+     TAR. (_stopping_ ORGON). Gently, sir, gently; not so fast, I beg.
+     You have not far to go to find a lodging, and you are a prisoner in
+     the king's name.
+
+     ORG. Wretch! you had reserved this shaft for the last; by it you
+     finish me, and crown all your perfidies.
+
+     TAR. Your abuse has no power to disturb me, and I know how to
+     suffer every thing for the sake of Heaven.
+
+     CLÉ. Your moderation is really great, we must acknowledge.
+
+     DA. How impudently the infamous wretch sports with Heaven!
+
+     TAR. Your anger cannot move me. I have no other wish but to fulfil
+     my duty.
+
+     MARIANNE. You may claim great glory from the performance of this
+     duty: it is a very honorable employment for you.
+
+     TAR. The employment cannot be otherwise than glorious, when it
+     comes from the power that sends me here.
+
+     ORG. But do you remember that my charitable hand, ungrateful
+     scoundrel, raised you from a state of misery?
+
+     TAR. Yes, I know what help I have received from you; but the
+     interest of my king is my first duty. The just obligation of this
+     sacred duty stifles in my heart all other claims; and I would
+     sacrifice to it friend, wife, relations, and myself with them.
+
+     ELMIRE. The impostor!
+
+     DOR. With what treacherous cunning he makes a cloak of all that men
+     revere!...
+
+     TAR. (_to the_ OFFICER). I beg of you, sir, to deliver me from all
+     this noise, and to act according to the orders you have received.
+
+     OFFICER. I have certainly put off too long the discharge of my
+     duty, and you very rightly remind me of it. To execute my order,
+     follow me immediately to the prison in which a place is assigned to
+     you.
+
+     TAR. Who? I, sir?
+
+     OFFICER. Yes, you.
+
+     TAR. Why to prison?
+
+     OFFICER. To you I have no account to render. (_To_ ORGON.) Pray,
+     sir, recover from your great alarm. We live under a king [Louis
+     XIV.] who is an enemy to fraud,--a king who can read the heart, and
+     whom all the arts of impostors cannot deceive. His great mind,
+     endowed with delicate discernment, at all times sees things in
+     their true, light.... He annuls, by his sovereign will, the terms
+     of the contract by which you gave him [Tartuffe] your property. He
+     moreover forgives you this secret offence in which you were
+     involved by the flight of your friend. This to reward the zeal
+     which you once showed for him in maintaining his rights, and to
+     prove that his heart, when it is least expected, knows how to
+     recompense a good action. Merit with him is never lost, and he
+     remembers good better than evil.
+
+     DOR. Heaven be thanked!
+
+     PER. Ah! I breathe again.
+
+     EL. What a favorable end to our troubles!
+
+     MAR. Who would have foretold it?
+
+     ORG. (to TARTUFFE, _as the_ OFFICER _leads him off_). Ah, wretch!
+     now you  are--
+
+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.
+
+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 Shakspeare,
+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 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 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 universally 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 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 defence 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 defence
+of Arnauld, the writer went on to take up a line of offence 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:--
+
+     "You know," he said, "that the ruling passion of persons in that
+     rank of life [the rank of gentleman] is 'the point of honor,' which
+     is perpetually driving them into acts of violence apparently quite
+     at variance with Christian piety; so that, in fact, they would be
+     almost all of them excluded from our confessionals, had not our
+     fathers relaxed a little from the strictness of religion, to
+     accommodate themselves to the weakness of humanity. Anxious to keep
+     on good terms, both with the gospel, by doing their duty to God,
+     and with the men of the world, by showing charity to their
+     neighbor, they needed all the wisdom they possessed to devise
+     expedients for so nicely adjusting matters as to permit these
+     gentlemen to adopt the methods usually resorted to for vindicating
+     their honor without wounding their consciences, and thus reconcile
+     things apparently so opposite to each other as piety and the point
+     of honor."...
+
+     "I should certainly [so replies M. Montalte, with the most
+     exquisite irony couched under a cover of admiring simplicity],--I
+     should certainly have considered the thing perfectly impracticable,
+     if I had not known, from what I have seen of your fathers, that
+     they are capable of doing with ease what is impossible to other
+     men. This led me to anticipate that they must have discovered some
+     method for meeting the difficulty,--a method which I admire, even
+     before knowing it, and which I pray you to explain to me."
+
+     "Since that is your view of the matter," replied the monk, "I
+     cannot refuse you. Know, then, that this marvellous principle is
+     our grand method of _directing the intention_--the importance of
+     which, in our moral system, is such, that I might almost venture to
+     compare it with the doctrine of probability. You have had some
+     glimpses of it in passing, from certain maxims which I mentioned to
+     you. For example, when I was showing you how servants might execute
+     certain troublesome jobs with a safe conscience, did you not remark
+     that it was simply by diverting their intention from the evil to
+     which they were accessory, to the profit which they might reap from
+     the transaction? Now, that is what we call _directing the
+     intention_. You saw, too, that, were it not for a similar
+     divergence of _the mind_, those who give money for benefices might
+     be downright simoniacs. But I will now show you this grand method
+     in all its glory, as it applies to the subject of homicide,--a
+     crime which it justifies in a thousand instances,--in order that,
+     from this startling result, you may form an idea of all that it is
+     calculated to effect."
+
+     "I foresee already," said I, "that, according to this mode, every
+     thing will be permitted: it will stick at nothing."
+
+     "You always fly from the one extreme to the other," replied the
+     monk; "prithee avoid that habit. For just to show you that we are
+     far from permitting every thing, let me tell you that we never
+     suffer such a thing as a formal intention to sin, with the sole
+     design of sinning; and, if any person whatever should persist in
+     having no other end but evil in the evil that he does, we break
+     with him at once; such conduct is diabolical. This holds true,
+     without exception of age, sex, or rank. But when the person is not
+     of such a wretched disposition as this, we try to put in practice
+     our method of _directing the intention_, which consists in his
+     proposing to himself, as the end of his actions, some allowable
+     object. Not that we do not endeavor, as far as we can, to dissuade
+     men from doing things forbidden; but, when we cannot prevent the
+     action, we at least purify the motive, and thus correct the
+     viciousness of the mean by the goodness of the end. Such is the way
+     in which our fathers have contrived to permit those acts of
+     violence to which men usually resort in vindication of their honor.
+     They have no more to do than to turn off their intention from the
+     desire of vengeance, which is criminal, and direct it to a desire
+     to defend their honor, which, according to us, is quite
+     warrantable. And in this way our doctors discharge all their duty
+     towards God and towards man. By permitting the action, they gratify
+     the world; and by purifying the intention, they give satisfaction
+     to the gospel. This is a secret, sir, which was entirely unknown to
+     the ancients; the world is indebted for the discovery entirely to
+     our doctors. You understand it now, I hope?"
+
+     "Perfectly," was my reply. "To men you grant the outward material
+     effect of the action, and to God you give the inward and spiritual
+     movement of the intention; and, by this equitable partition, you
+     form an alliance between the laws of God and the laws of men. But,
+     my dear sir, to be frank with you, I can hardly trust your
+     premises, and I suspect that your authors will tell another tale."
+
+     "You do me injustice," rejoined the monk; "I advance nothing but
+     what I am ready to prove, and that by such a rich array of
+     passages, that altogether their number, their authority, and their
+     reasonings, will fill you with admiration. To show you, for
+     example, the alliance which our fathers have formed between the
+     maxims of the gospel and those of the world, by thus regulating the
+     intention, let me refer you to Reginald. (_In praxi._, liv. xxi.,
+     num. 62, p. 260.) [These, and all that follow, are verifiable
+     citations from real and undisputed Jesuit authorities, not to this
+     day repudiated by that order.] 'Private persons are forbidden to
+     avenge themselves; for St. Paul says to the Romans (ch. 12th),
+     "Recompense to no man evil for evil;" and Ecclesiasticus says (ch.
+     28th), "He that taketh vengeance shall draw on himself the
+     vengeance of God, and his sins will not be forgotten." Besides all
+     that is said in the gospel about forgiving offences, as in the 6th
+     and 18th chapters of St. Matthew.'"
+
+     "Well, father, if after that, he [Reginald] says any thing contrary
+     to the Scripture, it will, at least, not be from lack of scriptural
+     knowledge. Pray, how does he conclude?"
+
+     "You shall hear," he said. "From all this it appears that a
+     military man may demand satisfaction on the spot from the person
+     who has injured him--not, indeed, with the intention of rendering
+     evil for evil, but with that of preserving his honor--_non ut malum
+     pro malo reddat, sed ut conservat honorem_. See you how carefully,
+     because the Scripture condemns it, they guard against the intention
+     of rendering evil for evil? This is what they will tolerate on no
+     account. Thus Lessius observes (De Just., liv. ii., c. 9, d. 12, n.
+     79), that, 'If a man has received a blow on the face, he must on no
+     account have an intention to avenge himself; but he may lawfully
+     have an intention to avert infamy, and may, with that view, repel
+     the insult immediately, even at the point of the sword--_etiam cum
+     gladio_.' So far are we from permitting any one to cherish the
+     design of taking vengeance on his enemies, that our fathers will
+     not allow any even to _wish their death_--by a movement of hatred.
+     'If your enemy is disposed to injure you,' says Escobar, 'you have
+     no right to wish his death, by a movement of hatred; though you
+     may, with a view to save yourself from harm.' So legitimate,
+     indeed, is this wish, with such an intention, that our great
+     Hurtado de Mendoza says that 'we may _pray God_ to visit with
+     speedy death those who are bent on persecuting us, if there is no
+     other way of escaping from it.'" (In his book, De Spe, vol. ii., d.
+     15, sec. 4, 48.)
+
+     "May it please your reverence," said I, "the Church has forgotten
+     to insert a petition to that effect among her prayers."
+
+     "They have not put every thing into the prayers that one may
+     lawfully ask of God," answered the monk. "Besides, in the present
+     case, the thing was impossible, for this same opinion is of more
+     recent standing than the Breviary. You are not a good chronologist,
+     friend. But, not to wander from the point, let me request your
+     attention to the following passage, cited by Diana from Gaspar
+     Hurtado (De Sub. Pecc., diff. 9; Diana, p. 5; tr. 14, r. 99), one
+     of Escobar's four-and-twenty fathers: 'An incumbent may, without
+     any mortal sin, desire the decease of a life-renter on his
+     benefice, and a son that of his father, and rejoice when it
+     happens; provided always it is for the sake of the profit that is
+     to accrue from the event, and not from personal aversion.'"
+
+     "Good," cried I. "That is certainly a very happy hit, and I can
+     easily see that the doctrine admits of a wide application. But yet
+     there are certain cases, the solution of which, though of great
+     importance for gentlemen, might present still greater
+     difficulties."
+
+     "Propose such, if you please, that we may see," said the monk.
+
+     "Show me, with all your directing of the intention," returned I,
+     "that it is allowable to fight a duel."
+
+     "Our great Hurtado de Mendoza," said the father, "will satisfy you
+     on that point in a twinkling. 'If a gentleman,' says he, in a
+     passage cited by Diana, 'who is challenged to fight a duel, is well
+     known to have no religion, and if the vices to which he is openly
+     and unscrupulously addicted, are such as would lead people to
+     conclude, in the event of his refusing to fight, that he is
+     actuated, not by the fear of God, but by cowardice, and induce them
+     to say of him that he was a _hen_, and not a man--_gallina, et non
+     vir_; in that case he may, to save his honor, appear at the
+     appointed spot--not, indeed, with the express intention of fighting
+     a duel, but merely with that of defending himself, should the
+     person who challenged him come there unjustly to attack him. His
+     action in this case, viewed by itself, will be perfectly
+     indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one's stepping into a
+     field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a person, and
+     defending one's self in the event of being attacked? And thus the
+     gentleman is guilty of no sin whatever; for in fact, it cannot be
+     called accepting a challenge at all, his intention being directed
+     to other circumstances, and the acceptance of a challenge
+     consisting in an express intention to fight, which we are supposing
+     the gentleman never had.'"
+
+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:--
+
+     I have been asked why I employed a pleasant, jocose, and diverting
+     style. I reply... I thought it a duty to write so as to be
+     comprehended by women and men of the world, that they might know
+     the danger of their maxims and propositions which were then
+     universally propagated.... I have been asked, lastly, if I myself
+     read all the books which I quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so,
+     I must have passed a great part of my life in reading very bad
+     books; but I read Escobar twice through, and I employed some of my
+     friends in reading the others. But I did not make use of a single
+     passage without having myself read it in the book from which it is
+     cited, without having examined the subject of which it treats, and
+     without having read what went before and followed, so that I might
+     run no risk of quoting an objection as an answer, which would have
+     been blameworthy and unfair.
+
+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 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 "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 sceptic of
+the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This sceptic represents his
+own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:--
+
+     'I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is,
+     nor what I am myself. I am in a frightful ignorance of all things.
+     I do not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is,
+     and that very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which
+     reflects upon every thing and upon itself, and is no better
+     acquainted with itself than with any thing else. I see these
+     appalling spaces of the universe which enclose me, and I find
+     myself tethered in one corner of this immense expansion without
+     knowing why I am stationed in this place rather than in another, or
+     why this moment of time which is given me to live is assigned me at
+     this point rather than at another of the whole eternity that has
+     preceded me, and of that which is to follow me.
+
+     'I see nothing but infinities on every side, which enclose me like
+     an atom, and like a shadow which endures but for an instant, and
+     returns no more.
+
+     'All that I know, is that I am soon to die; but what I am most
+     ignorant of, is that very death which I am unable to avoid.
+
+     'As I know not whence I came, so I know not whither I go; and I
+     know only, that in leaving this world I fall forever either into
+     nothingness or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing
+     which of these two conditions is to be eternally my lot. Such is my
+     state,--full of misery, of weakness, and of uncertainty.
+
+     'And from all this I conclude, that I ought to pass all the days
+     of my life without a thought of trying to learn what is to befall
+     me hereafter. Perhaps in my doubts I might find some enlightenment;
+     but I am unwilling to take the trouble, or go a single step in
+     search of it; and, treating with contempt those who perplex
+     themselves with such solicitude, my purpose is to go forward
+     without forethought and without fear to try the great event, and
+     passively to approach death in uncertainty of the eternity of my
+     future condition.'
+
+     Who would desire to have for a friend a man who discourses in this
+     manner? Who would select such a one for the confidant of his
+     affairs? Who would have recourse to such a one in his afflictions?
+     And, in fine, for what use of life could such a man be destined?
+
+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:--
+
+     Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking
+     reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to
+     crush him. An exhalation, a drop of water, suffices to kill him.
+     But were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble
+     than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and
+     knows the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe
+     knows nothing of it.
+
+     Our whole dignity consists, then, in 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."
+
+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:)--
+
+     Cæsar was too old, it seems to me, to amuse himself with conquering
+     the world. This amusement was well enough for Augustus or
+     Alexander; they were young people, whom it is difficult to stop;
+     but Cæsar ought to have been more mature.
+
+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:--
+
+     I lay it down as a fact, that, if all men knew what others say of
+     them, there would not be four friends in the world.
+
+Here is one of the most current of Pascal's sayings:--
+
+     Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.
+
+The following "Thought" condenses the substance of the book proposed,
+into three short sentences:--
+
+     The knowledge of God without that of our misery produces pride. The
+     knowledge of our misery without that of God gives despair. The
+     knowledge of Jesus Christ is intermediate, because therein we find
+     God and our misery.
+
+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:--
+
+     Console thyself; thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found
+     me.
+
+     I thought on thee in my agony; such drops of blood I shed for thee.
+
+It is austerity again, but not unjust austerity, that speaks as
+follows:--
+
+     Religion is a thing so great that those who would not take the
+     pains to seek it if it is obscure, should be deprived of it. What
+     do they complain of, then, if it is such that they could find it by
+     seeking it?
+
+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 practising, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 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 lustre 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 and 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.
+
+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:--
+
+THE ROCKS, Sunday, June 28, 1671.
+
+     You have amply made up to me my late losses; I have received two
+     letters from you which have filled me with transports of joy. The
+     pleasure I take in reading them is beyond all imagination. If I
+     have in any way contributed to the improvement of your style I did
+     it in the thought that I was laboring for the pleasure of others,
+     not for my own. But Providence, who has seen fit to separate us so
+     often, and to place us at such immense distances from each other,
+     has repaid me a little for the privation in the charms of your
+     correspondence, and still more in the satisfaction you express in
+     your situation, and the beauty of your castle; you represent it to
+     me with an air of grandeur and magnificence that enchants me. I
+     once saw a similar account of it by the first Madame de Grignan;
+     but I little thought at that time, that all these beauties were one
+     day to be at your command. I am very much obliged to you for having
+     given me so particular an account of it. If I could be tired in
+     reading your letters, it would not only betray a very bad taste in
+     me, but would likewise show that I could have very little love or
+     friendship for you. Divest yourself of the dislike you have taken
+     to circumstantial details. I have often told you, and you ought
+     yourself to feel the truth of this remark, that they are as dear to
+     us from those we love, as they are tedious and disagreeable from
+     others. If they are displeasing to us, it is only from the
+     indifference we feel for those who write them. Admitting this
+     observation to be true, I leave you to judge what pleasure yours
+     afford me. It is a fine thing, truly, to play the great lady, as
+     you do at present.
+
+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 wholly admire such maternal affection.
+But we should not criticise it too severely.
+
+We choose next a marvellously 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:--
+
+     I was at Versailles last Saturday with the Villarses.... At three
+     the king, the queen, Monsieur [eldest brother to the king], Madame
+     [that brother's wife], Mademoiselle [that brother's eldest
+     unmarried daughter], and every thing else which is royal, together
+     with Madame de Montespan [the celebrated mistress of the king] and
+     train, and all the courtiers, and all the ladies,--all, in short,
+     which constitutes the court of France, is assembled in the
+     beautiful apartment of the king's, which you remember. All is
+     furnished divinely, all is magnificent. Such a thing as heat is
+     unknown; you pass from one place to another without the slightest
+     pressure. A game at _reversis_ [the description is of a gambling
+     scene, in which Dangeau figures as a cool and skilful gamester]
+     gives the company a form and a settlement. The king and Madame de
+     Montespan keep a bank together; different tables are occupied by
+     Monsieur, the queen, and Madame de Soubise, Dangeau and party,
+     Langlée and party. Everywhere you see heaps of louis d'ors; they
+     have no other counters. I saw Dangeau play, and thought what fools
+     we all were beside him. He dreams of nothing but what concerns the
+     game; he wins where others lose; he neglects nothing, profits by
+     every thing, never has his attention diverted; in short, his
+     science bids defiance to chance. Two hundred thousand francs in ten
+     days, a hundred thousand crowns in a month, these are the pretty
+     memorandums he puts down in his pocket-book. He was kind enough to
+     say that I was partners with him, so that I got an excellent seat.
+     I made my obeisance to the king, as you told me; and he returned it
+     as if I had been young and handsome.... The duke said a thousand
+     kind things without minding a word he uttered. Marshal de Lorges
+     attacked me in the name of the Chevalier de Grignan; in short,
+     _tutti quanti_ [the whole company]. You know what it is to get a
+     word from everybody you meet. Madame de Montespan talked to me of
+     Bourbon, and asked me how I liked Vichi, and whether the place did
+     me good. She said that Bourbon, instead of curing a pain in one of
+     her knees, injured both.... Her size is reduced by a good half, and
+     yet her complexion, her eyes, and her lips, are as fine as ever.
+     She was dressed all in French point, her hair in a thousand
+     ringlets, the two side ones hanging low on her cheeks, black
+     ribbons on her head, pearls (the same that belonged to Madame de
+     l'Hôpital), the loveliest diamond earrings, three or four
+     bodkins--nothing else on the head; in short, a triumphant beauty,
+     worthy the admiration of all the foreign ambassadors. She was
+     accused of preventing the whole French nation from seeing the king;
+     she has restored him, you see, to their eyes; and you cannot
+     conceive the joy it has given all the world, and the splendor it
+     has thrown upon the court. This charming confusion, without
+     confusion, of all which is the most select, continues from three
+     till six. If couriers arrive, the king retires a moment to read the
+     despatches, and returns. There is always some music going on, to
+     which he listens, and which has an excellent effect. He talks with
+     such of the ladies as are accustomed to enjoy that honor.... At
+     six the carriages are at the door. The king is in one of them with
+     Madame de Montespan, Monsieur and Madame de Thianges, and honest
+     d'Heudicourt in a fool's paradise on the stool. You know how these
+     open carriages are made; they do not sit face to face, but all
+     looking the same way. The queen occupies another with the princess;
+     and the rest come flocking after, as it may happen. There are then
+     gondolas on the canal, and music; and at ten they come back, and
+     then there is a play; and twelve strikes, and they go to supper;
+     and thus rolls round the Saturday. If I were to tell you how often
+     you were asked after, how many questions were put to me without
+     waiting for answers, how often I neglected to answer, how little
+     they cared, and how much less I did, you would see the _iniqua
+     corte_ [wicked court] before you in all its perfection. However, it
+     never was so pleasant before, and everybody wishes it may last.
+
+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:--
+
+     FRIDAY, 1st Oct. (1677).
+
+     Yesterday evening at Cone, we descended into a veritable hell, the
+     true forges of Vulcan. Eight or ten Cyclops were at work, forging,
+     not arms for Æneas, but anchors for ships. You never saw strokes
+     redoubled so justly, nor with so admirable a cadence. We stood in
+     the middle of four furnaces; and the demons came passing about us,
+     all melting in sweat, with pale faces, wild-staring eyes, savage
+     mustaches, and hair long and black,--a sight enough to frighten
+     less well-bred folks than ourselves. As for me, I could not
+     comprehend the possibility of refusing any thing which these
+     gentlemen, in their hell, might have chosen to exact. We got out at
+     last, by the help of a shower of silver, with which we took care to
+     refresh their souls, and facilitate our exit.
+
+Once more:--
+
+     PARIS, 29th November (1679).
+
+     I have been to the wedding of Madame de Louvois. How shall I
+     describe it? Magnificence, illuminations, all France, dresses all
+     gold and brocade, jewels, braziers full of fire, and stands full of
+     flowers, confusions of carriages, cries out of doors, lighted
+     torches, pushings back, people run over; in short, a whirlwind, a
+     distraction; questions without answers, compliments without knowing
+     what is said, civilities without knowing who is spoken to, feet
+     entangled in trains. From the midst of all this, issue inquiries
+     after your health, which not being answered as quick as lightning,
+     the inquirers pass on, contented to remain in the state of
+     ignorance and indifference in which they [the inquiries] were made.
+     O vanity of vanities! Pretty little De Mouchy has had the
+     small-pox. O vanity, et cætera!
+
+Yet again. The gay writer has been sobered, perhaps hurt, by a friend's
+frankly writing to her, "You are old." To her daughter:--
+
+     So you were struck with the expression of Madame de la Fayette,
+     blended with so much friendship. 'Twas a truth, I own, which I
+     ought to have borne in mind; and yet I must confess it astonished
+     me, for I do not yet perceive in myself any such decay.
+     Nevertheless, I cannot help making many reflections and
+     calculations, and I find the conditions of life hard enough. It
+     seems to me that I have been dragged, against my will, to the fatal
+     period when old age must be endured; I see it; I have come to it;
+     and I would fain, if I could help it, not go any farther; not
+     advance a step more in the road of infirmities, of pains, of losses
+     of memory, of _disfigurements_ ready to do me outrage; and I hear a
+     voice which says, "You must go on in spite of yourself; or, if you
+     will not go on, you must die;" and this is another extremity from
+     which nature revolts. Such is the lot, however, of all who advance
+     beyond middle life. What is their resource? To think of the will of
+     God and of universal law, and so restore reason to its place, and
+     be patient. Be you, then, patient accordingly, my dear child, and
+     let not your affection soften into such tears as reason must
+     condemn.
+
+She dates a letter, and recalls that the day was the anniversary of an
+event in her life:--
+
+     PARIS, Friday, Feb. 5, 1672.
+
+     This day thousand years I was married.
+
+Here is a passage with power in it. The great war minister of Louis has
+died. Madame de Sévigné was now sixty-five years old. The letter is to
+her cousin Coulanges:--
+
+     I am so astonished at the news of the sudden death of M. de
+     Louvois, that I am at a loss how to speak of it. Dead, however, he
+     is, this great minister, this potent being, who occupied so great
+     a place; whose me (_le moi_), as M. Nicole says, had so wide a
+     dominion; who was the centre of so many orbs. What affairs had he
+     not to manage! what designs, what projects, what secrets! what
+     interests to unravel, what wars to undertake, what intrigues, what
+     noble games at chess to play and to direct! Ah! my God, grant me a
+     little time; I want to give check to the Duke of Savoy--checkmate
+     to the Prince of Orange. No, no, you shall not have a moment, not a
+     single moment. Are events like these to be talked of? Not they. We
+     must reflect upon them in our closets.
+
+A glimpse of Bourdaloue:--
+
+     Ah, that Bourdaloue! his sermon on the Passion was, they say, the
+     most perfect thing of the kind that can be imagined; it was the
+     same he preached last year, but revised and altered with the
+     assistance of some of his friends, that it might be wholly
+     inimitable. How can one love God, if one never hears him properly
+     spoken of? You must really possess a greater portion of grace than
+     others.
+
+A distinguished caterer or steward, a gentleman described as possessing
+talent enough to have governed a province, commits suicide on a
+professional point of honor:--
+
+     PARIS, Sunday, April 26, 1671.
+
+     I have just learned from Moreuil, of what passed at Chantilly with
+     regard to poor Vatel. I wrote to you last Friday that he had
+     stabbed himself--these are the particulars of the affair: The king
+     arrived there on Thursday night; the walk, and the collation, which
+     was served in a place set apart for the purpose, and strewed with
+     jonquils, were just as they should be. Supper was served; but there
+     was no roast meat at one or two of the tables, on account of
+     Vatel's having been obliged to provide several dinners more than
+     were expected. This affected his spirits; and he was heard to say
+     several times, "I have lost my honor! I cannot bear this disgrace!"
+     "My head is quite bewildered," said he to Gourville. "I have not
+     had a wink of sleep these twelve nights; I wish you would assist me
+     in giving orders." Gourville did all he could to comfort and assist
+     him, but the failure of the roast meat (which, however, did not
+     happen at the king's table, but at some of the other twenty-five)
+     was always uppermost with him. Gourville mentioned it to the prince
+     [Condé, the great Condé, the king's host], who went directly to
+     Vatel's apartment, and said to him, "Every thing is extremely well
+     conducted, Vatel; nothing could be more admirable than his
+     Majesty's supper." "Your highness's goodness," replied he,
+     "overwhelms me; I am sensible that there was a deficiency of roast
+     meat at two tables." "Not at all," said the prince; "do not perplex
+     yourself, and all will go well." Midnight came; the fireworks did
+     not succeed; they were covered with a thick cloud; they cost
+     sixteen thousand francs. At four o'clock in the morning Vatel went
+     round and found everybody asleep; he met one of the
+     under-purveyors, who was just come in with only two loads of fish.
+     "What!" said he, "is this all?" "Yes, sir," said the man, not
+     knowing that Vatel had despatched other people to all the seaports
+     around. Vatel waited for some time; the other purveyors did not
+     arrive; his head grew distracted; he thought there was no more fish
+     to be had. He flew to Gourville: "Sir," said he, "I cannot outlive
+     this disgrace." Gourville laughed at him. Vatel, however, went to
+     his apartment, and setting the hilt of his sword against the door,
+     after two ineffectual attempts, succeeded, in the third, in forcing
+     his sword through his heart. At that instant the couriers arrived
+     with the fish; Vatel was inquired after to distribute it. They ran
+     to his apartment, knocked at the door, but received no answer; upon
+     which they broke it open, and found him weltering in his blood. A
+     messenger was immediately despatched to acquaint the prince with
+     what had happened, who was like a man in despair. The Duke wept,
+     _for his Burgundy journey depended upon Vatel_.
+
+The italics here are our own. We felt that we must use them.
+
+Is it not all pathetic? But how exquisitely characteristic of the nation
+and of the times! "Poor Vatel," is the extent to which Madame de 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 sincerity as
+unquestionable as the levity is, on the point of personal religion:--
+
+     But, my dear child, the greatest inclination I have at present is
+     to be a little religious. I plague La Mousse about it every day. I
+     belong neither to God nor to the devil. I am quite weary of such a
+     situation; though, between you and me, I look upon it as the most
+     natural one in the world. I am not the devil's, because I fear God,
+     and have at the bottom a principle of religion; then, on the other
+     hand, I am not properly God's, because his law appears hard and
+     irksome to me, and I cannot bring myself to acts of self-denial; so
+     that altogether I am one of those called lukewarm Christians, the
+     great number of which does not in the least surprise me, for I
+     perfectly understand their sentiments, and the reasons that
+     influence them. However, we are told that this is a state highly
+     displeasing to God; if so, we must get out of it. Alas! this is the
+     difficulty. Was ever any thing so mad as I am, to be thus eternally
+     pestering you with my rhapsodies?
+
+Madame de Sévigné involuntarily becomes a maxim-maker:--
+
+     The other day I made a maxim off-hand, without once thinking of it;
+     and I liked it so well that I fancied I had taken it out of M. de
+     la Rochefoucauld's. Pray tell me whether it is so or not, for in
+     that case my memory is more to be praised than my judgment. I said,
+     with all the ease in the world, that "ingratitude begets reproach,
+     as acknowledgment begets new favors." Pray, where did this come
+     from? Have I read it? Did I dream it? Is it my own idea? Nothing
+     can be truer than the thing itself, nor than that I am totally
+     ignorant how I came by it. I found it properly arranged in my
+     brain, and at the end of my tongue.
+
+The partial mother lets her daughter know whom the maxim was meant for.
+She says, "It is intended for your brother." This young fellow had, we
+suspect, been first earning his mother's "reproaches" for spendthrift
+habits, and then getting more money from her by "acknowledgment."
+
+She hears that son of hers read "some chapters out of Rabelais," "which
+were enough," she declares, "to make us die with laughing." "I cannot
+affect," she says, "a prudery which is not natural to me." No, indeed, a
+prude this woman was not. She had the strong æsthetic 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 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:--
+
+     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 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:--
+
+     There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way
+     of being delivered from it but by ingratitude.
+
+     Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.
+
+     Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would
+     appear to be. The world is not unjust long.
+
+Madame de Sévigné makes a confession, which will comfort readers who may
+have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks:--
+
+     I send you M. de Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," revised and corrected,
+     with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I
+     can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others that,
+     to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. God knows how
+     it will be with you.
+
+What was it changed this woman's mood to serious? She could not have
+been hearing Massillon's celebrated sermon on the "fewness of the
+elect," for Massillon was yet only a boy of nine years; she may have
+been reading Pascal's "Thoughts,"--Pascal had been dead ten years, and
+the "Thoughts" had been published; or she may have been listening to one
+of those sifting, heart-searching discourses of Bourdaloue,--the date of
+her letter is March 16, 1672, and during the Lent of that year
+Bourdaloue preached at Versailles,--when she wrote sombrely as
+follows:--
+
+     You ask me if I am as fond of life as ever. I must own to you that
+     I experience mortifications, and severe ones too; but I am still
+     unhappy at the thoughts of death; I consider it so great a
+     misfortune to see the termination of all my pursuits, that I should
+     desire nothing better, if it were practicable, than to begin life
+     again. I find myself engaged in a scene of confusion and trouble; I
+     was embarked in life without my own consent, and know I must leave
+     it again; this distracts me, for how shall I leave it? In what
+     manner? By what door? At what time? In what disposition? Am I to
+     suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a
+     state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some
+     sudden accident? How shall I stand with God? What shall I have to
+     offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall
+     I have no other sentiment but that of fear? What have I to hope? Am
+     I worthy of heaven? Or have I deserved the torments of hell?
+     Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater
+     madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet
+     what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the
+     foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently
+     buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so
+     dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it, than I
+     do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me,
+     then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it; but, if I had
+     been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse's arms;
+     it would have spared me many vexations, and would have insured
+     heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something
+     else.
+
+A memorable sarcasm saved for us by Madame de Sévigné, at the very close
+of one of her letters:--
+
+     Guillenagues said yesterday that Pelisson abused the privilege men
+     have of being ugly.
+
+Readers familiar with Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities," will recognize in
+the following narrative a state of society not unlike that described by
+the novelist as immediately preceding the French Revolution:--
+
+     The Archbishop of Rheims, as he returned yesterday from St.
+     Germain, met with a curious adventure. He drove at his usual rate,
+     like a whirlwind. If he thinks himself a great man, his servants
+     think him still greater. They passed through Nanterre, when they
+     met a man on horseback, and in an insolent tone bid him clear the
+     way. The poor man used his utmost endeavors to avoid the danger
+     that threatened him, but his horse proved unmanageable. To make
+     short of it, the coach-and-six turned them both topsy-turvy; but at
+     the same time the coach, too, was completely overturned. In an
+     instant the horse and the man, instead of amusing themselves with
+     having their limbs broken, rose almost miraculously; the man
+     remounted, and galloped away, and is galloping still, for aught I
+     know; while the servants, the archbishop's coachman, and the
+     archbishop himself at the head of them, cried out, "Stop that
+     villain, stop him! thrash him soundly!" The rage of the archbishop
+     was so great, that afterward, in relating the adventure, he said,
+     if he could have caught the rascal, he would have broke all his
+     bones, and cut off both his ears.
+
+If such things were done by the aristocracy--and the spiritual
+aristocracy at that!--in the green tree, what might not be expected in
+the dry? The writer makes no comment--draws no moral. "Adieu, my dear,
+delightful child. I cannot express my eagerness to see you," are her
+next words. She rattles along, three short sentences more, and finishes
+her letter.
+
+We should still not have done with these letters, were we to go on a
+hundred pages, or two hundred, farther. Readers have already seen truly
+what Madame de 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 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, 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.
+
+It was perhaps not without its influence on the style of Corneille, that
+a youthful labor of his in authorship was to translate, wholly or
+partially, the "Pharsalia" of Lucan. Corneille always retained his
+fondness for Lucan. This taste on his part, and the rhymed Alexandrines
+in which he wrote tragedy, may together help account for the
+hyper-heroic style which is Corneille's great fault. A lady criticised
+his tragedy, "The Death of Pompey," by saying: "Very fine, but too many
+heroes in it." Corneille's tragedies generally have, if not too many
+heroes, at least too much hero, in them. Concerning the historian
+Gibbon's habitual pomp of expression, it was once wittily said that
+nobody could possibly tell the truth in such a style as that. It would
+be equally near the mark if we should say of Corneille's chosen mould
+of verse, that nobody could possibly be simple and natural in that.
+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 in this kind with no commanding success; but
+at thirty he wrote the tragedy of "The Cid," and instantly became
+famous. His subsequent plays were chiefly on classical subjects. The
+subject of "The Cid" was drawn from Spanish literature. This was
+emphatically what has been called an "epoch-making" production.
+Richelieu's "Academy," at the instigation, indeed almost under the
+dictation, of Richelieu, who was jealous of Corneille, tried to write it
+down. They succeeded about as Balaam succeeded in prophesying against
+Israel. "The Cid" triumphed over them, and over the great minister. It
+established not only Corneille's fame, but his authority. The man of
+genius taken alone, proved stronger than the men of taste taken
+together.
+
+For all this, however, our readers would hardly relish "The Cid." Let us
+go at once to that tragedy of Corneille's which, by the general consent
+of French critics, is the best work of its author, the "Polyeuctes." The
+following is the rhetorical climax of praise in which Gaillard, one of
+the most enlightened of Corneille's eulogists, arranges the different
+masterpieces of his author: "'The Cid' raised Corneille above his
+rivals; the 'Horace' and the 'Cinna' above his models; the 'Polyeuctes'
+above himself." This tragedy will, we doubt not, prove to our readers
+the most interesting of all the tragedies of Corneille.
+
+"The great Corneille"--to apply the traditionary designation which,
+besides attributing to our tragedian his conceded general eminence in
+character and genius, serves also to distinguish him by merit from his
+younger brother, who wrote very good tragedy--was an illustrious figure
+at the 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 de Rambouillet, and
+that awful court decided against the play. Corneille, like Michel
+Angelo, had to a good degree the courage of his own productions; but, in
+the face of adverse decision so august on his work, he needed
+encouragement, which happily he did not fail to receive, before he would
+allow his "Polyeuctes" to be represented. The theatre crowned it with
+the laurels of victory. It thus fell to Corneille to triumph
+successively, single-handed, over two great adversary courts of critical
+appreciation,--the Academy of Richelieu and the not less formidable
+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 judge the poet,--Corneille used, before putting them
+on the stage, to take his plays to the "Church,"--that is, to the
+priestly hierarchy who constituted the "Church,"--that they might be
+authoritatively judged as to their possible influence on the cause of
+Christian truth.
+
+In the "Polyeuctes," the motive is religion. Polyeuctes is an historic
+or traditional saint of the Roman-Catholic church. His conversion from
+paganism is the theme of the play. Polyeuctes has a friend Nearchus who
+is already a Christian convert, and who labors earnestly to make
+Polyeuctes a proselyte to the faith. Polyeuctes has previously married a
+noble Roman lady, daughter of Felix, governor of Armenia, in which
+province the action of the story occurs. (The persecuting Emperor Decius
+is on the throne of the Roman world.) Paulina is the daughter's name.
+Paulina married Polyeuctes against her own choice, for she loved Roman
+Severus better. Her father had put his will upon her, and Paulina had
+filially obeyed in marrying Polyeuctes. Such are the relations of the
+different persons of the drama. It will be seen that there is ample room
+for the play of elevated and tragic passions. Paulina, in fact, is the
+lofty, the impossible, ideal of wifely and daughterly truth and
+devotion. Pagan though she is, she is pathetically constant, both to the
+husband that was forced upon her, and to the father that did the
+forcing; while still she loves, and cannot but love, the man whom, in
+spite of her love for him, she, with an act like prolonged suicide,
+stoically separates from her torn and bleeding heart.
+
+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 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 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 gods; 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
+noblest things in French tragedy--a French critic would be likely to
+say, the very noblest 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 sturdy
+     independence that animated Johnson in annotating Shakspeare, 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. The Greeks were frigid declaimers in
+     comparison with this passage of Corneille."] Severus, learn to know
+     Paulina all in all.
+
+     My Polyeuctes touches on his last hour; he has but a moment to
+     live; you are the cause of this, though innocently so. I know not
+     if your heart, yielding to your desires, may have dared build any
+     hope on his destruction; but know that there is no death so cruel
+     that to it with firm brow I would not bend my steps, that there are
+     in hell no horrors that I would not endure, rather than soil a
+     glory so pure, rather than espouse, after his sad fate, a man that
+     was in any wise the cause of his death; and if you suppose me of a
+     heart so little sound, the love which I had for you would all turn
+     to hate. You are generous; be so even to the end. My father is in a
+     state to yield every thing to you; he fears you; and I further
+     hazard this saying, that, if he destroys my husband, it is to you
+     that he sacrifices him. Save this unhappy man, use your influence
+     in his favor, exert yourself to become his support. I know that
+     this is much that I ask; but the greater the effort, the greater
+     the glory from it. To preserve a rival of whom you are jealous,
+     that is a trait of virtue which appertains only to you. And if your
+     renown is not motive sufficient, it is much that a woman once so
+     well beloved, and the love of whom perhaps is still capable of
+     touching you, will owe to your great heart the dearest possession
+     that she owns; remember, in short, that you are Severus. Adieu.
+     Decide with yourself alone what you ought to do; if you are not
+     such as I dare hope that you are, then, in order that I may
+     continue to esteem you, I wish not to know it.
+
+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):--
+
+     That advice might be good for some common soul. Though he [the
+     Emperor Decius] holds in his hands my life and my fortune, I am yet
+     Severus; and all that mighty power is powerless over my glory, and
+     powerless over my duty. Here honor compels me, and I will satisfy
+     it; whether fate afterward show itself propitious or adverse,
+     perishing glorious I shall perish content.
+
+     I will tell thee further, but under confidence, the sect of
+     Christians is not what it is thought to be. They are hated, why I
+     know not; and I see Decius unjust only in this regard. From
+     curiosity I have sought to become acquainted with them. They are
+     regarded as sorcerers taught from hell; and, in this supposition,
+     the punishment of death is visited on secret mysteries which we do
+     not understand. But Eleusinian Ceres and the Good Goddess have
+     their secrets, like those at Rome and in Greece; still we freely
+     tolerate everywhere, their god alone excepted, every kind of god;
+     all the monsters of Egypt have their temples in Rome; our fathers,
+     at their will, made a god of a man; and, their blood in our veins
+     preserving their errors, we fill heaven with all our emperors; but,
+     to speak without disguise of deifications so numerous, the effect
+     is very doubtful of such metamorphoses.
+
+     Christians have but one God, absolute master of all, whose mere
+     will does whatever he resolves; but, if I may venture to say what
+     seems to me true, our gods very often agree ill together; and,
+     though their wrath crush me before your eyes, we have a good many
+     of them for them to be true gods. Finally, among the Christians,
+     morals are pure, vices are hated, virtues flourish; they offer
+     prayers on behalf of us who persecute them; and, during all the
+     time since we have tormented them, have they ever been seen
+     mutinous? Have they ever been seen rebellious? Have our princes
+     ever had more faithful soldiers? Fierce in war, they submit
+     themselves to our executioners; and, lions in combat, they die like
+     lambs. I pity them too much not to defend them. Come, let us find
+     Felix; let us commune with his son-in-law; and let us thus, with
+     one single action, gratify at once Paulina, and my glory, and my
+     compassion.
+
+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 him to be a
+prudent man. Felix at length says, "Adore the 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 Corneille, the father of French
+tragedy, 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 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.
+
+Besides his plays, there is a translation in verse by him of the
+"Imitation of Christ;" there are metrical versions of a considerable
+number of the Psalms; there are odes, madrigals, sonnets, stanzas,
+addresses to the king. Then there are discourses in prose on dramatic
+poetry, on tragedy, and on the three unities. Add to these, elaborate
+appreciations by himself of a considerable number of his own plays,
+prefaces, epistles, arguments to his pieces, and you have, what with the
+notes, the introductions, the eulogies, and other such things that the
+faithful French editor knows so well how to accumulate, matter enough of
+Corneille to swell out eleven, or, in one edition,--that issued under
+Napoleon as First Consul,--even twelve, handsome volumes of his works.
+
+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
+friend 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 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 theatre, 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.
+
+The "Thebaïd" was Racine's first tragedy,--at least his first that
+attained to the honor of being represented. Molière brought it out in
+his theatre, the Palais Royal. His second tragedy, the "Alexander the
+Great," was also put into the hands of Molière.
+
+This latter play the author took to 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 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.
+
+The "Andromache" followed the "Alexander," and then Racine did try his
+hand in another poetical line; for he wrote a comedy, his only one, "The
+Suitors," as is loosely translated "Les Plaideurs," a title which has a
+legal, and not an amorous, meaning. This play, after it had at first
+failed, Louis XIV. laughed into court favor. It became thenceforward a
+great success. It still keeps its place on the stage. It is, however, a
+farce, rather than a comedy.
+
+We pass over now one or two of the subsequent productions of Racine, to
+mention next a play of his which had a singular history. It was a 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 in "The Suitors," hurt the old
+man's pride. That pride suffered a worse hurt still. The chief Parisian
+theatre, 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 theatre
+were all bought by his enemies, and left solidly vacant. The best seats
+at Pradon's theatre 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 theatre, 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 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 Athaliah,
+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 "Athaliah," as in the "Esther," Racine
+introduced the feature of the chorus, a restoration which had all the
+effect of an innovation. The chorus in "Athaliah" 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 "Athaliah" is almost proof against
+technical criticism. It is acknowledged to be, after its kind, a nearly
+ideal product of art.
+
+There is a curious story about the fortune of this piece with the
+public, that will interest our readers. The first success of "Athaliah"
+was not great. In fact, it was almost a flat failure. But a company of
+wits, playing at forfeits somewhere in the country, severely sentenced
+one of their number to go by himself, and read the first act of
+"Athaliah." The victim went, and did not return. Sought at length, he
+was found just commencing a second perusal of the play entire. He
+reported of it so enthusiastically, that he was asked to read it before
+the company, which he did, to their delight. This started a reaction in
+favor of the condemned play, which soon came to be counted the
+masterpiece of its author.
+
+First, in specimen of the choral feature of the drama, we content
+ourselves with giving a single chorus from the "Athaliah." 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 a 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, is the state of feeling represented in the
+present chorus. Salomith is the leading singer:--
+
+      SALOMITH.
+
+        The Lord hath deigned to speak,
+      But what he to his prophet now hath shown--
+      Who unto us will make it clearly known?
+        Arms he himself to save us, poor and weak?
+        Arms he himself to have us overthrown?
+
+      THE WHOLE CHORUS.
+
+      O promises! O threats! O mystery profound!
+        What woe, what weal, are each in turn foretold?
+      How can so much of wrath be found
+        So much of love to enfold?
+
+      A VOICE.
+
+      Zion shall be no more; a cruel flame
+        Will all her ornaments devour.
+
+      A SECOND VOICE.
+
+        God shelters Zion; she has shield and tower
+      In His eternal name.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      I see her splendor all from vision disappear.
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+      I see on every side her glory shine more clear.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      Into a deep abyss is Zion sunk from sight.
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+      Zion lifts up her brow amid celestial light.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      What dire despair!
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+        What praise from every tongue!
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      What cries of grief!
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+        What songs of triumph sung!
+
+      A THIRD VOICE.
+
+      Cease we to vex ourselves; our God, one day,
+        Will this great mystery make clear.
+
+      ALL THREE VOICES.
+
+        Let us his wrath revere,
+      While on his love, no less, our hopes we stay.
+
+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:--
+
+     What pity touches you? Is it that in a holocaust to be this day
+     offered, I, like Jephtha's daughter in other times, must pacify by
+     my death the anger of the Lord? Alas, a son has nothing that does
+     not belong to his father!
+
+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, 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:--
+
+     JOASH. I feel myself ready, if he wishes it, to give to him my
+     life.
+
+     JEHOIADA. You have often heard read the history of our kings. Do
+     you remember, my son, what strict laws a king worthy of the crown
+     ought to impose upon himself?
+
+     JOASH. A wise and good king, so hath God himself declared, puts not
+     his reliance upon riches and gold; he fears the Lord his God, has
+     ever before him his precepts, his laws, his judgments severe, and
+     does not with unjust burdens overwhelm his brethren.
+
+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 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:--
+
+      God of the Jews, 'tis thou that dost prevail!
+      Ay, it is Joash; all without avail
+      Seek I to cheat myself with other thought:
+      I know the wound my weapon on him wrought;
+      I see his father Ahaziah's face;
+      Naught but brings back to me that hated race.
+      David doth triumph, Ahab only fall,--
+      Unpitying God, thou only hast done all!
+      'Tis thou that flattering me to hope in vain
+      For easy vengeance, o'er and o'er again
+      Hast with myself myself embroiled anew,
+      Now pangs of conscience rousing, not a few,
+      Now dazzling me with thy rich treasures rare,
+      Which I to burn or pillage did not dare.
+      Let him, then, reign, this son, thy care, thy toil,
+      And, so to signalize his new-got spoil,
+      Let him into my bosom plunge the knife,
+      And take with filial hand his mother's life.
+      Hearken what wish for him she dying breathes--
+      Wish? nay, what hope, assured hope, bequeaths,--
+      That, disobedient, proud, rebellious, he,
+      Faithful to Ahab's blood received from me,
+      To his grandfather, to his father, like,
+      Abhorrent heir of David, down may strike
+      Thy worship and thy fane, avenger fell
+      Of Athaliah, Ahab, Jezebel!
+
+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 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 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.
+
+
+We group three names in one title, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon, to
+represent the pulpit orators of France. There are other great names,--as
+Fléchier, with Claude and Saurin, the last two, Protestants both,--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 pure and classic style, became at once, and permanently became, a
+part of French literature.
+
+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 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
+everybody knows Louis sincerely practised--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."
+
+In proceeding now to give, from the three 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 the last one left of the children of 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
+Bourdaloue, we succeeded in obtaining a printed translation which we
+could modify to suit our purpose.) Bossuet:--
+
+     It was then reserved for my lot to pay this funereal tribute to the
+     high and potent princess, Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans.
+     She whom I had seen so attentive while I was discharging a like
+     office for the queen her mother, was so soon after to be the
+     subject of a similar discourse, and my sad voice was predestined to
+     this melancholy service. O vanity! O nothingness! O mortals!
+     ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago, would she have believed
+     it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was
+     shedding so many tears in this place, that she was so soon to
+     assemble you here to deplore her own loss? O princess! the worthy
+     object of the admiration of two great kingdoms, was it not enough
+     that England should deplore your absence, without being yet further
+     compelled to deplore your death? France, who with so much joy
+     beheld you again, surrounded with a new brilliancy, had she not in
+     reserve other pomps and other triumphs for you, returned from that
+     famous voyage whence you had brought hither so much glory, and
+     hopes so fair? "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Nothing is left
+     for me to say but that; that is the only sentiment which, in
+     presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well-grounded and so
+     poignant, permits me to indulge. Nor have I explored the Holy
+     Scriptures in order to find therein some text which I might apply
+     to this princess; I have taken, without premeditation and without
+     choice, the first expression presented to me by the Preacher, with
+     whom vanity, although it has been so often named, is yet, to my
+     mind, not named often enough to suit the purpose that I have in
+     view. I wish, in a single misfortune, to lament all the calamities
+     of the human race, and in a single death to exhibit the death and
+     the nothingness of all human greatness. This text, which suits all
+     the circumstances and all the occurrences of our life, becomes, by
+     a special adaptedness, appropriate to my mournful theme; since
+     never were the vanities of the earth either so clearly disclosed or
+     so openly confounded. No, after what we have just seen, health is
+     but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and
+     pleasures are but a dangerous diversion. Every thing is vain within
+     us, except the sincere acknowledgment made before God of our
+     vanity, and the fixed judgment of the mind, leading us to despise
+     all that we are.
+
+     But did I speak the truth? Man, whom God made in his own image, is
+     he but a shadow? That which Jesus Christ came from heaven to earth
+     to seek, that which he deemed that he could, without degrading
+     himself, ransom with his own blood, is that a mere nothing? Let us
+     acknowledge our mistake; surely this sad spectacle of the vanity of
+     things human was leading us astray, and public hope, baffled
+     suddenly by the death of this princess, was urging us too far. It
+     must not be permitted to man to despise himself entirely, lest he,
+     supposing, in common with the wicked, that our life is but a game
+     in which chance reigns, take his way without rule and without
+     self-control, at the pleasure of his own blind wishes. It is for
+     this reason that the Preacher, after having commenced his inspired
+     production by the expressions which I have cited, after having
+     filled all its pages with contempt for things human, is pleased at
+     last to show man something more substantial, by saying to him,
+     "Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of
+     man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every
+     secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil." Thus
+     every thing is vain in man, if we regard what he gives to the
+     world; but, on the contrary, every thing is important, if we
+     consider what he owes to God. Once again, every thing is vain in
+     man, if we regard the course of his mortal life; but every thing is
+     of value, every thing is important, if we contemplate the goal
+     where it ends, and the account of it which he must render. Let us,
+     therefore, meditate to-day, in presence of this altar and of this
+     tomb, the first and the last utterance of the Preacher; of which
+     the one shows the nothingness of man, the other establishes his
+     greatness. Let this tomb convince us of our nothingness, provided
+     that this altar, where is daily offered for us a Victim of price so
+     great, teach us at the same time our dignity. The princess whom we
+     weep shall be a faithful witness, both of the one and of the other.
+     Let us survey that which a sudden death has taken away from her;
+     let us survey that which a holy death has bestowed upon her. Thus
+     shall we learn to despise that which she quitted without regret, in
+     order to attach all our regard to that which she embraced with so
+     much ardor,--when her soul, purified from all earthly sentiments,
+     full of the heaven on whose border she touched, saw the light
+     completely revealed. Such are the truths which I have to treat, and
+     which I have deemed worthy to be proposed to so great a prince, and
+     to the most illustrious assembly in the world.
+
+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
+orator against "the most illustrious assembly in the world."
+
+The ordinary sermons of Bossuet are less read, and they less deserve
+perhaps 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. 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 levelled 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 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:--
+
+     I have said more particularly that in the world in which you
+     live,--I mean the court,--the disease of a perverted conscience is
+     far more common, and far more difficult to be avoided; and I am
+     sure that in this you will agree with me. For it is at the court
+     that the passions bear sway, that desires are more ardent, that
+     self-interest is keener, and that, by infallible consequence,
+     self-blinding is more easy, and consciences, even the most
+     enlightened and the most upright, become gradually perverted. It is
+     at the court that the goddess of the world, I mean fortune,
+     exercises over the minds of men, and in consequence over their
+     consciences, a more absolute dominion. It is at the court that the
+     aim to maintain one's self, the impatience to raise one's self, the
+     frenzy to push one's self, the fear of displeasing, the desire of
+     making one's self agreeable, produce consciences, which anywhere
+     else would pass for monstrous, but which, finding themselves there
+     authorized by custom, seem to have acquired a right of possession
+     and of prescription. People, from living at court, and from no
+     other cause than having lived there, are filled with these errors.
+     Whatever uprightness of conscience they may have brought thither,
+     by breathing its air and by hearing its language, they are
+     habituated to iniquity, they come to have less horror of vice, and,
+     after having long blamed it, a thousand times condemned it, they at
+     last behold it with a more favorable eye, tolerate it, excuse it;
+     that is to say, without observing what is happening, they make over
+     their consciences, and, by insensible steps, from Christian, which
+     they were, by little and little become quite worldly, and not far
+     from pagan.
+
+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?--
+
+     You would say, and it really seems, that for the court, there are
+     other principles of religion than for the rest of the world, and
+     that the courtier has a right to make for himself a conscience
+     different in kind and in quality from that of other men; for such
+     is the prevailing idea of the matter,--an idea well sustained, or
+     rather unfortunately justified, by experience.... Nevertheless, my
+     dear hearers, St. Paul assures us, that there is but one God and
+     one faith; and woe to the man who dividing Him, this one God, shall
+     represent Him as at court less an enemy to human transgressions
+     than He is outside of the court; or, severing this one faith, shall
+     suppose it in the case of one class more indulgent than in the case
+     of another.
+
+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:--
+
+     Behold one of the abuses of our time. Means have been found to
+     consecrate slander, to change it into a virtue, and even into one
+     of the holiest virtues--that means is, zeal for the glory of
+     God.... We must humble those people, is the cry; and it is for the
+     good of the Church to tarnish their reputation and to diminish
+     their credit. That idea becomes, as it were, a principle; the
+     conscience is fashioned accordingly, and there is nothing that is
+     not permissible to a motive so noble. You fabricate, you
+     exaggerate, you give things a poisonous taint, you tell but half
+     the truth; you make your prejudices stand for indisputable facts;
+     you spread abroad a hundred falsehoods; you confound what is
+     individual with what is general; what one man has said that is bad,
+     you pretend that all have said; and what many have said that is
+     good, you pretend that nobody has said; and all that, once again,
+     for the glory of God. For such direction of the intention justifies
+     all that. Such direction of the intention will not suffice to
+     justify a prevarication, but it is more than sufficient to justify
+     calumny, provided only you are convinced that you are serving God
+     thereby.
+
+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. 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:--
+
+     There are some just, fervent, perfect souls, who, like children in
+     the house of the Heavenly Father, strive to please and possess him,
+     in order only to possess and to love him; and who, incessantly
+     animated by this unselfish motive, inviolably adhere to his divine
+     precepts, and lay it down as a rigorous and unalterable rule, to
+     obey the least intimation of his will. They serve him with an
+     affection entirely filial. But there are also dastards, worldlings,
+     sinners, terrestrial and sensual men, who are scarcely susceptible
+     of any other impressions than those of the judgments and vengeance
+     of God. Talk to them of his greatness, of his perfections, of his
+     benefits, or even of his rewards, and they will hardly listen to
+     you; and, if they are prevailed upon to pay some attention and
+     respect to your words, they will sound in their ears, but not reach
+     their hearts.... Therefore, to move them, to stir them up, to
+     awaken them from the lethargic sleep with which they are
+     overwhelmed, the thunder of divine wrath and the decree that
+     condemns them to eternal flames must be dinned into their ears:
+     "Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire" (Matt. XXV.).
+     Make them consider attentively, and represent to them with all the
+     force of grace, the consequences and horror of this word
+     "eternal."...
+
+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:--
+
+     ...Struck with horror at so doleful a destiny, I apply to this
+     eternity all the powers of my mind; I examine and scrutinize it in
+     all its parts; and I survey, as it were, its whole dimensions.
+     Moreover, to express it in more lively colors, and to represent it
+     in my mind more conformably to the senses and the human
+     understanding, I borrow comparisons from the Fathers of the Church,
+     and I make, if I may so speak, the same computations. I figure to
+     myself all the stars of the firmament; to this innumerable
+     multitude I add all the drops of water in the bosom of the ocean;
+     and if this be not enough, I reckon, or at least endeavor to
+     reckon, all the grains of sand on its shore. Then I interrogate
+     myself, I reason with myself, and I put to myself the question--If
+     I had for as many ages, and a thousand times as many, undergone
+     torments in that glowing fire which is kindled by the breath of the
+     Lord in his anger to take eternal vengeance, would eternity be at
+     an end? No; and why? Because it is eternity, and eternity is
+     endless. To number up the stars that shine in the heavens, to count
+     the drops of water that compose the sea, to tell the grains of sand
+     that lie upon the shore, is not absolutely impossible; but to
+     measure in eternity the number of days, of years, of ages, is what
+     cannot be compassed, because the days, the years, and the ages are
+     without number; or, to speak more properly, because in eternity
+     there are neither days, nor years, nor ages, but a single, endless,
+     infinite duration.
+
+     To this thought I devote my mind. I imagine I see and rove through
+     this same eternity, and discover no end, but find it to be always a
+     boundless tract. I imagine the wide prospect lies open on all
+     sides, and encompasseth me around; that if I rise up, or if I sink
+     down, or what way soever I turn my eyes, this eternity meets them;
+     and that after a thousand efforts to get forward, I have made no
+     progress, but find it still eternity. I imagine that after long
+     revolutions of time, I behold in the midst of this eternity a
+     damned soul, in the same state, in the same affliction, in the same
+     misery still; and putting myself mentally in the place of this
+     soul, I imagine that in this eternal punishment I feel myself
+     continually devoured by that fire which nothing extinguishes; that
+     I continually shed those floods of tears which nothing can dry up;
+     that I am continually gnawed by the worm of conscience, which
+     never dies; that I continually express my despair and anguish by
+     that gnashing of teeth, and those lamentable cries, which never can
+     move the compassion of God. This idea of myself, this
+     representation, amazes and terrifies me. My whole body shudders, I
+     tremble with fear, I am filled with horror, I have the same
+     feelings as the royal prophet, when he cried, "Pierce thou my flesh
+     with thy fear, for I am afraid of thy judgments."
+
+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 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 deep 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 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 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
+marvellous 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 dialectic, could have
+accomplished. But there immediately follows a culmination in power, such
+as was distinctly beyond the height of Bourdaloue. Genius must be
+superadded to talent if you would have the supreme, either in poetry or
+in eloquence. There was an extreme point in Massillon's discourse 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:--
+
+     I confine myself to you, my brethren, who are gathered here. I
+     speak no longer of the rest of mankind. I look at you as if you
+     were the only ones on the earth; and here is the thought that
+     seizes me, and that terrifies me. I make the supposition that this
+     is your last hour, and the end of the world; that the heavens are
+     about to open above your heads, that Jesus Christ is to appear in
+     his glory in the midst of this sanctuary, and that you are gathered
+     here only to wait for him, and as trembling criminals on whom is to
+     be pronounced either a sentence of grace or a decree of eternal
+     death. For, vainly do you flatter yourselves; you will die such in
+     character as you are to-day. All those impulses toward change with
+     which you amuse yourselves, you will amuse yourselves with them
+     down to the bed of death. Such is the experience of all
+     generations. The only thing new you will then find in yourselves
+     will be, perhaps, a reckoning a trifle larger than that which you
+     would to-day have to render; and according to what you would be if
+     you were this moment to be judged, you may almost determine what
+     will befall you at the termination of your life.
+
+     Now I ask you, and I ask it smitten with terror, not separating in
+     this matter my lot from yours, and putting myself into the same
+     frame of mind into which I desire you to come,--I ask you, then, If
+     Jesus Christ were to appear in this sanctuary, in the midst of this
+     assembly, the most illustrious in the world, to pass judgment on
+     us, to draw the dread line of distinction between the goats and the
+     sheep, do you believe that the majority of all of us who are here
+     would be set on his right hand? Do you believe that things would
+     even be equal? Nay, do you believe there would be found so many as
+     the ten righteous men whom anciently the Lord could not find in
+     five whole cities? I put the question to you, but you know not; I
+     know not myself. Thou only, O my God, knowest those that belong to
+     thee! But if we know not those who belong to him, at least we know
+     that sinners do not belong to him. Now, of what classes of persons
+     do the professing Christians in this assembly consist? Titles and
+     dignities must be counted for naught; of these you shall be
+     stripped before Jesus Christ. Who make up this assembly? Sinners,
+     in great number, who do not wish to be converted; in still greater
+     number, sinners who would like it, but who put off their
+     conversion; many others who would be converted, only to relapse
+     into sin; finally, a multitude who think they have no need of
+     conversion. You have thus made up the company of the reprobate. Cut
+     off these four classes of sinners from this sacred assembly, for
+     they will be cut off from it at the great day! Stand forth now, ye
+     righteous! where are you? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right
+     hand! True wheat of Jesus Christ, disengage yourselves from this
+     chaff, doomed to the fire! O God! where are thine elect? and what
+     remains there for thy portion?
+
+     Brethren, our perdition is well-nigh assured, and we do not give it
+     a thought. Even if in that dread separation which one day shall be
+     made, there were to be but a single sinner out of this assembly
+     found on the side of the reprobate, and if a voice from heaven
+     should come to give us assurance of the fact in this sanctuary,
+     without pointing out the person intended, who among us would not
+     fear that he might himself be the wretch? Who among us would not at
+     once recoil upon his conscience, to inquire whether his sins had
+     not deserved that penalty? Who among us would not, seized with
+     dismay, ask of Jesus Christ, as did once the apostles, "Lord, is it
+     I?"
+
+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
+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.
+
+
+
+
+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:--
+
+  Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye,
+  In every gesture dignity and love.
+
+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 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 has 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 lustre 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 the
+portrait in words, drawn by him from the life, of Fénelon's princely
+pupil, we transfer here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon
+says:--
+
+     In the first place, it must be said that Monseigneur the Duke of
+     Burgundy had by nature a most formidable disposition. He was
+     passionate to the extent of wishing to dash to pieces his clocks
+     when they struck the hour which called him to what he did not like,
+     and of flying into the utmost rage against the rain if it
+     interfered with what he wanted to do. Resistance threw him into
+     paroxysms of fury. I speak of what I have often witnessed in his
+     early youth. Moreover, an ungovernable impulse drove him into
+     whatever indulgence, bodily or mental, was forbidden him. His
+     sarcasm was so much the more cruel as it was witty and piquant, and
+     as it seized with precision upon every point open to ridicule. All
+     this was sharpened by a vivacity of body and of mind that proceeded
+     to the degree of impetuosity, and that during his early days never
+     permitted him to learn any thing except by doing two things at
+     once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a violent avidity, and
+     all this with a pride and a haughtiness impossible to describe;
+     dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men and things, and to
+     detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and to reason
+     himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers. But at
+     the same time, as soon as his passion was spent, reason resumed
+     her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes
+     with such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively,
+     alert, penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling
+     literally in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time
+     piety and grace made of him a different being, and transformed
+     faults so numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite.
+
+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 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 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 perfectly 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 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 it 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, till 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 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 his 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 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 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 to Louis XIV., and the state of France, in mind, 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:--
+
+     The king's authority over the subject is absolute, but the
+     authority of the law is absolute over him. His power to do good is
+     unlimited, but he is restrained from doing evil. The laws have put
+     the people into his hands, as the most valuable deposit, upon
+     condition that he shall treat them as his children. It is the
+     intent of the law that the wisdom and equity of one man shall be
+     the happiness of many, and not that the wretchedness and slavery of
+     many should gratify the pride and luxury of one. The king ought to
+     possess nothing more than the subject, except what is necessary to
+     alleviate the fatigue of his station, and impress upon the minds of
+     the people a reverence of that authority by which the laws are
+     executed. Moreover, the king should indulge himself less, as well
+     in ease as in pleasure, and should be less disposed to the pomp and
+     the pride of life than any other man. He ought not to be
+     distinguished from the rest of mankind by the greatness of his
+     wealth, or the vanity of his enjoyments, but by superior wisdom,
+     more heroic virtue, and more splendid glory. Abroad he ought to be
+     the defender of his country, by commanding her armies; and at home
+     the judge of his people, distributing justice among them, improving
+     their morals, and increasing their felicity. It is not for himself
+     that the gods have intrusted him with royalty. He is exalted above
+     individuals, only that he may be the servant of the people. To the
+     public he owes all his time, all his attention, and all his love;
+     he deserves dignity only in proportion as he gives up private
+     enjoyments for the public good.
+
+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 free-thinkers, 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 truly foreshadowed? The "Telemachus:"--
+
+     Remember, that the sovereign who is most absolute is always least
+     powerful; he seizes upon all, and his grasp is ruin. He is, indeed,
+     the sole proprietor of whatever his state contains; but, for that
+     reason, his state contains nothing of value: the fields are
+     uncultivated, and almost a desert; the towns lose some of their few
+     inhabitants every day; and trade every day declines. The king, who
+     must cease to be a king when he ceases to have subjects, and who is
+     great only in virtue of his people, is himself insensibly losing
+     his character and his power, as the number of his people, from
+     whom alone both are derived, insensibly diminishes. His dominions
+     are at length exhausted of money and of men: the loss of men is the
+     greatest and the most irreparable he can sustain. Absolute power
+     degrades every subject to a slave. The tyrant is flattered, even to
+     an appearance of adoration, and every one trembles at the glance of
+     his eye; but, at the least revolt, this enormous power perishes by
+     its own excess. It derived no strength from the love of the people;
+     it wearied and provoked all that it could reach, and rendered every
+     individual of the state impatient of its continuance. At the first
+     stroke of opposition, the idol is overturned, broken to pieces, and
+     trodden under foot. Contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust,
+     and every other passion of the soul, unite against so hateful a
+     despotism. The king who, in his vain prosperity, found no man bold
+     enough to tell him the truth, in his adversity finds no man kind
+     enough to excuse his faults, or to defend him against his enemies.
+
+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:--
+
+     Telemachus observed the countenance of these criminals to be pale
+     and ghastly, strongly expressive of the torment they suffered at
+     the heart. They looked inward with a self-abhorrence, now
+     inseparable from their existence. Their crimes themselves had
+     become their punishment, and it was not necessary that greater
+     should be inflicted. They haunted them like hideous spectres, and
+     continually started up before them in all their enormity. They
+     wished for a second death, that might separate them from these
+     ministers of vengeance, as the first had separated their spirits
+     from the body,--a death that might at once extinguish all
+     consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the depths of hell
+     to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in impenetrable
+     darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance, which,
+     though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth,
+     from which they fled, has overtaken them, an invincible and
+     unrelenting enemy. The ray which once might have illuminated them,
+     like the mild radiance of the day, now pierces them like
+     lightning,--a fierce and fatal fire, that, without injury to the
+     external parts, infixes a burning torment at the heart. By truth,
+     now an avenging flame, the very soul is melted like metal in a
+     furnace; it dissolves all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the
+     first elements of life, yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as
+     it were, divided against himself, without rest and without comfort;
+     animated by no vital principle, but the rage that kindles at his
+     own misconduct, and the dreadful madness that results from despair.
+
+If the "perpetual feast of nectared 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:"--
+
+     In this place resided all the good kings who had wisely governed
+     mankind from the beginning of time. They were separated from the
+     rest of the just; for, as wicked princes suffer more dreadful
+     punishment than other offenders in Tartarus, so good kings enjoy
+     infinitely greater felicity than other lovers of virtue, in the
+     fields of Elysium.
+
+     Telemachus advanced towards these kings, whom he found in groves of
+     delightful fragrance, reclining upon the downy turf, where the
+     flowers and herbage were perpetually renewed. A thousand rills
+     wandered through these scenes of delight, and refreshed the soil
+     with a gentle and unpolluted wave; the song of innumerable birds
+     echoed in the groves. Spring strewed the ground with her flowers,
+     while at the same time autumn loaded the trees with her fruit. In
+     this place the burning heat of the dog-star was never felt, and the
+     stormy north was forbidden to scatter over it the frosts of winter.
+     Neither War that thirsts for blood, nor Envy that bites with an
+     envenomed tooth, like the vipers that are wreathed around her arms,
+     and fostered in her bosom, nor Jealousy, nor Distrust, nor Fears,
+     nor vain Desires, invade these sacred domains of peace. The day is
+     here without end, and the shades of night are unknown. Here the
+     bodies of the blessed are clothed with a pure and lambent light,
+     as with a garment. This light does not resemble that vouchsafed to
+     mortals upon earth, which is rather darkness visible; it is rather
+     a celestial glory than a light--an emanation that penetrates the
+     grossest body with more subtilety than the rays of the sun
+     penetrate the purest crystal, which rather strengthens than dazzles
+     the sight, and diffuses through the soul a serenity which no
+     language can express. By this ethereal essence the blessed are
+     sustained in everlasting life; it pervades them; it is incorporated
+     with them, as food with the mortal body; they see it, they feel it,
+     they breathe it, and it produces in them an inexhaustible source of
+     serenity and joy. It is a fountain of delight, in which they are
+     absorbed as fishes are absorbed in the sea; they wish for nothing,
+     and, having nothing, they possess all things. This celestial light
+     satiates the hunger of the soul; every desire is precluded; and
+     they have a fulness of joy which sets them above all that mortals
+     seek with such restless ardor, to fill the vacuity that aches
+     forever in their breast. All the delightful objects that surround
+     them are disregarded; for their felicity springs up within, and,
+     being perfect, can derive nothing from without. So the gods,
+     satiated with nectar and ambrosia, disdain, as gross and impure,
+     all the dainties of the most luxurious table upon earth. From these
+     seats of tranquillity all evils fly far away; death, disease,
+     poverty, pain, regret, remorse, fear, even hope,--which is
+     sometimes not less painful than fear itself,--animosity, disgust,
+     and resentment can never enter there.
+
+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 moulding 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 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."
+
+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 is, in quantity as in quality,
+enough, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the
+perverse inclination of the balance.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+MONTESQUIEU.
+
+1689-1755.
+
+
+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 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:--
+
+     This body [the Roman Senate] erected itself into a tribunal for the
+     judgment of all peoples, and at the end of every war it decided
+     upon the punishments and the recompenses which it conceived each to
+     be entitled to. It took away parts of the lands of the conquered
+     states, in order to bestow them upon the allies of Rome, thus
+     accomplishing two objects at once,--attaching to Rome those kings
+     of whom she had little to fear and much to hope, and weakening
+     those of whom she had little to hope and all to fear.
+
+     Allies were employed to make war upon an enemy, but the destroyers
+     were at once destroyed in their turn. Philip was beaten with the
+     half of the Ætolians, who were immediately afterwards annihilated
+     for having joined themselves to Antiochus. Antiochus was beaten
+     with the help of the Rhodians, who, after having received signal
+     rewards, were humiliated forever, under the pretext that they had
+     requested that peace might be made with Perseus.
+
+     When they had many enemies on hand at the same time, they accorded
+     a truce to the weakest, which considered itself happy in obtaining
+     such a respite, counting it for much to be able to secure a
+     postponement of its ruin.
+
+     When they were engaged in a great war, the senate affected to
+     ignore all sorts of injuries, and silently awaited the arrival of
+     the proper time for punishment; when, if it saw that only some
+     individuals were culpable, it refused to punish them, choosing
+     rather to hold the entire nation as criminal, and thus reserve to
+     itself a useful vengeance.
+
+     As they inflicted inconceivable evils upon their enemies, there
+     were not many leagues formed against them; for those who were most
+     distant from danger were not willing to draw nearer to it. The
+     consequence of this was, that they were rarely attacked; whilst, on
+     the other hand, they constantly made war at such time, in such
+     manner, and against such peoples, as suited their convenience; and,
+     among the many nations which they assailed, there were very few
+     that would not have submitted to every species of injury at their
+     hands if they had been willing to leave them in peace.
+
+     It being their custom to speak always as masters, the ambassadors
+     whom they sent to nations which had not yet felt their power were
+     certain to be insulted; and this was an infallible pretext for a
+     new war.
+
+     As they never made peace in good faith, and as, with the design of
+     universal conquest, their treaties were, properly speaking, only
+     suspensions of war, they always put conditions in them which began
+     the ruin of the states which accepted them. They either provided
+     that the garrisons of strong places should be withdrawn, or that
+     the number of troops should be limited, or that the horses or the
+     elephants of the vanquished party should be delivered over to
+     themselves; and if the defeated people was powerful on sea, they
+     compelled it to burn its vessels, and sometimes to remove, and
+     occupy a place of habitation farther inland.
+
+     After having destroyed the armies of a prince, they ruined his
+     finances by excessive taxes, or by the imposition of a tribute
+     under pretext of requiring him to pay the expenses of the war,--a
+     new species of tyranny, which forced the vanquished sovereign to
+     oppress his own subjects, and thus to alienate their affection.
+
+     When they granted peace to a king, they took some of his brothers
+     or children as hostages. This gave them the means of troubling his
+     kingdom at their pleasure. If they held the nearest heir, they
+     intimidated the possessor; if only a prince of a remote degree,
+     they used him to stir up revolts against the legitimate ruler.
+
+     Whenever any people or prince withdrew their obedience from their
+     sovereign, they immediately accorded to them the title of allies of
+     the Roman people, and thus rendered them sacred and inviolable; so
+     that there was no king, however great he might be, who could for a
+     moment be sure of his subjects, or even of his family.
+
+     Although the title of Roman ally was a species of servitude, it
+     was, nevertheless, very much sought after; for the possession of
+     this title made it certain that the recipients of it would receive
+     injuries from the Romans only, and there was ground for the hope
+     that this class of injuries would be rendered less grievous than
+     they would otherwise be.
+
+     Thus, there was no service which nations and kings were not ready
+     to perform, nor any humiliation which they did not submit to, in
+     order to obtain this distinction....
+
+     These customs were not merely some particular facts which happened
+     at hazard. They were permanently established principles, as may be
+     readily seen; for the maxims which the Romans acted upon against
+     the greatest powers were precisely those which they had employed in
+     the beginning of their career against the small cities which
+     surrounded them....
+
+     But nothing served Rome more effectually than the respect which she
+     inspired among all nations. She immediately reduced kings to
+     silence, and rendered them as dumb. With the latter, it was not a
+     mere question of the degree of their power: their very persons were
+     attacked. To risk a war with Rome was to expose themselves to
+     captivity, to death, and to the infamy of a triumph. Thus it was
+     that kings, who lived in pomp and luxury, did not dare to look with
+     steady eyes upon the Roman people, and, losing courage, they hoped,
+     by their patience and their obsequiousness, to obtain some
+     postponement of the calamities with which they were menaced.
+
+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. It acquired great contemporary
+fame, both at home and abroad. It was promptly translated into English,
+the translator earning the merited compliment of the author's own
+hearty approval of his work. Horace Walpole, who was something of a
+Gallomaniac, makes repeated allusion to Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws,"
+in letters of his written at about the time of the appearance of the
+book. But Walpole's admiring allusions themselves contain evidence that
+admiration equal to his own of the work that he praised, was by no means
+universal in England.
+
+The general aspect of the book is that of a composition meant to be
+luminously analyzed and arranged. Divisions and titles abound. There are
+thirty-one "books"; and each book contains, on the average, perhaps
+about the same number of chapters. The library edition, in English,
+consists of two volumes, comprising together some eight hundred open
+pages, in good-sized type. The books and chapters are therefore not
+formidably long. The look of the work is as if it were readable; and its
+character, on the whole, corresponds. It would hardly be French, if such
+were not the case. Except that Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws" is, as we
+have indicated, a highly organized, even an over-organized, book, which,
+by emphasis, Montaigne's "Essays" is not, these two works may be said,
+in their contents, somewhat to resemble each other. Montesquieu is
+nearly as discursive as Montaigne. He wishes to be philosophical, but he
+is not above supplying his reader with interesting historical instances.
+
+We shall not do better, in giving our readers a comprehensive idea of
+Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," than to begin by showing them the titles
+of a number of the books:--
+
+     Book I. Of Laws in General. Book II. Of Laws Directly Derived from
+     the Nature of Government. Book III. Of the Principles of the Three
+     Kinds of Government. Book IV. That the Laws of Education ought to
+     be Relative to the Principles of Government. Book V. That the Laws
+     given by the Legislator ought to be Relative to the Principle of
+     Government. Book VI. Consequences of the Principles of Different
+     Governments with Respect to the Simplicity of Civil and Criminal
+     Laws, the Form of Judgments, and the Inflicting of Punishments.
+     Book VII. Consequences of the Different Principles of the Three
+     Governments with Respect to Sumptuary Laws, Luxury, and the
+     Condition of Women. Book VIII. Of the Corruption of the Principles
+     of the Three Governments. Book XIV. Of Laws as Relative to the
+     Nature of the Climate.
+
+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 three 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 monarchy, _honor_, so
+_fear_ is necessary in a despotic government." The 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.:--
+
+     AN EXCELLENT CUSTOM OF THE SAMNITES.
+
+     The Samnites had a custom which in so small a republic, and
+     especially in their situation, must have been productive of
+     admirable effects. The young people were all convened in one place,
+     and their conduct was examined. He that was declared the best of
+     the whole assembly, had leave given him to take which girl he
+     pleased for his wife; the second best chose after him, and so on.
+     Admirable institution! The only recommendation that young men could
+     have on this occasion, was their virtue, and the service done their
+     country. He who had the greatest share of these endowments, chose
+     which girl he liked out of the whole nation. Love, beauty,
+     chastity, virtue, birth, and even wealth itself, were all, in some
+     measure, the dowry of virtue. A nobler and grander recompense, less
+     chargeable to a petty state, and more capable of influencing both
+     sexes, could scarce be imagined.
+
+     The Samnites were descended from the Lacedæmonians; and Plato,
+     whose institutes are only an improvement of those of Lycurgus,
+     enacted nearly the same law.
+
+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 Samnite 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 nearly the whole of the philosophy underlying M. Taine's
+essays on the history of literature:--
+
+     OF THE DIFFERENCE OF MEN IN DIFFERENT CLIMATES.
+
+     A cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibres of
+     the body; this increases their elasticity, and favors the return of
+     the blood from the extreme parts to the heart. It contracts those
+     very fibres; consequently it increases also their force. On the
+     contrary, a warm air relaxes and lengthens the extremes of the
+     fibres; of course it diminishes their force and elasticity.
+
+     People are therefore more vigorous in cold climates. Here the
+     action of the heart and the reaction of the extremities of the
+     fibres are better performed, the temperature of the humors is
+     greater, the blood moves freer towards the heart, and reciprocally
+     the heart has more power. This superiority of strength must produce
+     various effects; for instance, a greater boldness,--that is, more
+     courage; a greater sense of superiority,--that is, less desire of
+     revenge; a greater opinion of security,--that is, more frankness,
+     less suspicion, policy and cunning. In short, this must be
+     productive of very different tempers. Put a man into a close, warm
+     place, and, for the reasons above given, he will feel a great
+     faintness. If under this circumstance you propose a bold enterprise
+     to him, I believe you will find him very little disposed towards
+     it; his present weakness will throw him into a despondency; he will
+     be afraid of every thing, being in a state of total incapacity. The
+     inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the
+     people in cold countries are, like young men, brave.
+
+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:"--
+
+     When the Christian religion, two centuries ago, became unhappily
+     divided into Catholic and Protestant, the people of the north
+     embraced the Protestant, and those south adhered still to the
+     Catholic.
+
+     The reason is plain: the people of the north have, and will forever
+     have, a spirit of liberty and independence, which the people of the
+     south have not; and therefore, a religion which has no visible
+     head, is more agreeable to the independency of the climate, than
+     that which has one.
+
+Climate is a "great matter" with Montesquieu. In treating of the subject
+of a state changing its religion, he says:--
+
+     The ancient religion is connected with the constitution of the
+     kingdom, and the new one is not; the former _agrees with the
+     climate_, and very often the new one is opposite to it.
+
+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 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.
+
+The latter part of "The Spirit of Laws" contains discussions exhibiting
+no little research on the part of the author. There is, for one example,
+a discussion of the course of commerce in different ages of the world,
+and of the influences that have wrought from time to time to bring about
+the changes occurring. For another example, there is a discussion of the
+feudal system.
+
+Montesquieu was an admirer of the English constitution. His work,
+perhaps, contains no extended chapters more likely to instruct the
+general reader and to furnish a good idea of the writer's genius and
+method, than the two chapters--chapter six, Book XI., and chapter
+twenty-seven, Book XIX.--in which the English nation and the English
+form of government are sympathetically described. We simply indicate,
+for we have no room to exhibit, these chapters. Voltaire, too, expressed
+Montesquieu's admiration of English liberty and English law.
+
+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 contrast of these two different sets of expressions from his
+pen. In earlier manhood he says:--
+
+     Study has been for me the sovereign remedy for all the
+     dissatisfactions of life, having never had a sense of chagrin that
+     an hour's reading would not dissipate. I wake in the morning with a
+     secret joy to behold the light. I behold the light with a kind of
+     ravishment, and all the rest of the day I am happy.
+
+Within a few years of his death, the brave, cheerful tone had declined
+to this:--
+
+     I am broken down with fatigue; I must repose for the rest of my
+     life.
+
+Then further to this:--
+
+     I have expected to kill myself for the last three months, finishing
+     an addition to my work on the origin and changes of the French
+     civil law. It will take only three hours to read it; but, I assure
+     you, it has been such a labor to me, that my hair has turned white
+     under it all.
+
+Finally it touches nadir:--
+
+     It [his work] has almost cost me my life; I must rest; I can work
+     no more.
+
+     My candles are all burned out; I have set off all my cartridges.
+
+When Montesquieu died, only Diderot, among Parisian men of letters,
+followed him to his tomb.
+
+
+
+
+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 single great
+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 works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven
+volumes (equivalent, probably, in the aggregate, to three 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 to extinguish 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. 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 Shakspeare'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 either the merit 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 coming shortly and easily at a
+knowledge of Voltaire.
+
+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 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:--
+
+     "I have heard great talk of the Senator Pococuranté, who lives in
+     that fine house at the Brenta, where they say he entertains
+     foreigners in the most polite manner. They pretend this man is a
+     perfect stranger to uneasiness."--"I should be glad to see so
+     extraordinary a being," said Martin. Candide thereupon sent a
+     messenger to Signor Pococuranté, desiring permission to wait on him
+     the next day.
+
+     Candide and his friend Martin went into a gondola on the Brenta,
+     and arrived at the palace of the noble Pococuranté: the gardens
+     were laid out in elegant taste, and adorned with fine marble
+     statues; his palace was built after the most approved rules of
+     architecture. The master of the house, who was a man of sixty, and
+     very rich, received our two travellers with great politeness, but
+     without much ceremony, which somewhat disconcerted Candide, but was
+     not at all displeasing to Martin.
+
+     As soon as they were seated, two very pretty girls, neatly dressed,
+     brought in chocolate, which was extremely well frothed. Candide
+     could not help making encomiums upon their beauty and graceful
+     carriage. "The creatures are well enough," said the senator. "I
+     make them my companions, for I am heartily tired of the ladies of
+     the town, their coquetry, their jealousy, their quarrels, their
+     humors, their meannesses, their pride, and their folly. I am weary
+     of making sonnets, or of paying for sonnets to be made, on them;
+     but, after all, these two girls begin to grow very indifferent to
+     me."
+
+     After having refreshed himself, Candide walked into a large
+     gallery, where he was struck with the sight of a fine collection of
+     paintings. "Pray," said Candide, "by what master are the two first
+     of these?"--"They are Raphael's," answered the senator. "I gave a
+     great deal of money for them seven years ago, purely out of
+     curiosity, as they were said to be the finest pieces in Italy: but
+     I cannot say they please me; the coloring is dark and heavy; the
+     figures do not swell nor come out enough; and the drapery is very
+     bad. In short, notwithstanding the encomiums lavished upon them,
+     they are not, in my opinion, a true representation of nature. I
+     approve of no paintings but where I think I behold Nature herself;
+     and there are very few, if any, of that kind to be met with. I have
+     what is called a fine collection, but I take no manner of delight
+     in them."
+
+     While dinner was getting ready, Pococuranté ordered a concert.
+     Candide praised the music to the skies. "This noise," said the
+     noble Venetian, "may amuse one for a little time; but if it was to
+     last above half an hour, it would grow tiresome to everybody,
+     though perhaps no one would care to own it. Music is become the art
+     of executing what is difficult; now, whatever is difficult cannot
+     be long pleasing.
+
+     "I believe I might take more pleasure in an opera, if they had not
+     made such a monster of that species of dramatic entertainment as
+     perfectly shocks me; and I am amazed how people can bear to see
+     wretched tragedies set to music, where the scenes are contrived for
+     no other purpose than to lug in, as it were by the ears, three or
+     four ridiculous songs, to give a favorite actress an opportunity of
+     exhibiting her pipe. Let who will or can die away in raptures at
+     the trills of a eunuch quavering the majestic part of Cæsar or
+     Cato, and strutting in a foolish manner upon the stage. For my
+     part, I have long ago renounced these paltry entertainments, which
+     constitute the glory of modern Italy, and are so dearly purchased
+     by crowned heads." Candide opposed these sentiments, but he did it
+     in a discreet manner. As for Martin, he was entirely of the old
+     senator's opinion.
+
+     Dinner being served up, they sat down to table, and after a very
+     hearty repast, returned to the library. Candide, observing Homer
+     richly bound, commended the noble Venetian's taste. "This," said
+     he, "is a book that was once the delight of the great Pangloss, the
+     best philosopher in Germany."--"Homer is no favorite of mine,"
+     answered Pococuranté very coolly. "I was made to believe once that
+     I took a pleasure in reading him; but his continual repetitions of
+     battles must have all such a resemblance with each other; his gods
+     that are forever in a hurry and bustle, without ever doing any
+     thing; his Helen, that is the cause of the war, and yet hardly acts
+     in the whole performance; his Troy, that holds out so long without
+     being taken; in short, all these things together make the poem very
+     insipid to me. I have asked some learned men whether they are not
+     in reality as much tired as myself with reading this poet. Those
+     who spoke ingenuously assured me that he had made them fall asleep,
+     and yet that they could not well avoid giving him a place in their
+     libraries; but that it was merely as they would do an antique, or
+     those rusty medals which are kept only for curiosity, and are of no
+     manner of use in commerce."
+
+     "But your excellency does not surely form the same opinion of
+     Virgil?" said Candide. "Why, I grant," replied Pococuranté, "that
+     the second, third, fourth, and sixth books of his 'Æneid' are
+     excellent; but as for his pious Æneas, his strong Cloanthus, his
+     friendly Achates, his boy Ascanius, his silly King Latinus, his
+     ill-bred Amata, his insipid Lavinia, and some other characters much
+     in the same strain, I think there cannot in nature be any thing
+     more flat and disagreeable. I must confess I prefer Tasso far
+     beyond him; nay, even that sleepy tale-teller Ariosto."
+
+     "May I take the liberty to ask if you do not receive great pleasure
+     from reading Horace?" said Candide. "There are maxims in this
+     writer," replied Pococuranté, "from whence a man of the world may
+     reap some benefit; and the short measure of the verse makes them
+     more easily to be retained in the memory. But I see nothing
+     extraordinary in his journey to Brundusium, and his account of his
+     bad dinner; nor in his dirty, low quarrel between one Rupilius,
+     whose words, as he expresses it, were full of poisonous filth; and
+     another, whose language was dipped in vinegar. His indelicate
+     verses against old women and witches have frequently given me great
+     offence; nor can I discover the great merit of his telling his
+     friend Mæcenas, that, if he will but rank him in the class of lyric
+     poets, his lofty head shall touch the stars. Ignorant readers are
+     apt to advance every thing by the lump in a writer of reputation.
+     For my part, I read only to please myself. I like nothing but what
+     makes for my purpose." Candide, who had been brought up with a
+     notion of never making use of his own judgment, was astonished at
+     what he heard; but Martin found there was a good deal of reason in
+     the senator's remarks.
+
+     "Oh, here is a Tully!" said Candide; "this great man, I fancy, you
+     are never tired of reading."--"Indeed, I never read him at all,"
+     replied Pococuranté. "What a deuce is it to me whether he pleads
+     for Rabirius or Cluentius? I try causes enough myself. I had once
+     some liking to his philosophical works; but when I found he doubted
+     of every thing, I thought I knew as much as himself, and had no
+     need of a guide to learn ignorance."
+
+     "Ha!" cried Martin, "here are fourscore volumes of the 'Memoirs of
+     the Academy of Sciences;' perhaps there may be something curious
+     and valuable in this collection."--"Yes," answered Pococuranté; "so
+     there might, if any one of these compilers of this rubbish had only
+     invented the art of pin-making. But all these volumes are filled
+     with mere chimerical systems, without one single article conducive
+     to real utility."
+
+     "I see a prodigious number of plays," said Candide, "in Italian,
+     Spanish, and French."--"Yes," replied the Venetian; "there are, I
+     think, three thousand, and not three dozen of them good for any
+     thing. As to those huge volumes of divinity, and those enormous
+     collections of sermons, they are not all together worth one single
+     page of Seneca; and I fancy you will readily believe that neither
+     myself nor any one else ever looks into them."
+
+     Martin, perceiving some shelves filled with English books, said to
+     the senator, "I fancy that a republican must be highly delighted
+     with those books, which are most of them written with a noble
+     spirit of freedom."--"It is noble to write as we think," said
+     Pococuranté; "it is the privilege of humanity. Throughout Italy we
+     write only what we do not think; and the present inhabitants of the
+     country of the Cæsars and Antoninuses dare not acquire a single
+     idea without the permission of a father Dominican. I should be
+     enamoured of the spirit of the English nation did it not utterly
+     frustrate the good effects it would produce by passion and the
+     spirit of party."
+
+     Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think
+     that author a great man. "Who!" said Pococuranté sharply. "That
+     barbarian, who writes a tedious commentary, in ten books of
+     rambling verse, on the first chapter of Genesis! That slovenly
+     imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation by making the
+     Messiah take a pair of compasses from heaven's armory to plan the
+     world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole
+     universe by his fiat! Can I think you have any esteem for a writer
+     who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer,
+     sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him
+     say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses
+     him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation
+     of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils
+     and angels cannonading each other in heaven! Neither I, nor any
+     other Italian, can possibly take pleasure in such melancholy
+     reveries. But the marriage of Sin and Death, and snakes issuing
+     from the womb of the former, are enough to make any person sick
+     that is not lost to all sense of delicacy. This obscene, whimsical,
+     and disagreeable poem met with the neglect that it deserved at its
+     first publication; and I only treat the author now as he was
+     treated in his own country by his contemporaries."
+
+     Candide was sensibly grieved at this speech, as he had a great
+     respect for Homer, and was very fond of Milton. "Alas!" said he
+     softly to Martin, "I am afraid this man holds our German poets in
+     great contempt."--"There would be no such great harm in that," said
+     Martin.--"Oh, what a surprising man!" said Candide to himself.
+     "What a prodigious genius is this Pococuranté! Nothing can please
+     him."
+
+     After finishing their survey of the library they went down into the
+     garden, when Candide commended the several beauties that offered
+     themselves to his view. "I know nothing upon earth laid out in such
+     bad taste," said Pococuranté; "every thing about it is childish and
+     trifling; but I shall have another laid out to-morrow upon a nobler
+     plan."
+
+     As soon as our two travellers had taken leave of his excellency,
+     "Well," said Candide to Martin, "I hope you will own that this man
+     is the happiest of all mortals, for he is above every thing he
+     possesses."--"But do you not see," answered Martin, "that he
+     likewise dislikes every thing he possesses? It was an observation
+     of Plato long since, that those are not the best stomachs that
+     reject, without distinction, all sorts of aliments."--"True," said
+     Candide; "but still, there must certainly be a pleasure in
+     criticising every thing, and in perceiving faults where others
+     think they see beauties."--"That is," replied Martin, "there is a
+     pleasure in having no pleasure."--"Well, well," said Candide, "I
+     find that I shall be the only happy man at last, when I am blessed
+     with the sight of my dear Cunegund."--"It is good to hope," said
+     Martin.
+
+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 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.
+
+It was a happy editorial thought of Mr. Henry Morley, in his cheap
+library, now issuing, of standard books for the people, to bind up
+Johnson's "Rasselas" in one volume with Voltaire's "Candide." The two
+stories, nearly contemporaneous in their production, offer a stimulating
+contrast in treatment, at the hands of two sharply contrasted writers,
+of much the same subject,--the unsatisfactoriness of the world.
+
+Mr. John Morley, a very different writer and a very different man from
+his namesake just mentioned, has an elaborate monograph on Voltaire in a
+volume perhaps twice as large as the present. This work claims the
+attention of all students desirous of exhaustive acquaintance with its
+subject. Mr. John Morley 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. It is only in his
+two volumes on "Diderot and the Encyclopædists," that Mr. Morley finds
+himself able to write without reserve in full moral accord with the men
+whom he describes. Of course, in all these books the biographer and
+critic feels, as Englishman, obliged to concede much to his English
+audience, in the way of condemning impurities in his authors. The
+concession thus made is made with great adroitness of manner, the
+writer's aim evidently being to imply that his infidels and atheists, if
+they are somewhat vicious in taste, had the countenance of good
+Christian example or parallel for all the lapses they show. Mr. Morley
+wishes to be fair, but his atheist zeal overcomes him. This is
+especially evident in his work on "Diderot and the Encyclopædists,"
+where his propagandist desire to clear the character of his hero bribes
+him once and again to unconscious false dealing. In his "Voltaire," and
+in his "Rousseau," Mr. Morley is so lofty in tone, expressing himself
+against the moral obliquities of the men with whom he is dealing, that
+often you feel the ethic atmosphere of the books to be pure and bracing,
+almost beyond the standard of biblical and Christian. But in his
+"Diderot and the Encyclopædists," such fine severity is conspicuously
+absent. Mr. Morley is so deeply convinced that atheism is what we all
+most need just now, that when he has--not halting mere infidels, like
+Voltaire and Rousseau--but good thorough-going atheists, like Diderot
+and his fellows, to exhibit, he can hardly bring himself to injure their
+exemplary influence with his readers, by allowing to exist any damaging
+flaws in their character.
+
+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, 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 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
+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 theatre. 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."
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+1712-1778.
+
+
+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.
+
+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:--
+
+     I purpose an undertaking that never had an example, and whose
+     execution never will have an imitator. I would exhibit to my
+     fellows a man in all the truth of nature, and that man--myself.
+
+     Myself alone. I know my own heart, and I am acquainted with men. I
+     am made unlike any one I have ever seen,--I dare believe unlike any
+     living being. If no better than, I am at least different from,
+     others. Whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mould
+     wherein I was cast, can be determined only after having read me.
+
+     Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I will come, with this
+     book in my hand, and present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I
+     will boldly proclaim: Thus have I acted, thus have I thought, such
+     was I. With equal frankness have I disclosed the good and the evil.
+     I have omitted nothing bad, added nothing good; and if I have
+     happened to make use of some unimportant ornament, it has, in every
+     case, been simply for the purpose of filling up a void occasioned
+     by my lack of memory. I may have taken for granted as true what I
+     knew to be possible, never what I knew to be false. Such as I was,
+     I have exhibited myself,--despicable and vile, when so; virtuous,
+     generous, sublime, when so. I have unveiled my interior being, such
+     as Thou, Eternal Existence, hast beheld it. Assemble around me the
+     numberless throng of my fellow-mortals; let them listen to my
+     confessions, let them blush at my depravities, let them shrink
+     appalled at my miseries. Let each of them, in his turn, with equal
+     sincerity, lay bare his heart at the foot of thy throne, and then
+     let a single one tell thee, if he dare, _I was better than that
+     man_.
+
+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 pretence 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:--
+
+     I was born at Geneva, in 1712, of Isaac Rousseau and Susannah
+     Bernard, citizens.... I came into the world weak and sickly. I cost
+     my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes.
+
+     I never learned how my father supported his loss, but I know that
+     he remained ever after inconsolable.... When he used to say to me,
+     "Jean Jacques, let us speak of your mother," my usual reply was,
+     "Well, father, we'll cry, then," a reply which would instantly
+     bring the tears to his eyes. "Ah!" he would exclaim with agitation,
+     "give me her back, console me for her loss, fill up the void she
+     has left in my soul. Could I love thee thus wert thou but _my_
+     son?" Forty years after having lost her he expired in the arms of a
+     second wife, but with the name of the first on his lips, and her
+     image engraven on his heart.
+
+     Such were the authors of my being. Of all the gifts Heaven had
+     allotted them, a feeling heart was the only one I had inherited.
+     While, however, this had been the source of their happiness, it
+     became the spring of all my misfortunes.
+
+"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; but heart's blood was the ink in
+which almost every word of Rousseau's was written. This was the spring
+of his marvellous power. Rousseau:--
+
+     My mother had left a number of romances. These father and I betook
+     us to reading during the evenings. At first the sole object was, by
+     means of entertaining books, to improve me in reading; but, ere
+     long, the charm became so potent, that we read turn about without
+     intermission, and passed whole nights in this employment. Never
+     could we break up till the end of the volume. At times my father,
+     hearing the swallows of a morning, would exclaim, quite ashamed of
+     himself, "Come, let's to bed; I'm more of a child than you are!"
+
+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:--
+
+     I soon acquired, by this dangerous course, not only an extreme
+     facility in reading and understanding, but, for my age, a quite
+     unprecedented acquaintance with the passions. I had not the
+     slightest conception of things themselves, at a time when the whole
+     round of sentiments was already perfectly familiar to me. I had
+     apprehended nothing--I had felt all.
+
+Some hint now of other books read by the boy:--
+
+     With the summer of 1719 the romance-reading terminated.... "The
+     History of the Church and Empire" by Lesueur, Bossuet's
+     "Dissertation on Universal History," Plutarch's "Lives," Nani's
+     "History of Venice," Ovid's "Metamorphoses," "La Bruyère,"
+     Fontenelle's "Worlds," his "Dialogues of the Dead," and a few
+     volumes of Molière, were transported into my father's shop; and I
+     read them to him every day during his work. For this employment I
+     acquired a rare, and, for my age, perhaps unprecedented, taste.
+     Plutarch especially became my favorite reading. The pleasure which
+     I found in incessantly reperusing him, cured me in some measure of
+     the romance madness; and I soon came to prefer Agesilaus, Brutus,
+     and Aristides, to Orondates, Artemenes, and Juba. From these
+     interesting studies, joined to the conversations to which they gave
+     rise with my father, resulted that free, republican spirit, that
+     haughty and untamable character, fretful of restraint or
+     subjection, which has tormented me my life long, and that in
+     situations the least suitable for giving it play. Incessantly
+     occupied with Rome and Athens, living, so to speak, with their
+     great men, born myself the citizen of a republic [Geneva], the son
+     of a father with whom patriotism was the ruling passion, I caught
+     the flame from him--I imagined myself a Greek or a Roman, and
+     became the personage whose life I was reading.
+
+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 thus in part was 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:--
+
+     I had a brother, my elder by seven years.... He fell into the ways
+     of debauchery, even before he was old enough to be really a
+     libertine.... I remember once when my father was chastising him
+     severely and in anger, that I impetuously threw myself between
+     them, clasping him tightly. I thus covered him with my body,
+     receiving the blows that were aimed at him; and I held out so
+     persistently in this position, that whether softened by my cries
+     and tears, or fearing that I should get the worst of it, my father
+     was forced to forgive him. In the end my brother turned out so bad
+     that he ran away and disappeared altogether.
+
+It is pathetic--Rousseau's attempted contrast following, between the
+paternal neglect of his older brother and the paternal indulgence of
+himself:--
+
+     If this poor lad was carelessly brought up, it was quite otherwise
+     with his brother.... My desires were so little excited, and so
+     little crossed, that it never came into my head to have any. I can
+     solemnly aver, that, till the time when I was bound to a master, I
+     never knew what it was to have a whim.
+
+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!
+The "Confessions" truly say:--
+
+     Thus commenced the formation or the manifestation in me of that
+     heart at once so haughty and so tender, of that effeminate and yet
+     unconquerable character which, ever vacillating between courage and
+     weakness, between virtue and yielding to temptation, has all along
+     set me in contradiction to myself, and has resulted in my failing
+     both of abstinence and enjoyment, both of prudence and pleasure.
+
+The half-orphan becomes orphan entire, not by the death, but by the
+withdrawing, of the father. That father, having been accused of a
+misdemeanor, "preferred," Rousseau somewhat vaguely says, "to quit
+Geneva for the remainder of his life, rather than give up a point
+wherein honor and liberty appeared to him compromised." Jean Jacques was
+sent to board with a parson, who taught him Latin, and, along with
+Latin, supplied, Rousseau scornfully says, "all the accompanying mass of
+paltry rubbish styled education." He adds:--
+
+     The country was so entirely new to me, that I could never grow
+     weary in my enjoyment of it; and I acquired so strong a liking for
+     it, that it has never become extinguished.
+
+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:--
+
+     I learned to covet in silence, to dissemble, to dissimulate, to
+     lie, and at last to steal,--a propensity for which I had never
+     hitherto had the slightest inclination, and of which I have never
+     since been able quite to cure myself....
+
+     My first theft was the result of complaisance, but it opened the
+     door to others which had not so laudable a motive.
+
+     My master had a journeyman named M. Verrat.... [He] took it into
+     his head to rob his mother of some of her early asparagus and sell
+     it, converting the proceeds into some extra good breakfasts. As he
+     did not wish to expose himself, and not being very nimble, he
+     selected me for this expedition.... Long did I stickle, but he
+     persisted. I never could resist kindness, so I consented. I went
+     every morning to the garden, gathered the best of the asparagus,
+     and took it to "the Molard," where some good creature, perceiving
+     that I had just been stealing it, would insinuate that little fact,
+     so as to get it the cheaper. In my terror I took whatever she chose
+     to give me, and carried it to M. Verrat.
+
+     This little domestic arrangement continued for several days before
+     it came into my head to rob the robber, and tithe M. Verrat for the
+     proceeds of the asparagus.... I thus learned that to steal was,
+     after all, not so very terrible a thing as I had conceived; and ere
+     long I turned this discovery to so good an account, that nothing I
+     had an inclination for could safely be left within my reach....
+
+     And now, before giving myself over to the fatality of my destiny,
+     let me, for a moment, contemplate what would naturally have been my
+     lot had I fallen into the hands of a better master. Nothing was
+     more agreeable to my tastes, nor better calculated to render me
+     happy, than the calm and obscure condition of a good artisan, more
+     especially in certain lines, such as that of an engraver at
+     Geneva.... In my native country, in the bosom of my religion, of my
+     family, and my friends, I should have led a life gentle and
+     uncheckered as became my character, in the uniformity of a pleasing
+     occupation and among connections dear to my heart. I should have
+     been a good Christian, a good citizen, a good father, a good
+     friend, a good artisan, and a good man in every respect. I should
+     have loved my station; it may be I should have been an honor to it:
+     and after having passed an obscure and simple, though even and
+     happy, life, I should peacefully have departed in the bosom of my
+     kindred. Soon, it may be, forgotten, I should at least have been
+     regretted as long as the remembrance of me survived.
+
+     Instead of this... what a picture am I about to draw!
+
+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. (Apprentice Jean Jacques has left his
+master, and entered on a vagabond life.) This lady is a character very
+difficult for us Protestant Americans in our contrasted society to
+conceive as real or as possible. She kept a house of, what shall we call
+it? detention, for souls doubtfully in the way of being reclaimed from
+Protestant error into the bosom of the Roman-Catholic Church. She was
+herself a Roman-Catholic convert from Protestantism. She 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 loathness
+of self-respect to prevent his detailing the absurd adventures with
+which he diverted himself on the way. For example:--
+
+     Not a country-seat could I see, either to the right or left,
+     without going after the adventure which I was certain awaited me.
+     I could not muster courage to enter the mansion, nor even to knock,
+     for I was excessively timid; but I sang beneath the most inviting
+     window, very much astonished to find, after wasting my breath, that
+     neither lady nor miss made her appearance, attracted by the beauty
+     of my voice, or the spice of my songs,--seeing that I knew some
+     capital ones that my comrades had taught me, and which I sang in
+     the most admirable manner.
+
+Rousseau describes the emotions he experienced in his first meeting with
+Madame de Warens:--
+
+     I had pictured to myself a grim old devotee--M. de Pontverre's
+     "worthy lady" could, in my opinion, be none other. But lo, a
+     countenance beaming with charms, beautiful, mild blue eyes, a
+     complexion of dazzling fairness, the outline of an enchanting neck!
+     Nothing escaped the rapid glance of the young proselyte; for that
+     instant I was hers, sure that a religion preached by such
+     missionaries could not fail to lead to paradise!
+
+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:--
+
+     My father was not only an honorable man, but a person of the most
+     reliable probity, and endowed with one of those powerful minds that
+     perform deeds of loftiest heroism. I may add, he was a good father,
+     especially to me. Tenderly did he love me, but he loved his
+     pleasures also; and, since our living apart, other ties had, in a
+     measure, weakened his paternal affection. He had married again, at
+     Nyon; and though his wife was no longer of an age to present me
+     with brothers, yet she had connections; another family-circle was
+     thus formed, other objects engrossed his attention, and the new
+     domestic relations no longer so frequently brought back the
+     remembrance of me. My father was growing old, and had nothing on
+     which to rely for the support of his declining years. My brother
+     and I had something coming to us from my mother's fortune; the
+     interest of this my father was to receive during our absence. This
+     consideration did not present itself to him directly, nor did it
+     stand in the way of his doing his duty; it had, however, a silent,
+     and to himself imperceptible, influence, and at times slackened his
+     zeal, which, unacted upon by this, would have been carried much
+     farther. This, I think, was the reason, that, having traced me as
+     far as Annecy, he did not follow me to Chamberi, where he was
+     morally certain of overtaking me. This will also explain why, in
+     visiting him many times after my flight, I received from him on
+     every occasion a father's kindness, though unaccompanied by any
+     very pressing efforts to retain me.
+
+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:--
+
+     This conduct on the part of a father of whose affection and virtue
+     I have had so many proofs, has given rise within me to reflections
+     on my own character which have not a little contributed to maintain
+     my heart uncorrupted. I have derived therefrom this great maxim of
+     morality, perhaps the only one of any use in practice; namely, to
+     avoid such situations as put our duty in antagonism with our
+     interest, or disclose our own advantage in the misfortunes of
+     another, certain that in such circumstances, however sincere the
+     love of virtue we bring with us, it will sooner or later, and
+     whether we perceive it or not, become weakened, and we shall come
+     to be unjust and culpable in our acts without having ceased to be
+     upright and blameless in our intentions.
+
+The fruitful maxim thus deduced by Rousseau, he thinks he tried
+faithfully to put in practice. With apparent perfect assurance
+concerning himself, he says:--
+
+     I have sincerely desired to do what was right. I have, with all the
+     energy of my character, shunned situations which set my interest in
+     opposition to the interest of another, thus inspiring me with a
+     secret though involuntary desire prejudicial to that man.
+
+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 this 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:--
+
+     From the first day, the most affectionate familiarity sprang up
+     between us, and that to the same degree in which it continued
+     during all the rest of her life. _Petit_--Child--was my name,
+     _Maman_--Mamma--hers; and _Petit_ and _Maman_ we remained, even
+     when the course of time had all but effaced the difference of our
+     ages. These two names seem to me marvellously well to express our
+     tone towards each other, the simplicity of our manners, and, more
+     than all, the relation of our hearts. She was to me the tenderest
+     of mothers, never seeking her own pleasure, but ever my welfare;
+     and if the senses had any thing to do with my attachment for her,
+     it was not to change its nature, but only to render it more
+     exquisite, and intoxicate me with the charm of having a young and
+     pretty mamma whom it was delightful for me to caress. I say quite
+     literally, to caress; for it never entered into her head to deny me
+     the tenderest maternal kisses and endearments, nor into my heart to
+     abuse them. Some may say that, in the end, quite other relations
+     subsisted between us. I grant it; but have patience,--I cannot tell
+     every thing at once.
+
+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 he forsook her.
+Rousseau's whole life was a series of self-indulgences, grovelling,
+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:--
+
+     I remember, particularly, having passed a delicious night without
+     the city on a road that skirted the Rhone or the Saône, for I
+     cannot remember which. On the other side were terraced gardens. It
+     had been a very warm day; the evening was charming; the dew
+     moistened the faded grass; a calm night, without a breeze; the air
+     was cool without being cold; the sun in setting had left crimson
+     vapors in the sky, which tinged the water with its roseate hue,
+     while the trees along the terrace were filled with nightingales
+     gushing out melodious answers to each other's song. I walked along
+     in a species of ecstasy, giving up heart and senses to the
+     enjoyment of the scene, only slightly sighing with regret at
+     enjoying it alone. Absorbed in my sweet reverie, I prolonged my
+     walk far into the night, without perceiving that I was wearied out.
+     At length I discovered it. I lay voluptuously down on the tablet of
+     a sort of niche or false door sunk in the terrace wall. The canopy
+     of my couch was formed by the over-arching boughs of the trees; a
+     nightingale sat exactly above me; its song lulled me to sleep; my
+     slumber was sweet, and my awaking still more so. It was broad day;
+     my eyes, on opening, fell on the water, the verdure, and the
+     admirable landscape spread out before me. I arose and shook off
+     dull sleep; and, growing hungry, I gayly directed my steps towards
+     the city, bent on transforming two _pièces de six blancs_ that I
+     had left, into a good breakfast. I was so cheerful that I went
+     singing along the whole way.
+
+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:--
+
+     One day, among others, having purposely turned aside to get a
+     closer view of a spot that appeared worthy of all admiration, I
+     grew so delighted with it, and wandered round it so often, that I
+     at length lost myself completely. After several hours of useless
+     walking, weary and faint with hunger and thirst, I entered a
+     peasant's hut which did not present a very promising appearance,
+     but it was the only one I saw around. I conceived it to be here as
+     at Geneva and throughout Switzerland, where all the inhabitants in
+     easy circumstances are in the situation to exercise hospitality. I
+     entreated the man to get me some dinner, offering to pay for it. He
+     presented me with some skimmed milk and coarse barley bread,
+     observing that that was all he had. I drank the milk with delight,
+     and ate the bread, chaff and all; but this was not very restorative
+     to a man exhausted with fatigue. The peasant, who was watching me
+     narrowly, judged of the truth of my story by the sincerity of my
+     appetite. All of a sudden, after having said that he saw perfectly
+     well that I was a good and true young fellow that did not come to
+     betray him, he opened a little trap-door by the side of his
+     kitchen, went down and returned a moment afterwards with a good
+     brown loaf of pure wheat, the remains of a toothsome ham, and a
+     bottle of wine, the sight of which rejoiced my heart more than all
+     the rest. To these he added a good thick omelette, and I made such
+     a dinner as none but a walker ever enjoyed. When it came to pay,
+     lo! his disquietude and fears again seized him; he would none of my
+     money, and rejected it with extraordinary manifestations of
+     disquiet. The funniest part of the matter was, that I could not
+     conceive what he was afraid of. At length, with fear and trembling,
+     he pronounced those terrible words, _Commissioners_ and
+     _Cellar-rats_. He gave me to understand that he concealed his wine
+     because of the excise, and his bread on account of the tax, and
+     that he was a lost man if they got the slightest inkling that he
+     was not dying of hunger. Every thing he said to me touching this
+     matter, whereof, indeed, I had not the slightest idea, produced an
+     impression on me that can never be effaced. It became the germ of
+     that inextinguishable hatred that afterwards sprang up in my heart
+     against the vexations to which these poor people are subject, and
+     against their oppressors. This man, though in easy circumstances,
+     dared not eat the bread he had gained by the sweat of his brow, and
+     could escape ruin only by presenting the appearance of the same
+     misery that reigned around him.
+
+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 we
+emphatically call character was sadly wanting in Rousseau--how sadly,
+witness such an acted piece of mad folly as the following:--
+
+     I, without knowing aught of the matter,... gave myself out for a
+     [musical] composer. Nor was this all: having been presented to M.
+     de Freytorens, law-professor, who loved music, and gave concerts at
+     his house, nothing would do but I must give him a sample of my
+     talent; so I set about composing a piece for his concert quite as
+     boldly as though I had really been an adept in the science. I had
+     the constancy to work for fifteen days on this fine affair, to copy
+     it fair, write out the different parts, and distribute them with as
+     much assurance as though it had been a masterpiece of harmony.
+     Then, what will scarcely be believed, but which yet is gospel
+     truth, worthily to crown this sublime production, I tacked to the
+     end thereof a pretty minuet which was then having a run on the
+     streets.... I gave it as my own just as resolutely as though I had
+     been speaking to inhabitants of the moon.
+
+     They assembled to perform my piece. I explain to each the nature of
+     the movement, the style of execution, and the relations of the
+     parts--I was very full of business. For five or six minutes they
+     were tuning; to me each minute seemed an age. At length, all being
+     ready, I rap with a handsome paper _bâton_ on the leader's desk the
+     five or six beats of the "_Make ready_." Silence is made--I gravely
+     set to beating time--they commence! No, never since French operas
+     began, was there such a _charivari_ heard. Whatever they might have
+     thought of my pretended talent, the effect was worse than they
+     could possibly have imagined. The musicians choked with laughter;
+     the auditors opened their eyes, and would fain have closed their
+     ears. But that was an impossibility. My tormenting set of
+     symphonists, who seemed rather to enjoy the fun, scraped away with
+     a din sufficient to crack the tympanum of one born deaf. I had the
+     firmness to go right ahead, however, sweating, it is true, at every
+     pore, but held back by shame; not daring to retreat, and glued to
+     the spot. For my consolation I heard the company whispering to each
+     other, quite loud enough for it to reach my ear: "It is not
+     bearable!" said one. "What music gone mad!" cried another. "What a
+     devilish din!" added a third. Poor Jean Jacques, little dreamed
+     you, in that cruel moment, that one day before the King of France
+     and all the court, thy sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and
+     applause, and that in all the boxes around thee the loveliest
+     ladies would burst forth with, "What charming sounds! what
+     enchanting music! every strain reaches the heart!"
+
+     But what restored every one to good humor was the minuet. Scarcely
+     had they played a few measures than I heard bursts of laughter
+     break out on all hands. Every one congratulated me on my fine
+     musical taste; they assured me that this minuet would make me
+     spoken about, and that I merited the loudest praises. I need not
+     attempt depicting my agony, nor own that I well deserved it.
+
+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 a later 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):--
+
+     I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my
+     genius, and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in
+     my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of
+     thinking.... It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for 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 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 "Émile"), to change the habit of a nation in
+the matter of 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 that had lately set all Europe in ferment with
+the "Émile" 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
+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 sombre, in
+spirit, but "beautiful exceedingly," in form of expression. Such works
+as the "Réné" of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French
+literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau's "Walks." We
+introduce two specimen extracts. The shadow of Rousseau's monomania will
+be felt thick upon them:--
+
+     It is now fifteen years since I have been in this strange
+     situation, which yet appears to me like a dream; ever imagining
+     that, disturbed by indigestion, I sleep uneasily, but shall soon
+     awake, freed from my troubles, but surrounded by my friends....
+
+     How could I possibly foresee the destiny that awaited me?... Could
+     I, if in my right senses, suppose that one day, the man I was, and
+     yet remain, should be taken, without any kind of doubt, for a
+     monster, a poisoner, an assassin, the horror of the human race, the
+     sport of the rabble, my only salutation to be spit upon, and that a
+     whole generation would unanimously amuse themselves in burying me
+     alive? When this strange revolution first happened, taken by
+     unawares, I was overwhelmed with astonishment; my agitation, my
+     indignation, plunged me into a delirium, which ten years have
+     scarcely been able to calm: during this interval, falling from
+     error to error, from fault to fault, and folly to folly, I have, by
+     my imprudence, furnished the contrivers of my fate with
+     instruments, which they have artfully employed to fix it without
+     resource....
+
+     * * *
+
+     Every future occurrence will be immaterial to me; I have in the
+     world neither relative, friend, nor brother; I am on the earth as
+     if I had fallen into some unknown planet; if I contemplate any
+     thing around me, it is only distressing, heart-rending objects;
+     every thing I cast my eyes on conveys some new subject either of
+     indignation or affliction; I will endeavor henceforward to banish
+     from my mind all painful ideas which unavailingly distress me.
+     Alone for the rest of my life, I must only look for consolation,
+     hope, or peace in my own breast; and neither ought nor will,
+     henceforward, think of any thing but myself. It is in this state
+     that I return to the continuation of that severe and just
+     examination which formerly I called my Confessions; I consecrate my
+     latter days to the study of myself, and to the preparation of that
+     account which I must shortly render up of my actions. I resign my
+     thoughts entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my own soul;
+     that being the only consolation that man cannot deprive me of. If
+     by dint of reflection on my internal propensities, I can attain to
+     putting them in better order, and correcting the evil that remains
+     in me, these meditations will not be utterly useless; and though I
+     am accounted worthless on earth, shall not cast away my latter
+     days. The leisure of my daily walks has frequently been filled with
+     charming contemplations, which I regret having forgot; but I will
+     write down those that occur in future; then, every time I read them
+     over, I shall forget my misfortunes, disgraces, and persecutors,
+     in recollecting and contemplating the integrity of my own heart.
+
+Rousseau'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:--
+
+     I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures
+     strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its
+     influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with
+     all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they,
+     compared with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so
+     simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible
+     that the Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be
+     himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an
+     enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in
+     his manners! What an affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What
+     sublimity in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses!
+     What presence of mind, what subtilety, what truth, in his replies!
+     How great the command over his passions! Where is the man, where
+     the philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness and
+     without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man
+     loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest reward
+     of virtue, he described exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the
+     resemblance was so striking that all the Fathers perceived it.
+
+     What prepossession, what blindness, must it be to compare the son
+     of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion
+     there is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy,
+     easily supported his character to the last; and if his death,
+     however easy, had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted
+     whether Socrates, with all his wisdom, was any thing more than a
+     vain sophist. He invented, it is said, the theory of morals.
+     Others, however, had before put them in practice; he had only to
+     say what they had done, and reduce their examples to precepts.
+     Aristides had been _just_ before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas
+     gave up his life for his country before Socrates declared
+     patriotism to be a duty; the Spartans were a sober people before
+     Socrates recommended sobriety; before he had even defined virtue,
+     Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where could Jesus learn, among
+     his compatriots, that pure and sublime morality of which he only
+     has given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made
+     known amidst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the
+     most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on the earth.
+     The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing with his friends,
+     appears the most agreeable that could be wished for; that of Jesus,
+     expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed
+     by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared.
+     Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the
+     weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of
+     excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if
+     the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and
+     death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic
+     history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks
+     of fiction; on the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody
+     presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ.
+     Such a supposition, in fact, only shifts the difficulty without
+     removing it; it is more inconceivable that a number of persons
+     should agree to write such a history, than that one only should
+     furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the
+     diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the gospel, the
+     marks of whose truth are so striking and inimitable that the
+     inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero.
+
+So far in eloquent ascription of incomparable excellence to the Bible
+and to the Founder of Christianity. But then immediately Rousseau's
+Curate proceeds:--
+
+     And yet, with all this, the same gospel abounds with incredible
+     relations, with circumstances repugnant to reason, and which it is
+     impossible for a man of sense either to conceive or admit.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+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 implication, awaiting the unwary
+feet of the reader. 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 any thing 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 over-earnest 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 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 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 theatre.
+This brought out Rousseau in an eloquent harangue against the theatre 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, D'Holbach, with many others
+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 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.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+EPILOGUE.
+
+
+In looking backward over the preceding pages, we think of many things
+which we should like still to say. Of these many things, we limit
+ourselves to saying here, as briefly as we can, some four or five only.
+
+To begin with, in nearly every successive case, we have found ourselves
+lamenting afresh that, from the authors to be represented, the
+representative extracts must needs be so few and so short. We have,
+therefore, sincerely begrudged to ourselves every line of room that we
+felt obliged to occupy with matter, preparatory, explanatory, or
+critical, of our own. Whatever success we may have achieved in
+fulfilling our purpose, our purpose has been to say ourselves barely so
+much as was indispensable in order finally to convey, upon the whole, to
+our readers, within the allotted space, the justest and the fullest
+impression of the selected authors, through the medium of their own
+quoted words.
+
+In the second place, it was with great regret that we yielded to the
+necessity of omitting entirely, or dismissing with scant mention, such
+literary names, for example, as Boileau, of the age of Louis Quatorze,
+and, a little later than he, Fontenelle, spanning with his century of
+years the space from 1657 to 1757,--these, and, belonging to the period
+that ushered in the Revolution, Bernardin St. Pierre, the teller of the
+tale of "Paul and Virginia," with also that hero of a hundred romantic
+adventures, Beaumarchais, half Themistocles, half Alcibiades, the author
+of "The Barber of Seville." The line had to be drawn somewhere; and,
+whether wisely or not, at least thoughtfully, we drew it to run as it
+does.
+
+A third, and a yet graver, occasion of regret was that we must stop
+short on the threshold, without crossing it, of the nineteenth-century
+literature of France. With so many shining names seen just ahead of us,
+beacon-like, to invite our advance, we felt it as a real self-denial to
+stay our steps at that point. We hope still to deal with Chateaubriand,
+Madame de Staël, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo,
+and perhaps others, in a future volume.
+
+Our eye is caught with the antithetical terms, "classicism" and
+"romanticism," occurring here and there; and the observation is forced
+upon us, that these terms, in their mutual relation, are nowhere by us
+defined. The truth is, they scarcely, as thus used, admit of hard and
+fast definition. It is in a somewhat loose conventional sense of each
+term, that, in late literary language, they are set off, one over
+against the other. They name two different, but by no means necessarily
+antagonistic, forces or tendencies in literature. Classicism stands for
+what you might call the established order, against which romanticism is
+a revolt. Paradoxical though it be to say so, both the established
+order, and the revolt against it, are good things. The established
+order, which was never really any thing more or less than the dominance
+in literature of rules and standards derived through criticism from the
+acknowledged best models, especially the ancient, tended at last to
+cramp and stifle the life which it should, of course, only serve to
+shape and conform. The mould, always too narrow perhaps, but at any rate
+grown too rigid, needed itself to be fashioned anew. Fresh life, a full
+measure, would do this. Such is the true mission of romanticism,--not to
+break the mould that classicism sought to impose on literary production,
+but to expand that mould, make it more pliant, more free. A mould, for
+things living and growing, should be plastic in the passive, as well as
+in the active, sense of that word,--should accept form, as well as give
+form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not
+when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when it
+shall have made classicism over, after the law of a larger life. To risk
+a concrete illustration--among our American poets, Bryant, in the
+perfectly self-consistent unity of his whole intellectual development,
+may be said to represent classicism; while in Lowell, as Lowell appears
+in the later, more protracted, phase of his genius, romanticism is
+represented. The "Thanatopsis" of Bryant and the "Cathedral" of Lowell
+may stand for individual examples respectively of the classic and the
+romantic styles in poetry. Compare these two productions, and in the
+difference between the chaste, well-pruned severity of the one, and the
+indulged, perhaps stimulated, luxuriance of the other, you will feel the
+difference between classicism and romanticism. But Victor Hugo is the
+great recent romanticist; and when, hereafter, we come to speak somewhat
+at large of him, it will be seasonable to enter more fully into the
+question of these two tendencies in literature.
+
+We cannot consent to have said here our very last word, without
+emphasizing once again our sense of the really extraordinary
+pervasiveness in French literature of that element in it which one does
+not like to name, even to condemn it,--we mean its impurity. The
+influence of French literary models, very strong among us just now, must
+not be permitted insensibly to pervert our own cleaner and sweeter
+national habit and taste in this matter. But we, all of us together,
+need to be both vigilant and firm; for the beginnings of corruption here
+are very insidious. Let us never grow ashamed of our saving Saxon
+shamefacedness. They may nickname it prudery, if they will; but let us,
+American and English, for our part, always take pride in such prudery.
+
+
+
+
+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.]
+
+
+Ab'é-lard (1079-1142), 6.
+
+Academy, French, 10, 12, 75, 156, 287.
+
+Æs'chy-lus, 94, 152, 166, 168.
+
+Æ'sop, 85.
+
+Al-ci-bi'a-des, 289.
+
+Alembert. _See_ D'Alembert.
+
+Al-ex-an'der (the Great), 5, 131.
+
+Al-ex-an'drine, 5, 86, 153.
+
+Am-y-ot' (ä-me-o´), Jacques (1513-1593), 8.
+
+An'ge-lo, Michel, 156.
+
+Ariosto, 245, 247.
+
+Ar'is-tot-le, 50.
+
+Ar-nauld' (ar-n�´), Antoine (1612-1694), 119.
+
+Ar'thur (King), 5.
+
+Au'gus-tīne, St., Latin Christian Father, 83.
+
+Au'gus'tus (the Emperor), 131.
+
+
+Ba'con, Francis, 48, 63.
+
+Ba'ker, Jehu, 226.
+
+B�´laam, 154.
+
+Băl´zac, Jean Louis Guez de (1594-1654), 10, 11.
+
+Beau-mar-chais´, de (b�-mar-sh�´), Pierre Augustin Caron
+(1732-1799), 287, 289.
+
+Benedictines, 29.
+
+Boi-leau´-Des-pré-aux´ (bwä-l�´-d�-pr�-o´), Nicolas
+(1636-1711), 9, 12, 14, 83, 84, 167, 168, 171, 289.
+
+Bolton, A. S., 69.
+
+=BOS-SU-ET=´(bo-sü-�´), Jacques Bénigne (1627-1704), 11, 12, 77, 127,
+166, 170, 182-188, 205, 206, 224, 225.
+
+=BOUR-DA-LOUE=´, Louis (1632-1704), 3, 12, 77, 143, 148, 182, 185, 188,
+189-197, 198, 201, 202.
+
+Brook Farm, 38.
+
+Bry´ant, William Cullen, 290, 291.
+
+Buckle, Henry Thomas, 234.
+
+Buffon (büf-foN´), Georges Louis Leclerc de (1707-1788), 287.
+
+Bur´gun-dy, Duke of (1682-1712), 177, 207, 208, 209, 214, 216.
+
+Burke, Edmund, 48, 75.
+
+Bussy (büs-se´), Count, 135.
+
+By´ron, Lord, 48.
+
+
+Cæsar, Julius, 56, 131.
+
+Calas (cä-lä´), Jean, 253.
+
+Calvin, John (1509-1564), 7.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, 251, 255.
+
+Catherine (Empress of Russia), 285.
+
+Cham-fort´ (shäN-for´), Sébastien Roch Nicolas (1741-1794), 85.
+
+_Chanson _(shäN-soN´), 5.
+
+Char-le-magne´ (shar-le-m�n´), 5.
+
+Charles I. (of England), 170, 185.
+
+Charles IX. (of France), 63.
+
+Cha-teau-bri-and´ (shä-t�-bre-äN´), François Auguste de (1768-1848),
+3, 13, 14, 206, 277, 289.
+
+Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 20.
+
+"Classicism," 10, 14, 224, 289, 290.
+
+Claude, Jean (1619-1687), 182.
+
+Coleridge, S. T., 7, 34, 43.
+
+Comines (k�-meen´), Philippe de (1445-1509), 7, 25, 28.
+
+Condé (koN-d�´), Prince of, "The Great Condé" (1621-1686), 144.
+
+Condillac (koNde-yäk´), Étienne Bonnot de (1715-1780), 287.
+
+Condorcet (koN-dor-s�´), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat de
+(1743-1794), 128.
+
+=CORNEILLE= (kor-n�l´), Pierre (1606-1684), 2, 11, 12, 16, 78, 79, 80,
+151-166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 182, 183, 239.
+
+Cotin (ko-tăN´), Abbé, 100.
+
+Cotton, Charles (1630-1687), 44, 48.
+
+Cousin (koo-zăN´), Victor (1792-1867), 128.
+
+
+D'Alembert (dä-läN-bêr´), Jean le Rond (1717-1783), 13, 251, 286, 287.
+
+Dante, 50, 93, 94, 114.
+
+David (King), 198.
+
+Descartes (d�-kärt´), René (1596-1650), 11, 12, 104, 115.
+
+D'Holbach (d�l-bäk´), Paul Henri Thyry (1723-1789), 287.
+
+Dickens, Charles, 35, 149.
+
+Diderot (de-dr�´), Denis (1713-1784), 13, 237, 250, 284, 285, 286,
+287.
+
+Dryden, John, 48, 166.
+
+Duclos (dü-kl�´), Charles Pineau (1704-1772), 287.
+
+
+"_Écrasez l'Infâme_," 252.
+
+Edinburgh Review, 140.
+
+Edward (the Black Prince), 21-25.
+
+Edwards, President, 194.
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 49, 51, 52, 61.
+
+Encyclopædia Britannica, 18.
+
+=ENCYCLOPÆDISTS=, 13, 218, 249, 250, 282-288.
+
+Epictetus, 65.
+
+Epicurus, 50.
+
+Erasmus, 43, 126.
+
+Euripides, 153, 166, 171.
+
+
+_Fabliaux_ (fab´le-�´), 6.
+
+Faugère (f�-zhêr´), Arnaud Prosper (1810- ), 128.
+
+=FÉNELON= (f�n-loN´), François de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715), 12,
+85, 177, 178, 181, 205-224.
+
+Fléchier (fl�-she-�´), Esprit (1632-1710), 182.
+
+Foix (fwä), Count de, 26, 27.
+
+Fontenelle (foNt-nĕl´), Bernard le Bovier (1657-1757), 289.
+
+Franciscans, 29.
+
+Frederick (the Great), 254.
+
+Friar John, 40.
+
+=FROISSART= (frwä-sar´), Jean (1337-1410?), 7, 18-28.
+
+
+Gaillard (gă-yar´), Gabriel Henri (1726-1806), 155.
+
+Gar-gant´ua, 29, 36, 37, 39.
+
+Gibbon, Edward, 153.
+
+Goldsmith, Oliver, 83, 225.
+
+Grignan (green-yäN´), Madame de, 138.
+
+Grimm, Friedrich Melchior (1723-1807), 287.
+
+Gulliver's Travels, 37.
+
+Guyon (ğe-yoN´), Madame (1648-1717), 210.
+
+
+Hallam, Henry, 18, 34.
+
+Havet (ä-va´) (editor of Pascal's works), 128, 129.
+
+Hawkesworth, Dr., 222.
+
+Hazlitt, W. Carew, 48.
+
+Helvétius (ēl-v�-se-üss´), Claude Adrien (1715-1771), 287.
+
+Henriette, Princess, 170.
+
+Henry of Navarre, 63.
+
+Herod (King), 198.
+
+Herodotus, 7, 18.
+
+Holbach. _See_ D'Holbach.
+
+Homer, 244.
+
+Hooker ("The judicious"), 205.
+
+Horace, 245.
+
+Hugo (ü-go´), Victor. _See_ Victor Hugo.
+
+Hume, David, 48, 276.
+
+
+Isaiah (the prophet), 94.
+
+Israel, 154.
+
+
+James (King), 210.
+
+Job, 94, 210.
+
+John (the Baptist), 198.
+
+John (King), 21, 22.
+
+Johnes, Thomas, 19.
+
+Johnson, Samuel, 160, 249.
+
+Joinville (zhwăN-vel´), Jean de (1224?-1319?), 7.
+
+Julian (the Apostate), 178.
+
+
+Kant, Emmanuel, 42.
+
+Knox, John, 198.
+
+
+La Boëtie (lä b�-ă-tē´), Étienne (1530-1563), 58, 59.
+
+=LA BRUYÈRE= (lä brü-e-y êr´), Jean (1646?-1696), 12, 75-81, 153.
+
+=LA FONTAINE= (lä foN-t�n´), Jean de (1621-1695), 12, 81-92.
+
+Lamartine (lä-mar-tēn´), Alphonse Marie Louis de (1780-1869), 14, 206, 289.
+
+_Langue d'oc_, 4.
+
+_Langue d'oïl_, 4.
+
+Lanier, Sidney (1842-1881), 25.
+
+=LA ROCHEFOUCAULD= (lä r�sh-foo-k�´), François, Duc de (1613-1680),
+12, 48, 66-75, 131, 147, 148.
+
+Longfellow, Henry W., 50.
+
+Louis IX. (1215-1270) (St. Louis), 6, 7.
+
+Louis XI. (1423-1483), 7.
+
+Louis XIII. (1601-1643), 10, 95.
+
+Louis XIV. (1638-1715) (Quatorze), 10, 12, 113, 135, 136, 169, 172, 176,
+181, 184, 189, 190, 198, 199, 200, 207, 208, 213, 217-219, 223, 255.
+
+Louis XV. (1710-1774), 199, 214, 254.
+
+Louvois (loo-vwä´), Marquis de, 142.
+
+Lowell, James Russell, 291.
+
+Lucan, 151, 153, 240.
+
+Lucretius, 94, 166.
+
+Luther, Martin, 7, 40.
+
+
+Maintenon (măN-teh-noN´), Madame de (1635-1719), 172, 181, 210, 211.
+
+Malherbe (mäl-êrb´), François (1555-1628), 9, 10, 14.
+
+Martin (mar-tăN´), Henri (1810- ), 183.
+
+Mary, Queen of Scots, 8, 198.
+
+=MASSILLON= (mäs-se-yoN´), Jean Baptiste (1663-1742), 3, 12, 148, 182,
+185, 188, 197-205.
+
+M'Crie, Thomas, 119.
+
+Michael (the Archangel), 205.
+
+Milton, John, 92, 182, 206, 247.
+
+=MOLIÈRE= (mo-le-êr´) (real name, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673), 12,
+16, 83, 92-114, 127, 154, 165, 167, 169, 240.
+
+Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 151.
+
+=MONTAIGNE= (mon-t�n´), Michel Eyquem de (1533-1592), 2, 7, 8, 44-65,
+67, 75, 131, 230, 234, 257, 268.
+
+Montespan (moN-tĕss-päN´), Madame de (1641-1707), 138, 139, 140.
+
+=MONTESQUIEU=, de (moN-tĕs-kê-uh´), Charles de Secondat (1689-1755),
+13, 218, 225-237.
+
+Morley, Henry, 249.
+
+Morley, John, 249, 251, 285.
+
+Motteux, Peter Anthony (1660-1718), 30.
+
+Musset (mü-s�´) (1810-1857), Alfred de, 289.
+
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte, 13, 166.
+
+Nathan (the prophet), 198.
+
+Newton, Sir Isaac, 115.
+
+Nicole (ne-k�l´), Pierre (1625-1695), 3, 143, 147, 168.
+
+
+"Obscurantism" (disposition, in the sphere of the intellect, to love
+darkness rather than light), 252.
+
+
+Pan-tag´-ru-el, 29, 40, 41, 42.
+
+Panurge (pä-nürzh´), 40, 41, 42.
+
+=PASCAL=, Blaise (1623-1662), 3, 12, 48, 62, 65, 80, 115-133, 193.
+
+Pascal, Jacqueline, 116.
+
+Pelisson (pĕl-ē-soN´), 149.
+
+Petrarch, Francesco, 20.
+
+Phædrus, 85.
+
+Plato, 50, 51, 59.
+
+Pleiades (plē´ya-dēz), 8, 10, 13.
+
+Plutarch, 8, 48, 56.
+
+Po-co-cu´rant-ism, 248.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, 254.
+
+Pompey, 56.
+
+Pope, Alexander, 48, 166.
+
+Poquelin (po-ke-lăN´). _See_ Molière, 94, 95.
+
+Port Royal, 119, 127, 128, 147, 168.
+
+Pradon (prä-doN´), 171.
+
+_Provençal_ (pro-väN-sal), 4.
+
+Ptolemy Philadelphus, 8.
+
+
+Quentin Durward, 7.
+
+
+=RABELAIS= (ră-bl�´), François (1495?-1553?), 3, 7, 28-43, 60, 65,
+83, 146.
+
+=RACINE= (rä-seen´), Jean (1639-1699), 12, 78, 79, 80, 83, 151, 152, 153,
+166-181, 205.
+
+Rambouillet (räN-boo-y�´), Hôtel de, 10, 11, 12, 100, 105, 155, 156,
+183.
+
+Raphael (archangel), 205.
+
+Récamier (r�-kä-me-�´), Madame (1777-1849), 11.
+
+Richard, the Lion-hearted, 117.
+
+Richelieu (rēsh-le-uh´), Cardinal, 10, 12, 95, 154, 156.
+
+_Roman_ (ro-mäN´), 5.
+
+"Romanticism," 224, 289, 290.
+
+"Romanticists," 14.
+
+Ronsard (roN-sar´), Pierre de (1524-1585), 8, 9.
+
+Ronsardism, 14.
+
+Rousseau (roo-s�´), Jean Baptiste (1670-1741), 255.
+
+=ROUSSEAU=, Jean Jacques (1712-1778), 3, 13, 14, 48, 206, 218, 249, 250,
+251, 255-281, 287.
+
+Ruskin, John, 73.
+
+Rutebeuf (rü-te-buf´) (_b._ 1230), _trouvère,_ 6.
+
+
+Sablíère (sä-blï-êr´), Madame de la, 83, 84.
+
+Saci (sä-se´), M. de, 65.
+
+Saintsbury, George, 17, 58.
+
+Sainte-Beuve (săNt-buv´), Charles Augustin (1804-1869), 9, 14, 189,
+193, 199, 235, 289.
+
+Sal´a-din (Saracen antagonist of Richard the Lion-hearted), 117.
+
+_Salon_ (sä-loN´), 11.
+
+Sand (säNd), George (Madame Dudevant, 1804-1876), 3, 14.
+
+Saurin (s�-răN´), Jacques (1677-1730), 182.
+
+"Savoyard Curate's Confession," 279.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, 7, 19, 25, 105.
+
+Selden, John ("The learned"), 205.
+
+Seneca, 48, 50.
+
+SÉVIGNÉ (s�-vēn-y�´), Madame de, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
+(1626-1696), 11, 105, 134-151, 170.
+
+Shakspeare, 16, 48, 63, 92, 94, 114, 160, 240.
+
+Socrates (contrasted by Rousseau with Jesus), 280, 281.
+
+Sophocles, 153, 166, 168.
+
+Staël-Holstein (stä-ĕl´ ol-stăN´), Anne Louise Grermanie de
+(1766-1817), 13, 289.
+
+Stanislaus (King of Poland), 285.
+
+St. John, Bayle, 56, 58, 59.
+
+St. Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de (1737-1814), 289.
+
+St. Simon (sē-moN´), Louis de Rouvroi, Duc de (1675-1755), 208, 209.
+
+Swift, Dean, 37.
+
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 94.
+
+
+Tacitus, 7.
+
+Taine, H. (1828-), 233.
+
+Tartuffe (tar-tüf´), 106-114, 147.
+
+Tasso, 245, 247.
+
+Thélème (t�-lĕm´), 38, 40.
+
+Themistocles, 289.
+
+Thibaud (tē-b�´), _troubadour_ (1201-1253), 6.
+
+Trajan, 254.
+
+_Troubadour_, 4.
+
+_Trouvère_ (troo-vêr´), 5, 6.
+
+Tully (Cicero), 246.
+
+Turgot (tür-g�´), Anne RobertJacques (1727-1781), 287.
+
+
+Urquhart, Sir Thomas, 30.
+
+
+Van Laun, H., 17.
+
+Vatel, 143, 144, 145.
+
+Vauvenargues (v�-ve-narg´), Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de (1715-1747),
+79, 80, 81.
+
+Vercingetorix, 226.
+
+Victor Hugo (1802-1885), 14, 16, 94, 289, 291.
+
+Villehardouin (vēl-ar-doo-ăN´), Geoffrey (1165?-1213?), 7.
+
+Villemain (vēl-măN´), Abel François (1790-1870), 118.
+
+Virgil, 5, 9, 81, 166, 172, 245.
+
+Voiture (vwä-tür´), Vincent (1598-1648), 11.
+
+=VOLTAIRE= (vol-têr´), François Marie Arouet de (1694-1778), 2, 13, 38,
+48, 68, 80, 127, 152, 153, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 204, 218, 234,
+235, 238-255, 285, 286, 287.
+
+
+Wall, C. H., 106.
+
+Walpole, Horace, 151, 230.
+
+Warens (vä-räN´), Madame de, 264, 265, 268, 269, 275.
+
+Webster, Daniel, 188.
+
+Wright, Elizur, 86.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Classic French Course in English, by 
+William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Classic French Course in English, by 
+William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Classic French Course in English
+
+Author: William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+Release Date: October 14, 2007 [EBook #23033]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE IN ENGLISH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Vachuska, Chuck Greif and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+=_THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES._=
+
+CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE
+
+IN ENGLISH.
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON.
+
+  NEW YORK:
+  CHAUTAUQUA PRESS,
+  C. L. S. C. DEPARTMENT,
+  805 BROADWAY.
+  1886.
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1886,
+
+BY PHILLIPS & HUNT.
+
+_OTHER VOLUMES IN THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES_
+
+  BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
+
+  *PREPARATORY GREEK COURSE IN ENGLISH       $1.00
+  **PREPARATORY LATIN COURSE IN ENGLISH       1.00
+  *** COLLEGE GREEK COURSE IN ENGLISH         1.00
+  ****COLLEGE LATIN COURSE IN ENGLISH         1.00
+
+_The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of
+six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not
+involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every
+principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended._
+
+ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
+BY RAND, AVERY, & COMPANY.
+BOSTON.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The preparation of the present volume proposed to the author a task more
+difficult far than that undertaken in any one of the four preceding
+volumes of the group, THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES, to which it belongs.
+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 greater difficulty seen thus to inhere already in the nature itself
+of the task proposed for accomplishment, was gravely increased by the
+much more severe compression deemed to be in the present instance
+desirable. The room placed at the author's disposal for a display of
+French literature was less than half the room allowed him for the
+display of either the Greek or the Latin.
+
+The plan, therefore, of this volume, imposed the necessity of
+establishing from the outset certain limits, to be very strictly
+observed. First, it was resolved to restrict the attention bestowed upon
+the national history, the national geography, and the national language,
+of the French, to such brief occasional notices as, in the course of the
+volume, it might seem necessary, for illustration of the particular
+author, from time to time to make. The only introductory general matter
+here to be found will accordingly consist of a rapid and summary review
+of that literature, as a whole, which is the subject of the book. It was
+next determined to limit the authors selected for representation to
+those of the finished centuries. A third decision was to make the number
+of authors 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.
+
+It is proposed to follow the present volume with a volume similar in
+general character, devoted to German literature.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+I.
+                                                                  PAGE
+FRENCH LITERATURE                                             1
+
+II.
+
+FROISSART                                                    18
+
+III.
+
+RABELAIS                                                     28
+
+IV.
+
+MONTAIGNE                                                    44
+
+V.
+
+LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (LA BRUYÈRE; VAUVENARGUES)                  66
+
+VI.
+
+LA FONTAINE                                                  81
+
+VII.
+
+MOLIÈRE                                                      92
+
+VIII.
+
+PASCAL                                                      115
+
+IX.
+
+MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ                                           134
+
+X.
+
+CORNEILLE                                                   151
+
+XI.
+
+RACINE                                                      166
+
+XII.
+
+BOSSUET, BOURDALOUE, MASSILLON                              182
+
+XIII.
+
+FÉNELON                                                     205
+
+XIV.
+
+MONTESQUIEU                                                 225
+
+XV.
+
+VOLTAIRE                                                    238
+
+XVI.
+
+ROUSSEAU                                                    255
+
+XVII.
+
+THE ENCYCLOPÆDISTS                                          282
+
+XVIII.
+
+EPILOGUE                                                    288
+
+INDEX                                                       293
+
+
+
+
+CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE 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 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 sombre 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 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 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 centre 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 metre 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 early 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
+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
+Saint 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 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 lifetime
+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 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 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 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 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 centre 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, earth-shaking explosion would
+follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called,--the
+usurpation, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte,--literature was well-nigh
+extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpassingly brilliant,
+of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, 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 afterwards 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 at length would 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 has already passed the limit
+within which our choice of authors for representation is necessarily
+confined.
+
+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 Shakspeare--was largely
+the pregnant cause of this attempted emancipation of the French literary
+mind from the burden 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, 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 farther 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, if the truth must be told, diffuses himself too widely to
+do his best possible work. He has, however, 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,--extracts, however, not unfrequently
+marred by wretched translation. 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 he belongs by
+character and by sympathy 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 traveller 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 other 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 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 a 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 had been able to 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 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:--
+
+     There was much pressing at this time, through eagerness to take the
+     king; and those who were nearest to him, and knew him, cried out,
+     "Surrender yourself, surrender yourself, or you are a dead man!" In
+     that part of the field was a young knight from St. Omer, who was
+     engaged by a salary in the service of the King of England; his name
+     was Denys de Morbeque; who for five years had attached himself to
+     the English, on account of having been banished in his younger days
+     from France, for a murder committed in an affray at St. Omer. It
+     fortunately happened for this knight, that he was at the time near
+     to the King of France, when he was so much pulled about. He, by
+     dint of force, for he was very strong and robust, pushed through
+     the crowd, and said to the king, in good French, "Sire, sire,
+     surrender yourself!" The king, who found himself very disagreeably
+     situated, turning to him, asked, "To whom shall I surrender myself?
+     to whom? Where is my cousin, the Prince of Wales? If I could see
+     him, I would speak to him."--"Sire," replied Sir Denys, "he is not
+     here; but surrender yourself to me, and I will lead you to
+     him."--"Who are you?" said the king. "Sire, I am Denys de Morbeque,
+     a knight from Artois; but I serve the King of England because I
+     cannot belong to France, having forfeited all I possessed there."
+     The king then gave him his right-hand glove, and said, "I surrender
+     myself to you." There was much crowding and pushing about; for
+     every one was eager to cry out, "I have taken him!" Neither the
+     king nor his youngest son Philip were able to get forward, and free
+     themselves from the throng....
+
+     The Prince [of Wales] asked them [his marshals] if they knew any
+     thing of the King of France: they replied, "No, sir, not for a
+     certainty; but we believe he must be either killed or made
+     prisoner, since he has never quitted his battalion." The prince
+     then, addressing the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cobham, said, "I beg
+     of you to mount your horses, and ride over the field, so that on
+     your return you may bring me some certain intelligence of him." The
+     two barons, immediately mounting their horses, left the prince, and
+     made for a small hillock, that they might look about them. From
+     their stand they perceived a crowd of men-at-arms on foot, who were
+     advancing very slowly. The King of France was in the midst of them,
+     and in great danger; for the English and Gascons had taken him from
+     Sir Denys de Morbeque, and were disputing who should have him, the
+     stoutest bawling out, "It is I that have got him."--"No, no,"
+     replied the others: "we have him." The king, to escape from this
+     peril, said, "Gentlemen, gentlemen, I pray you conduct me and my
+     son in a courteous manner to my cousin the prince; and do not make
+     such a riot about my capture, for I am so great a lord that I can
+     make all sufficiently rich." These words, and others which fell
+     from the king, appeased them a little; but the disputes were always
+     beginning again, and they did not move a step without rioting. When
+     the two barons saw this troop of people, they descended from the
+     hillock, and, sticking spurs into their horses, made up to them. On
+     their arrival, they asked what was the matter. They were answered,
+     that it was the King of France, who had been made prisoner, and
+     that upward of ten knights and squires challenged him at the same
+     time, as belonging to each of them. The two barons then pushed
+     through the crowd by main force, and ordered all to draw aside.
+     They commanded, in the name of the prince, and under pain of
+     instant death, that every one should keep his distance, and not
+     approach unless ordered or desired so to do. They all retreated
+     behind the king; and the two barons, dismounting, advanced to the
+     king with profound reverences, and conducted him in a peaceable
+     manner to the Prince of Wales.
+
+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):--
+
+     When evening was come, the Prince of Wales gave a supper in his
+     pavilion to the King of France, and to the greater part of the
+     princes and barons who were prisoners. The prince seated the King
+     of France, and his son the Lord Philip, at an elevated and
+     well-covered table: with them were Sir James de Bourbon, the Lord
+     John d'Artois, the earls of Tancarville, of Estampes, of Dammartin,
+     of Graville, and the Lord of Partenay. The other knights and
+     squires were placed at different tables. The prince himself served
+     the king's table, as well as the others, with every mark of
+     humility, and would not sit down at it, in spite of all his
+     entreaties for him so to do, saying that "he was not worthy of such
+     an honor, nor did it appertain to him to seat himself at the table
+     of so great a king, or of so valiant a man as he had shown himself
+     by his actions that day." He added, also, with a noble air, "Dear
+     sir, do not make a poor meal, because the Almighty God has not
+     gratified your wishes in the event of this day; for be assured that
+     my lord and father will show you every honor and friendship in his
+     power, and will arrange your ransom so reasonably, that you will
+     henceforward always remain friends. In my opinion, you have cause
+     to be glad that the success of this battle did not turn out as you
+     desired; for you have this day acquired such high renown for
+     prowess, that you have surpassed all the best knights on your side.
+     I do not, dear sir, say this to flatter you; for all those of our
+     side who have seen and observed the actions of each party, have
+     unanimously allowed this to be your due, and decree you the prize
+     and garland for it." At the end of this speech, there were murmurs
+     of praise heard from every one; and the French said the prince had
+     spoken nobly and truly, and that he would be one of the most
+     gallant princes in Christendom if God should grant him life to
+     pursue his career of glory.
+
+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 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 enamoured 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 not unfitly so
+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:--
+
+     Count Gaston Phoebus de Foix, of whom I am now speaking, was at
+     that time fifty-nine years old; and I must say, that although I
+     have seen very many knights, kings, princes, and others, I have
+     never seen any so handsome, either in the form of his limbs and
+     shape, or in countenance, which was fair and ruddy, with gray and
+     amorous eyes, that gave delight whenever he chose to express
+     affection. He was so perfectly formed, one could not praise him too
+     much. He loved earnestly the things he ought to love, and hated
+     those which it was becoming him so to hate. He was a prudent
+     knight, full of enterprise and wisdom. He had never any men of
+     abandoned character with him, reigned prudently, and was constant
+     in his devotions. There were regular nocturnals from the Psalter,
+     prayers from the rituals to the Virgin, to the Holy Ghost, and
+     from the burial service. He had every day distributed as alms, at
+     his gate, five florins in small coin, to all comers. He was liberal
+     and courteous in his gifts, and well knew how to take when it was
+     proper, and to give back where he had confidence. He mightily loved
+     dogs above all other animals, and during the summer and winter
+     amused himself much with hunting....
+
+     When he quitted his chamber at midnight for supper, twelve servants
+     bore each a lighted torch before him, which were placed near his
+     table, and gave a brilliant light to the apartment. The hall was
+     full of knights and squires, and there were plenty of tables laid
+     out for any person who chose to sup. No one spoke to him at his
+     table, unless he first began a conversation. He commonly ate
+     heartily of poultry, but only the wings and thighs; for in the
+     daytime, he neither ate nor drank much. He had great pleasure in
+     hearing minstrels; as he himself was a proficient in the science,
+     and made his secretaries sing songs, ballads, and roundelays. He
+     remained at table about two hours, and was pleased when fanciful
+     dishes were served up to him, which having seen, he immediately
+     sent them to the tables of his knights and squires.
+
+     In short, every thing considered, though I had before been in
+     several courts of kings, dukes, princes, counts, and noble ladies,
+     I was never at one that pleased me more, nor was I ever more
+     delighted with feats of arms, than at this of the Count de Foix.
+     There were knights and squires to be seen in every chamber, hall,
+     and court, going backwards and forwards, and conversing on arms and
+     amours. Every thing honorable was there to be found. All
+     intelligence from distant countries was there to be learnt, for the
+     gallantry of the count had brought visitors from all parts of the
+     world. It was there I was informed of the greater part of those
+     events which had happened in Spain, Portugal, Arragon, Navarre,
+     England, Scotland, and on the borders of Languedoc; for I saw,
+     during my residence, knights and squires arrive from every nation.
+     I therefore made inquiries from them, or from the count himself,
+     who cheerfully conversed with me.
+
+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.
+
+We take now a somewhat long forward step, in going, as we do, at once
+from Froissart to Rabelais. Comines, lying between, 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 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 the
+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 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
+to 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 Motteux; 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:--
+
+     Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious
+     pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my
+     writings), Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's which is
+     entitled, "The Banquet," whilst he was setting forth the praises of
+     his schoolmaster Socrates (without all question the prince of
+     philosophers), amongst other discourses to that purpose said that
+     he resembled the Sileni. Sileni of old were little boxes, like
+     those we now may see in the shops of apothecaries, painted on the
+     outside with wanton toyish figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled
+     geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts,
+     and other such counterfeited pictures, at pleasure, to excite
+     people unto laughter, as Silenus himself, who was the foster-father
+     of good Bacchus, was wont to do; but within those capricious
+     caskets called Sileni, were carefully preserved and kept many rich
+     and fine drugs, such as balm, ambergreese, amomon, musk, civet,
+     with several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great
+     price. Just such another thing was Socrates; for to have eyed his
+     outside, and esteemed of him by his exterior appearance, you would
+     not have given the peel of an onion for him, so deformed he was in
+     body, and ridiculous in his gesture.... Opening this box, you would
+     have found within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than
+     human understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning,
+     invincible courage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of
+     mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible disregard of all that
+     for which men commonly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel,
+     toil, and turmoil themselves.
+
+     Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble
+     tend? For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly
+     fools of ease and leisure,... are too ready to judge, that there is
+     nothing in them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and
+     recreative lies;... therefore is it, that you must open the book,
+     and seriously consider of the matter treated in it. Then shall you
+     find that it containeth things of far higher value than the box did
+     promise; that is to say, that the subject thereof is not so
+     foolish, as by the title at the first sight it would appear to be.
+
+     ...Did you ever see a dog with a marrow-bone in his mouth?... Like
+     him, you must, by a sedulous lecture [reading], and frequent
+     meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow; that is, my
+     allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be
+     signified by these Pythagorical symbols;... the most glorious
+     doctrines and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth our
+     religion, as matters of the public state and life economical.
+
+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?
+
+     Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was
+     couching his Iliad and Odyssey, had any thought upon those
+     allegories which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius,
+     Phornutus, squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again
+     from them? If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come
+     near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little
+     dreamed of by Homer, as the gospel sacraments were by Ovid, in his
+     Metamorphoses; though a certain gulligut friar, and true
+     bacon-picker, would have undertaken to prove it, if, perhaps, he
+     had met with as very fools as himself, and, as the proverb says, "a
+     lid worthy of such a kettle."
+
+     If you give any credit thereto, why do not you the same to these
+     jovial new Chronicles of mine? Albeit, when I did dictate them, I
+     thought thereof no more than you, who possibly were drinking the
+     whilst, as I was. For, in the composing of this lordly book, I
+     never lost nor bestowed any more, nor any other time, than what was
+     appointed to serve me for taking of my bodily refection; that is,
+     whilst I was eating and drinking. And, indeed, that is the fittest
+     and most proper hour, wherein to write these high matters and deep
+     sentences; as Homer knew very well, the paragon of all philologues,
+     and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace calls him,
+     although a certain sneaking jobbernol alleged that his verses
+     smelled more of the wine than oil.
+
+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 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' 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 the allegorical sense hidden deep
+underneath the monstrous mass of the Rabelaisian buffoonery. A more
+judicial 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:--
+
+     And, therefore, to make an end of this Prologue, even as I give
+     myself to an hundred thousand panniers-full of fair devils, body
+     and soul,... in case that I lie so much as one single word in this
+     whole history; after the like manner, St. Anthony's fire burn you,
+     Mahoom's disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your
+     side, and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize
+     upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender
+     and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into
+     you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into
+     sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly
+     believe all that I shall relate unto you in this present Chronicle.
+
+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":--
+
+     The story requireth that we relate that which happened unto six
+     pilgrims, who came from Sebastian near to Nantes; and who, for
+     shelter that night, being afraid of the enemy, had hid themselves
+     in the garden upon the chickling peas, among the cabbages and
+     lettuces. Gargantua, finding himself somewhat dry, asked whether
+     they could get any lettuce to make him a salad; and, hearing that
+     there were the greatest and fairest in the country,--for they were
+     as great as plum trees, or as walnut trees,--he would go thither
+     himself, and brought thence in his hand what he thought good, and
+     withal carried away the six pilgrims, who were in so great fear
+     that they did not dare to speak nor cough. Washing them, therefore,
+     first at the fountain, the pilgrims said one to another, softly,
+     "What shall we do? We are almost drowned here amongst these
+     lettuce: shall we speak? But, if we speak, he will kill us for
+     spies." And, as they were thus deliberating what to do, Gargantua
+     put them, with the lettuce, into a platter of the house, as large
+     as the huge tun of the White Friars of the Cistertian order; which
+     done, with oil, vinegar, and salt, he ate them up, to refresh
+     himself a little before supper, and had already swallowed up five
+     of the pilgrims, the sixth being in the platter, totally hid under
+     a lettuce, except his bourbon, or staff, that appeared, and nothing
+     else. Which Grangousier [Gargantua's father] seeing, said to
+     Gargantua, "I think that is the horn of a shell snail: do not eat
+     it."--"Why not?" said Gargantua; "they are good all this month:"
+     which he no sooner said, but, drawing up the staff, and therewith
+     taking up the pilgrim, he ate him very well, then drank a terrible
+     draught of excellent white wine. The pilgrims, thus devoured, made
+     shift to save themselves, as well as they could, by drawing their
+     bodies out of the reach of the grinders of his teeth, but could
+     not escape from thinking they had been put in the lowest dungeon of
+     a prison. And, when Gargantua whiffed the great draught, they
+     thought to have drowned in his mouth, and the flood of wine had
+     almost carried them away into the gulf of his stomach.
+     Nevertheless, skipping with their bourbons, as St. Michael's
+     palmers used to do, they sheltered themselves from the danger of
+     that inundation under the banks of his teeth. But one of them, by
+     chance, groping, or sounding the country with his staff, to try
+     whether they were in safety or no, struck hard against the cleft of
+     a hollow tooth, and hit the mandibulary sinew or nerve of the jaw,
+     which put Gargantua to very great pain, so that he began to cry for
+     the rage that he felt. To ease himself, therefore, of his smarting
+     ache, he called for his tooth-picker, and, rubbing towards a young
+     walnut-tree, where they lay skulking, unnestled you my gentlemen
+     pilgrims. For he caught one by the legs, another by the scrip,
+     another by the pocket, another by the scarf, another by the band of
+     the breeches; and the poor fellow that had hurt him with the
+     bourbon, him he hooked to him by [another part of his clothes]....
+     The pilgrims, thus dislodged, ran away.
+
+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, differs from 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 Liliput 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 the form of an abbey, but 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 everybody to eat, and nobody to prepare:--
+
+     All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but
+     according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of
+     their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labor,
+     sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None
+     did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor
+     to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all
+     their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this
+     one clause to be observed,--
+
+
+     DO WHAT THOU WILT.
+
+
+     ...By this liberty they entered into a very laudable emulation, to
+     do all of them what they saw did please one. If any of the gallants
+     or ladies should say, Let us drink, they would all drink. If any
+     one of them said, Let us play, they all played. If one said, Let us
+     go a walking into the fields, they went all.... There was neither
+     he nor she amongst them, but could read, write, sing, play upon
+     several musical instruments, speak five or six several languages,
+     and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and prose.
+     Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so
+     dextrous and skilful both on foot and a horseback, more brisk and
+     lively, more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of
+     weapons than were there. Never were seen ladies so proper and
+     handsome, so miniard and dainty, less forward, or more ready with
+     their hand, and with their needle, in every honest and free action
+     belonging to that sex, than were there. For this reason, when the
+     time came, that any man of the said abbey, either at the request of
+     his parents, or for some other cause, had a mind to go out of it,
+     he carried along with him one of the ladies, namely her who had
+     before that accepted him as her lover, and they were married
+     together.
+
+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, 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:--
+
+     Fail not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian,
+     and Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists;
+     and by frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of that
+     other world, called the microcosm, which is man. And at some of the
+     hours of the day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy
+     Scriptures: first, in Greek, the New Testament, with the Epistles
+     of the Apostles; and then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In brief,
+     let me see thee an abyss and bottomless pit of knowledge....
+
+     ...It behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to
+     cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and, by faith formed in
+     charity, to cleave unto him, so that thou mayst never be separated
+     from him by thy sins. Suspect the abuses of the world. Set not thy
+     heart upon vanity, for this life is transitory; but the Word of the
+     Lord endureth forever.
+
+"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:--
+
+     He had threescore and three tricks to come by it [money] at his
+     need, of which the most honorable and most ordinary was in manner
+     of thieving, secret purloining, and filching, for he was a wicked,
+     lewd rogue, a cozener, drinker, roysterer, rover, and a very
+     dissolute and debauched fellow, if there were any in Paris;
+     otherwise, and in all matters else, the best and most virtuous man
+     in the world; and he was still contriving some plot, and devising
+     mischief against the serjeants and the watch.
+
+     At one time he assembled three or four especial good hacksters and
+     roaring boys; made them in the evening drink like Templars,
+     afterwards led them till they came under St. Genevieve, or about
+     the college of Navarre, and, at the hour that the watch was coming
+     up that way,--which he knew by putting his sword upon the pavement,
+     and his ear by it, and, when he heard his sword shake, it was an
+     infallible sign that the watch was near at that instant,--then he
+     and his companions took a tumbrel or garbage-cart, and gave it the
+     brangle, hurling it with all their force down the hill, and then
+     ran away upon the other side; for in less than two days he knew all
+     the streets, lanes, and turnings in Paris, as well as his _Deus
+     det._
+
+     At another time he laid, in some fair place where the said watch
+     was to pass, a train of gunpowder, and, at the very instant that
+     they went along, set fire to it, and then made himself sport to see
+     what good grace they had in running away, thinking that St.
+     Anthony's fire had caught them by the legs.... In one of his
+     pockets he had a great many little horns full of fleas and lice,
+     which he borrowed from the beggars of St. Innocent, and cast them,
+     with small canes or quills to write with, into the necks of the
+     daintiest gentlewomen that he could find, yea, even in the church;
+     for he never seated himself above in the choir, but always in the
+     body of the church amongst the women, both at mass, at vespers, and
+     at sermon.
+
+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":--
+
+     By the means of a little Pantagruelism (which, you know, is _a
+     certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune_), you see
+     me now ["at near seventy years of age," his translator says], hale
+     and cheery, as sound as a bell, and ready to drink, if you will.
+
+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!
+
+
+
+
+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 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, divided into 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:--
+
+     That men by various ways arrive at the same end; Whether the
+     governor of a place ought himself to go out to parley; Of liars; Of
+     quick or slow speech; A proceeding of some ambassadors; Various
+     events from the same counsel; Of cannibals; That we laugh and cry
+     from the same thing; Of smells; That the mind hinders itself; Of
+     thumbs; Of virtue; Of coaches; Of managing the will; Of cripples;
+     Of experience.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 self-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
+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:--
+
+     Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset
+     forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to
+     myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no
+     consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My
+     powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to
+     the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that,
+     having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein
+     recover some traits of my conditions and humors, and by that means
+     preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of
+     me. Had my intention been to seek the world's favor, I should
+     surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties. I desire therein
+     to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary
+     manner, without study and artifice; for it is myself I paint. My
+     defects are therein to be read to the life, and my imperfections
+     and my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me.
+     If I had lived among those nations which (they say) yet dwell under
+     the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure thee I would
+     most willingly have painted myself quite fully, and quite naked.
+     Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book. There's no reason
+     thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a
+     subject. Therefore, farewell.
+
+     From Montaigne, the 12th of June, 1580.
+
+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 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, Shakspeare 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, "Of 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:--
+
+     For a boy of quality, then, I say, I would also have his friends
+     solicitous to find him out a tutor who has rather a well-made than
+     a well-filled head, seeking, indeed, both the one and the other,
+     but rather of the two to prefer manners and judgment to mere
+     learning, and that this man should exercise his charge after a new
+     method.
+
+     'Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their
+     pupil's ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the
+     business of the pupil is only to repeat what the others have said:
+     now, I would have a tutor to correct this error, and that, at the
+     very first, he should, according to the capacity he has to deal
+     with, put it to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste
+     things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes
+     opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving him to open it for
+     himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent and speak,
+     but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.... Let him
+     make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and
+     accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet
+     rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own.... 'Tis a sign of
+     crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
+     condition it was swallowed: the stomach has not performed its
+     office, unless it have altered the form and condition of what was
+     committed to it to concoct....
+
+     Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift every thing he reads,
+     and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon
+     trust. Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to
+     him than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of
+     opinions be propounded to, and laid before, him; he will himself
+     choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt.
+
+     "Che, non men che saper, dubbiar m'aggrata." DANTE, _Inferno_, xl.
+     93.
+
+     ["That doubting pleases me, not less than knowing." LONGFELLOW'S
+     _Translation_.]
+
+     For, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own
+     reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who
+     follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is
+     inquisitive after nothing. "Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se
+     vindicet." ["We are under no king; let each look to
+     himself."--SENECA, _Ep._ 33.] Let him, at least, know that he
+     knows. It will be necessary that he imbibe their knowledge, not
+     that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no matter if he
+     forget where he had his learning, provided he know how to apply it
+     to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every one, and are
+     no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after;
+     'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both
+     he and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several
+     sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they
+     find them; but themselves afterward make the honey, which is all
+     and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the
+     several fragments he borrows from others he will transform and
+     shuffle together, to compile a work that shall be absolutely his
+     own; that is to say, his judgment: his instruction, labor, and
+     study tend to nothing else but to form that.... Conversation with
+     men is of very great use, and travel into foreign countries;... to
+     be able chiefly to give an account of the humors, manners, customs,
+     and laws of those nations where he has been, and that we may whet
+     and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against those of others....
+
+     In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those
+     who live only in the records of history: he shall, by reading those
+     books, converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages.
+
+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 had myself 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
+mould 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 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:--
+
+     In my infancy, and before I began to speak, he [my father]
+     committed me to the care of a German,... totally ignorant of our
+     language, but very fluent, and a great critic, in Latin. This man,
+     whom he had fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained
+     with a very great salary, for this only end, had me continually
+     with him: to him there were also joined two others, of inferior
+     learning, to attend me, and to relieve him, who all of them spoke
+     to me in no other language but Latin. As to the rest of his family,
+     it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself nor my mother, man
+     nor maid, should speak any thing in my company, but such Latin
+     words as every one had learned only to gabble with me. It is not to
+     be imagined how great an advantage this proved to the whole family:
+     my father and my mother by this means learned Latin enough to
+     understand it perfectly well, and to speak it to such a degree as
+     was sufficient for any necessary use, as also those of the servants
+     did, who were most frequently with me. In short, we Latined it at
+     such a rate, that it overflowed to all the neighboring villages,
+     where there yet remain, that have established themselves by custom,
+     several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools. As for what
+     concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood
+     either French or Perigordin ["Perigordin" is Montaigne's name for
+     the dialect of his province, Perigord (Gascony)], any more than
+     Arabic; and, without art, book, grammar, or precept, whipping, or
+     the expense of a tear, I had, by that time, learned to speak as
+     pure Latin as my master himself, for I had no means of mixing it up
+     with any other.
+
+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 _reveillé_ that broke the slumbers of this
+hopeful young heir of Montaigne:--
+
+     Some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of
+     children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them
+     violently and over-hastily from sleep, wherein they are much more
+     profoundly involved than we, he [the father] caused me to be
+     wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never
+     unprovided of a musician for that purpose.... The good man, being
+     extremely timorous of any way failing in a thing he had so wholly
+     set his heart upon, suffered himself at last to be overruled by the
+     common opinions:... he sent me, at six years of age, to the College
+     of Guienne, at that time the best and most flourishing in France.
+
+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:--
+
+     A woman, fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread,
+     cried and lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her
+     throat, where she thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious
+     fellow that was brought to her, seeing no outward tumor nor
+     alteration, supposing it to be only a conceit taken at some crust
+     of bread that had hurt her as it went down, caused her to vomit,
+     and, unseen, threw a crooked pin into the basin, which the woman no
+     sooner saw, but, believing she had cast it up, she presently found
+     herself eased of her pain....
+
+     Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field, have, I make
+     no question, heard the story of the falconer, who, having earnestly
+     fixed his eyes upon a kite in the air, laid a wager that he would
+     bring her down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it
+     was said; for _the tales I borrow, I charge upon the consciences of
+     those from whom I have them_.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+     Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of
+     Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to
+     receive the enemy's charge, "by reason that" (I shall here steal
+     Plutarch's own words, which are better than mine) "he by so doing
+     deprived himself of the violent impression the motion of running
+     adds to the first shock of arms, and hindered that clashing of the
+     combatants against one another, which is wont to give them greater
+     impetuosity and fury, especially when they come to rush in with
+     their utmost vigor, their courages increasing by the shouts and the
+     career; 'tis to render the soldiers' ardor, as a man may say, more
+     reserved and cold." This is what he says. But, if Cæsar had come by
+     the worse, why might it not as well have been urged by another,
+     that, on the contrary, the strongest and most steady posture of
+     fighting is that wherein a man stands planted firm, without motion;
+     and that they who are steady upon the march, closing up, and
+     reserving their force within themselves for the push of the
+     business, have a great advantage against those who are disordered,
+     and who have already spent half their breath in running on
+     precipitately to the charge? Besides that, an army is a body made
+     up of so many individual members, it is impossible for it to move
+     in this fury with so exact a motion as not to break the order of
+     battle, and that the best of them are not engaged before their
+     fellows can come on to help them.
+
+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. This 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 subjoined, you will have the
+sensation of coming suddenly upon a treasure-trove of coined proverbial
+wisdom:--
+
+     Our minds are never at home, but ever beyond home.
+
+     I will take care, if possible, that my death shall say nothing that
+     my life has not said.
+
+     Life in itself is neither good nor bad: it is the place of what is
+     good or bad.
+
+     Knowledge should not be stuck on to the mind, but incorporated in
+     it.
+
+     Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our
+     nature.
+
+     Age wrinkles the mind more than the face.
+
+     Habit is a second nature.
+
+     Hunger cures love.
+
+     It is easier to get money than to keep it.
+
+     Anger has often been the vehicle of courage.
+
+     It is more difficult to command than to obey.
+
+     A liar should have a good memory.
+
+     Ambition is the daughter of presumption.
+
+     To serve a prince, you must be discreet and a liar.
+
+     We learn to live when life has passed.
+
+     The mind is ill at ease when its companion has the colic.
+
+     We are all richer than we think, but we are brought up to go
+     a-begging.
+
+     The greatest masterpiece of man is... to be born at the right time.
+
+We append a saying of Montaigne's not found in Mr. St. John's
+collection:--
+
+     There is no so good man who so squares all his thoughts and actions
+     to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten
+     times in his life.
+
+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, 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:--
+
+     You sow your fruits [crops] that he [the king] may ravage them; you
+     furnish and fill your houses that he may have something to steal;
+     you bring up your daughters that he may slake his luxury; you bring
+     up your sons that he may take them to be butchered in his wars, to
+     be the ministers of his avarice, the executors of his vengeance;
+     you disfigure your forms by labor [your own selves you inure to
+     toil] that he may cocker himself in delight, and wallow in nasty
+     and disgusting pleasure.
+
+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 is
+boldly, and not presumptuously, paralleled by Mr. St. John 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
+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:--
+
+     I gently turn aside, and avert my eyes from the stormy and cloudy
+     sky I have before me, which, thanks be to God, I regard without
+     fear, but not without meditation and study, and amuse myself in the
+     remembrance of my better years:--
+
+     "Animus quod perdidit, optat, Atque in præterita se totus imagine
+     versat."
+
+       PETRONIUS, c. 128.
+
+     ["The mind desires what it has lost, and in fancy flings itself
+     wholly into the past."]
+
+     Let childhood look forward, and age backward: is not this the
+     signification of Janus' double face? Let years haul me along if
+     they will, but it shall be backward; as long as my eyes can discern
+     the pleasant season expired, I shall now and then turn them that
+     way; though it escape from my blood and veins, I shall not,
+     however, root the image of it out of my memory:--
+
+     "Hoc est Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui."
+
+       MARTIAL, x. 23, 7.
+
+     ["'Tis to live twice to be able to enjoy former life again."]
+
+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:--
+
+     I have enjoined myself to dare to say all that I dare to do; even
+     thoughts that are not to be published, displease me; the worst of
+     my actions and qualities do not appear to me so evil, as I find it
+     evil and base not to dare to own them....
+
+     ...I am greedy of making myself known, and I care not to how many,
+     provided it be truly.... Many things that I would not say to a
+     particular individual, I say to the people; and, as to my most
+     secret thoughts, send my most intimate friends to my book.... For
+     my part, if any one should recommend me as a good pilot, as being
+     very modest, or very chaste, I should owe him no thanks [because
+     the recommendation would be false].
+
+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:--
+
+     In farewells, we oftener than not heat our affections towards the
+     things we take leave of: I take my last leave of the pleasures of
+     this world; these are our last embraces.
+
+Mr. Emerson, in his "Representative Men," makes Montaigne stand for The
+Sceptic. Sceptic 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
+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,
+speaking as "moral philosopher," in his "Essays," 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 Shakspeare. 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 "The Great Eastern" overlay 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 if he
+had 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. 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 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
+prepared, 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.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: 1613-1680 (La Bruyère: 1646 (?)-1696; Vauvenargues:
+1715-1747).
+
+
+In La Rochefoucauld 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 the "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. 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 sceptical 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 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:"--
+
+     No. 11. The passions often beget their contraries. Avarice
+     sometimes produces prodigality, and prodigality avarice: we are
+     often firm from weakness, and daring from timidity.
+
+     No. 13. Our self-love bears more impatiently the condemnation of
+     our tastes than of our opinions.
+
+How much just detraction from all mere natural human greatness is
+contained in the following penetrative maxim!--
+
+     No. 18. Moderation is a fear of falling into the envy and contempt
+     which those deserve who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it
+     is a vain parade of the strength of our mind; and, in short, the
+     moderation of men in their highest elevation is a desire to appear
+     greater than their fortune.
+
+What effectively quiet satire in these few words!--
+
+     No. 19. We have strength enough to bear the ills of others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 20. The steadfastness of sages is only the art of locking up
+     their uneasiness in their hearts.
+
+Of course, had it lain in the author's chosen line to do so, he might,
+with as much apparent truth, have pointed out, 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:--
+
+     No. 22. Philosophy triumphs easily over troubles passed and
+     troubles to come, but present troubles triumph over it.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 34. If we had no pride, we should not complain of that of
+     others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 39. Interest [self-love] speaks all sorts of languages, and
+     plays all sorts of parts, even that of disinterestedness.
+
+     No. 49. We are never so happy, or so unhappy, as we imagine.
+
+     No. 78. The love of justice is, in most men, only the fear of
+     suffering injustice.
+
+What a subtly unsoldering distrust the following maxim introduces into
+the sentiment of mutual friendship!--
+
+     No. 83. What men have called friendship, is only a partnership, a
+     mutual accommodation of interests, and an exchange of good offices:
+     it is, in short, only a traffic, in which self-love always proposes
+     to gain something.
+
+     No. 89. Every one complains of his memory, and no one complains of
+     his judgment.
+
+How striking, from its artful suppression of strikingness, is the first
+following, and what a wide, easy sweep of well-bred satire it
+contains!--
+
+     No. 93. Old men like to give good advice, to console themselves for
+     being no longer able to give bad examples.
+
+     No. 119. We are so much accustomed to disguise ourselves to others,
+     that, at last, we disguise ourselves to ourselves.
+
+     No. 127. The true way to be deceived, is to think one's self
+     sharper than others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 132. It is easier to be wise for others, than to be so for
+     one's self.
+
+How pitilessly this inquisitor pursues his prey, "the human soul, into
+all its useless hiding-places!--
+
+     No. 138. We would rather speak ill of ourselves, than not talk of
+     ourselves.
+
+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:"--
+
+     No. 139. One of the causes why we find so few people who appear
+     reasonable and agreeable in conversation, is, that there is
+     scarcely any one who does not think more of what he wishes to say,
+     than of replying exactly to what is said to him. The cleverest and
+     the most compliant think it enough to show an attentive air; while
+     we see in their eyes and in their mind a wandering from what is
+     said to them, and a hurry to return to what they wish to say,
+     instead of considering that it is a bad way to please or to
+     persuade others, to try so hard to please one's self, and that to
+     listen well is one of the greatest accomplishments we can have in
+     conversation.
+
+If we are indignant at the maxims following, it is probably rather
+because they are partly true than, because they are wholly false:--
+
+     No. 144. We are not fond of praising, and, without interest, we
+     never praise any one. Praise is a cunning flattery, hidden and
+     delicate, which, in different ways, pleases him who gives and him
+     who receives it. The one takes it as a reward for his merit: the
+     other gives it to show his equity and his discernment.
+
+     No. 146. We praise generally only to be praised.
+
+     No. 147. Few are wise enough to prefer wholesome blame to
+     treacherous praise.
+
+     No. 149. Disclaiming praise is a wish to be praised a second time.
+
+     No. 152. If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others
+     could not hurt us.
+
+     No. 184. We acknowledge our faults in order to atone, by our
+     sincerity, for the harm they do us in the minds of others.
+
+     No. 199. The desire to appear able often prevents our becoming so.
+
+     No. 201. Whoever thinks he can do without the world, deceives
+     himself much; but whoever thinks the world cannot do without him,
+     deceives himself much more.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 214. Valor, in private soldiers, is a perilous calling, which
+     they have taken to in order to gain their living.
+
+Here is, perhaps, the most current of all La Rochefoucauld's maxims:--
+
+     No. 218. Hypocrisy is a homage which vice renders to virtue.
+
+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!--
+
+     No. 226. Too great eagerness to requite an obligation is a kind of
+     ingratitude.
+
+     No. 298. The gratitude of most men is only a secret desire to
+     receive greater favors.
+
+     No. 304. We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive
+     those whom we bore.
+
+     No. 318. Why should we have memory enough to retain even the
+     smallest particulars of what has happened to us, and yet not have
+     enough to remember how often we have told them to the same
+     individual?
+
+The first following maxim satirizes both princes and courtiers. It might
+be entitled, "How to insult a prince, and not suffer for your
+temerity":--
+
+     No. 320. To praise princes for virtues they have not, is to insult
+     them with impunity.
+
+     No. 347. We find few sensible people, except those who are of our
+     way of thinking.
+
+     No. 409. We should often be ashamed of our best actions, if the
+     world saw the motives which cause them.
+
+     No. 424. We boast of faults the reverse of those we have: when we
+     are weak, we boast of being stubborn.
+
+Here, at length, is a maxim that does not depress,--that animates you:--
+
+     No. 432. To praise noble actions heartily, is in some sort to take
+     part in them.
+
+The following is much less exhilarating:--
+
+     No. 454. There are few instances in which we should make a bad
+     bargain, by giving up the good that is said of us, on condition
+     that nothing bad be said.
+
+This, also:--
+
+     No. 458. Our enemies come nearer to the truth, in the opinions they
+     form of us, than we do ourselves.
+
+Here is a celebrated maxim, vainly "suppressed" by the author, after
+first publication:--
+
+     No. 583. In the adversity of our best friends, we always find
+     something which does not displease us.
+
+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.
+
+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:--
+
+     Every thing has been said; and one comes too late, after more than
+     seven thousand years that there have been men, and men who have
+     thought.
+
+La Bruyère has something to say, and that at length unusual for him, of
+pulpit eloquence. We select a few specimen sentences:--
+
+     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 amusement, 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
+     pronounces against. The orator pleases some, displeases others, and
+     has an understanding with all in one thing,--that as he does not
+     seek to render them better, so they do not think of becoming
+     better.
+
+The almost cynical acerbity of the preceding is ostensibly relieved of
+an obvious application to certain illustrious contemporary examples
+among preachers by the following open allusion to Bossuet and
+Bourdaloue:--
+
+     The Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] and Father Bourdaloue make me think
+     of Demosthenes and Cicero. Both of them, masters of pulpit
+     eloquence, have had the fortune of great models; the one has made
+     bad critics, the other, bad imitators.
+
+Here is a happy instance of La 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:--
+
+     An honest man who says, Yes, or No, deserves to be believed; his
+     character swears for him.
+
+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:--
+
+     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 Bruyère 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 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:--
+
+     Corneille subjects us to his characters and to his ideas; Racine
+     accommodates himself to ours. The one paints men as they ought to
+     be; the other paints them as they are. There is more in the former
+     of what one admires, and of what one ought even to imitate; there
+     is more in the latter of what one observes in others, or of what
+     one experiences in one's self. The one inspires, astonishes,
+     masters, instructs; the other pleases, moves, touches, penetrates.
+     Whatever there is most beautiful, most noble, most imperial, in the
+     reason is made use of by the former; by the latter, whatever is
+     most seductive and most delicate in passion. You find in the
+     former, maxims, rules, and precepts; in the latter, taste and
+     sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of Corneille; you are
+     more shaken and more softened in those of Racine. Corneille is more
+     moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make Sophocles his
+     model; the other owes more to Euripides.
+
+* * *
+
+Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La 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 when he went to the wars. His culture
+always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know
+Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his
+accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the
+small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost
+immediately after he abandoned a military career which had been fruitful
+to him of hardship, but not of promotion. In spite of all that was thus
+against him, Vauvenargues, in those years, few and evil, that were his,
+thought finely and justly enough to earn for himself a lasting place in
+the literary history of his nation. He was in the eighteenth century of
+France, without being of it. You have to separate him in thought from
+the infidels and the "philosophers" of his time. He belongs in spirit to
+an earlier age. His moral and intellectual kindred was with such as
+Pascal, far more than with such as Voltaire. Vauvenargues is, however, a
+writer for the few, instead of for the many. His fame is high, but it is
+not wide. Historically, he forms a stepping-stone of transition to a
+somewhat similar nineteenth-century name, that of Joubert. A very few
+sentences of his will suffice to indicate to our readers the quality of
+Vauvenargues. Self-evidently, the following antithesis drawn by him
+between Corneille and Racine is subtly and ingeniously thought, as well
+as very happily expressed--this, whatever may be considered to be its
+aptness in point of literary appreciation:--
+
+     Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them;
+     Racine's inspire them without saying them.
+
+Here is a good saying:--
+
+     It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising.
+
+There is worldly wisdom also here:--
+
+     He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account,
+     practises a large and noble economy.
+
+Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is
+recalled by this:--
+
+     The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.
+
+So much for Vauvenargues.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+LA FONTAINE.
+
+1621-1695.
+
+
+La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the
+firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any
+nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet
+as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever
+among the French, by long proof more secure, than is La Fontaine's, of
+universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the
+most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain
+thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true
+poetry,--this surely is an achievement entitling La Fontaine to
+monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.
+
+Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at 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 debauched manners in
+life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to
+condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation.
+As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking
+friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any
+sterling worth of character felt in him, as by an exhaustless,
+easy-going good-nature, that, despite his social insipidity, made La
+Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy
+to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La
+Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait
+in his character would he perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed
+not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude,
+no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man
+in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring
+personal regard. The mirror of _bonhomie_ (easy-hearted
+good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost
+untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's
+case. On his amiable side--a full hemisphere or more of the man--it sums
+him up completely. Twenty years long, this mirror of _bonhomie_ was
+domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the
+celebrated Madame de la 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 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 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, 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 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, we shall use Elizur
+Wright's translation,--a meritorious one, still master of the field
+which, near fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here
+expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to forty-four. The additions are
+not ungraceful, but they encumber somewhat the Attic neatness and
+simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly
+broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines--lines of
+six feet--obligatory in French verse. He rhymes irregularly, at choice,
+and makes his verses long or short, as pleases him. The closing verse of
+the present piece is, in accordance with the intended majesty of the
+representation, an Alexandrine.
+
+          The Oak one day said to the Reed,
+      "Justly might you dame Nature blame:
+      A wren's weight would bow down your frame;
+          The lightest wind that chance may make
+          Dimple the surface of the lake
+          Your head bends low indeed,
+      The while, like Caucasus, my front
+      To meet the branding sun is wont,
+      Nay, more, to take the tempest's brunt.
+
+          A blast you feel, I feel a breeze.
+      Had you been born beneath my roof,
+      Wide-spread, of leafage weather-proof,
+          Less had you known your life to tease;
+          I should have sheltered you from storm.
+          But oftenest you rear your form
+      On the moist limits of the realm of wind.
+      Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned."
+          "Your pity," answers him the Heed,
+      "Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain;
+      I more than you may winds disdain.
+          I bend, and break not. You, indeed,
+      Against their dreadful strokes till now
+      Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow:
+      But wait we for the end."
+                                Scarce had he spoke,
+      When fiercely from the far horizon broke
+      The wildest of the children, fullest fraught
+      With terror, that till then the North had brought.
+          The tree holds good; the reed it bends.
+          The wind redoubled might expends,
+      And so well works that from his bed
+      Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head
+      Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead.
+
+In the fable of the "Rat retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies
+the monks. "With French _finesse_, he hits his mark by expressly
+avoiding it. "What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No,
+but a Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always
+ready with his help to the needy!"
+
+      The sage Levantines have a tale
+          About a rat that weary grew
+      Of all the cares which life assail,
+          And to a Holland cheese withdrew.
+      His solitude was there profound,
+      Extending through his world so round.
+      Our hermit lived on that within;
+      And soon his industry had been
+      With claws and teeth so good,
+          That in his novel heritage,
+          He had in store for wants of age,
+      Both house and livelihood.
+      What more could any rat desire?
+          He grew fat, fair, and round.
+          God's blessings thus redound
+      To those who in his vows retire.
+      One day this personage devout,
+      Whose kindness none might doubt,
+      Was asked, by certain delegates
+      That came from Rat United States,
+      For some small aid, for they
+      To foreign parts were on their way,
+      For succor in the great cat-war:
+      Ratopolis beleaguered sore,
+          Their whole republic drained and poor,
+      No morsel in their scrips they bore.
+          Slight boon they craved, of succor sure
+      In days at utmost three or four.
+      "My friends," the hermit said,
+      "To worldly things I'm dead.
+      How can a poor recluse
+      To such a mission be of use?
+      What can he do but pray
+      That God will aid it on its way?
+      And so, my friends, it is my prayer
+      That God will have you in his care."
+      His well-fed saintship said no more,
+      But in their faces shut the door.
+          What think you, reader, is the service,
+      For which I use this niggard rat?
+          To paint a monk? No, but a dervise.
+      A monk, I think, however fat,
+      Must be more bountiful than that.
+
+The fable entitled "Death and the Dying" is much admired for its union
+of pathos with wit. "The Two Doves" is another of La Fontaine's more
+tender inspirations. "The Mogul's Dream" is a somewhat ambitious flight
+of the fabulist's muse. On the whole, however, the masterpiece among the
+fables of La Fontaine is that of "The Animals Sick of the Plague." Such
+at least is the opinion of critics in general. The idea of this fable is
+not original with La Fontaine. The homilists of the middle ages used a
+similar fiction to enforce on priests the duty of impartiality in
+administering the sacrament, so called, of confession. We give this
+famous fable as our closing specimen of La Fontaine:--
+
+                The sorest ill that Heaven hath
+            Sent oil this lower world in wrath,--
+            The plague (to call it by its name),
+                    One single day of which
+                Would Pluto's ferryman enrich,
+            Waged war on beasts, both wild and tame.
+            They died not all, but all were sick:
+            No hunting now, by force or trick,
+            To save what might so soon expire.
+            No food excited their desire:
+            Nor wolf nor fox now watched to slay
+            The innocent and tender prey.
+                            The turtles fled,
+            So love and therefore joy were dead.
+            The lion council held, and said,
+            "My friends, I do believe
+            This awful scourge for which we grieve,
+            Is for our sins a punishment
+            Most righteously by Heaven sent.
+            Let us our guiltiest beast resign,
+            A sacrifice to wrath divine.
+            Perhaps this offering, truly small,
+            May gain the life and health of all.
+            By history we find it noted
+            That lives have been just so devoted.
+            Then let us all turn eyes within,
+            And ferret out the hidden sin.
+            Himself, let no one spare nor flatter,
+            But make clean conscience in the matter.
+            For me, my appetite has played the glutton
+            Too much and often upon mutton.
+            What harm had e'er my victims done?
+                            I answer, truly, None.
+            Perhaps, sometimes, by hunger pressed,
+                  I've eat the shepherd with the rest.
+                  I yield myself if need there be;
+                  And yet I think, in equity,
+            Each should confess his sins with me;
+            For laws of right and justice cry,
+            The guiltiest alone should die."
+            "Sire," said the fox, "your majesty
+            Is humbler than a king should be,
+            And over-squeamish in the case.
+                  What! eating stupid sheep a crime?
+                  No, never, sire, at any time.
+
+            It rather was an act of grace,
+            A mark of honor to their race.
+            And as to shepherds, one may swear,
+                    The fate your majesty describes,
+            Is recompense less full than fair
+                    For such usurpers o'er our tribes."
+
+                    Thus Renard glibly spoke,
+            And loud applause from listeners broke.
+            Of neither tiger, boar, nor bear,
+            Did any keen inquirer dare
+            To ask for crimes of high degree;
+                    The fighters, biters, scratchers, all
+            From every mortal sin were free;
+                    The very dogs, both great and small,
+                    Were saints, as far as dogs could be.
+
+                    The ass, confessing in his turn,
+            Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:
+            "I happened through a mead to pass;
+            The monks, its owners, were at mass:
+            Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass,
+                    And, add to these the devil, too,
+                    All tempted me the deed to do.
+            I browsed the bigness of my tongue:
+            Since truth must out, I own it wrong."
+            On this, a hue and cry arose,
+            As if the beasts were all his foes.
+            A wolf, haranguing lawyer-wise,
+            Denounced the ass for sacrifice,--
+            The bald-pate, scabby, ragged lout,
+            By whom the plague had come, no doubt.
+            His fault was judged a hanging crime.
+                    What! eat another's grass? Oh, shame!
+            The noose of rope, and death sublime,
+                    For that offence were all too tame!
+                    And soon poor Grizzle felt the same.
+
+            Thus human courts acquit the strong,
+            And doom the weak, as therefore wrong.
+
+It is suitable to add, in conclusion, that La Fontaine is a crucial
+author for disclosing the irreconcilable difference that exists, at
+bottom, between the Englishman's and the Frenchman's idea of poetry. No
+English-speaker, heir of Shakspeare and Milton, will ever be able to
+satisfy a Frenchman with admiration such as he can conscientiously
+profess for the poetry of La Fontaine.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+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 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 of 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 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
+(Shakspeare),--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 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 mould, 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:--
+
+     M. JOURDAIN. I have the greatest desire in the world to be learned;
+     and it vexes me more than I can tell, that my father and mother
+     did not make me learn thoroughly all the sciences when I was young.
+
+     PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY. This is a praiseworthy feeling. _Nam sine
+     doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago._ You understand this, and you
+     have, no doubt, a knowledge of Latin?
+
+     M. JOUR. Yes; but act as if I had none. Explain to me the meaning
+     of it.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The meaning of it is, that, without science, life is an
+     image of death.
+
+     M. JOUR. That Latin is quite right.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Have you any principles, any rudiments, of science?
+
+     M. JOUR. Oh, yes! I can read and write.
+
+     PROP. PHIL. With what would you like to begin? Shall I teach you
+     logic?
+
+     M. JOUR. And what may this logic be?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. It is that which teaches us the three operations of the
+     mind.
+
+     M. JOUR. What are they--these three operations of the mind?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The first, the second, and the third. The first is to
+     conceive well by means of universals; the second, to judge well by
+     means of categories; and the third, to draw a conclusion aright by
+     means of the figures Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio, Baralipton,
+     etc.
+
+     M. JOUR. Pooh! what repulsive words! This logic does not by any
+     means suit me. Teach me something more enlivening.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Will you learn moral philosophy?
+
+     M. JOUR. Moral philosophy?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Yes.
+
+     M. JOUR. What does it say, this moral philosophy?
+
+     PROF. PHIL.It treats of happiness, teaches men to moderate their
+     passions, and--
+
+     M. JOUR. No, none of that. I am devilishly hot-tempered, and
+     morality, or no morality, I like to give full vent to my anger
+     whenever I have a mind to it.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Would you like to learn physics?
+
+     M. JOUR. And what have physics to say for themselves?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Physics are that science which explains the principles
+     of natural things and the properties of bodies; which discourses of
+     the nature of the elements, of metals, minerals, stones, plants,
+     and animals; which teaches us the cause of all the meteors, the
+     rainbow, the _ignis fatuus,_ comets, lightning, thunder,
+     thunderbolts, rain, snow, hail, and whirlwinds.
+
+     M. JOUR. There is too much hullaballoo in all that, too much riot
+     and rumpus.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Very good.
+
+     M. JOUR. And now I want to intrust you with a great secret. I am in
+     love with a lady of quality, and I should be glad if you would help
+     me to write something to her in a short letter which I mean to drop
+     at her feet.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Very well.
+
+     M. JOUR. That will be gallant, will it not?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Undoubtedly. Is it verse you wish to write to her?
+
+     M. JOUR. Oh, no! not verse.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. You only wish prose?
+
+     M. JOUR. No. I wish for neither verse nor prose.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. It must be one or the other.
+
+     M. JOUR.Why?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Because, sir, there is nothing by which we can express
+     ourselves except prose or verse.
+
+     M. JOUR. There is nothing but prose or verse?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. No, sir. Whatever is not prose, is verse; and whatever
+     is not verse, is prose.
+
+     M. JOUR.And when we speak, what is that, then?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Prose.
+
+     M. JOUR. What! when I say, "Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give
+     me my nightcap," is that prose?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Yes, sir.
+
+     M. JOUR. Upon my word, I have been speaking prose these forty years
+     without being aware of it; and I am under the greatest obligation
+     to you for informing me of it. Well, then, I wish to write to her
+     in a letter, "Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of
+     love;" but I would have this worded in a genteel manner, and turned
+     prettily.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Say that the fire of her eyes has reduced your heart to
+     ashes; that you suffer day and night for her, tortures--
+
+     M. JOUR. No, no, no, I don't any of that. I simply wish for what I
+     tell you,--"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of
+     love."
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Still, you might amplify the thing a little.
+
+     M. JOUR. No, I tell you, I will have nothing but these very words
+     in the letter; but they must be put in a fashionable way, and
+     arranged as they should be. Pray show me a little, so that I may
+     see the different ways in which they can be put.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. They may be put first of all, as you have said, "Fair
+     Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of love;" or else, "Of
+     love die make me, fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes;" or, "Your
+     beautiful eyes of love make me, fair Marchioness, die;" or, "Die of
+     love your beautiful eyes, fair Marchioness, make me;" or else, "Me
+     make your beautiful eyes die, fair Marchioness, of love."
+
+     M. JOUR. But of all these ways, which is the best?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The one you said,--"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful
+     eyes make me die of love."
+
+     M. JOUR. Yet I have never studied, and I did all right off at the
+     first shot.
+
+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 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:--
+
+     TRISSOTIN. Sonnet to the Princess Urania on her Fever, Your
+     prudence sure is fast asleep, That thus luxuriously you keep And
+     lodge magnificently so Your very hardest-hearted foe.
+
+     BÉLISE. Ah! what a pretty beginning!
+
+     ARMANDE. What a charming turn it has!
+
+     PHILAMINTE. He alone possesses the talent of making easy verses.
+
+     ARM. We must yield to _prudence fast asleep_.
+
+     BÉL. _Lodge one's very hardest-hearted foe_ is full of charms for
+     me.
+
+     PHIL. I like _luxuriously_ and _magnificently_: these two adverbs
+     joined together sound admirably.
+
+     BÉL. Let us hear the rest.
+
+     TRISS. Your prudence sure is fast asleep, That thus luxuriously you
+     keep And lodge magnificently so Your very hardest-hearted foe.
+
+     ARM. _Prudence fast asleep._
+
+     BÉL. _To lodge one's foe._
+
+     PHIL. _Luxuriously_ and _magnificently_.
+
+     TRISS. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say, From out your
+     chamber, decked so gay, Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,
+     Bold she assails your lovely life.
+
+     BÉL. Ah! gently. Allow me to breathe, I beseech you.
+
+     ARM.Give us time to admire, I beg.
+
+     PHIL. One feels, at hearing these verses, an indescribable
+     something which goes through one's inmost soul, and makes one feel
+     quite faint.
+
+     ARM. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say, From out your chamber,
+     decked so gay--
+
+     How prettily _chamber, decked so gay_, is said here! And with what
+     wit the metaphor is introduced!
+
+     PHIL. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say.
+
+     Ah! in what an admirable taste that _whate'er men say _is! To my
+     mind, the passage is invaluable.
+
+     ARM. My heart is also in love with _whate'er men say_.
+
+     BÉL. I am of your opinion: _whate'er men say_ is a happy
+     expression.
+
+     ARM. I wish I had written it.
+
+     BÉL. It is worth a whole poem.
+
+     PHIL. But do you, like me, thoroughly understand the wit of it?
+
+     ARM. _and_ BÉL. Oh! Oh!
+
+     PHIL. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say. Although another
+     should take the fever's part, pay no attention; laugh at the
+     gossips.
+
+      Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,
+      Whate'er men say, whate'er men say.
+
+This _whate'er men say_, says a great deal more than it seems. I do not
+know if every one is like me, but I discover in it a hundred meanings.
+
+     BÉL. It is true that it says more than its size seems to imply.
+
+     PHIL. (_to_ TRISSOTIN). But when you wrote this charming _whate'er
+     men say_, did you yourself understand all its energy? Did you
+     realize all that it tells us? And did you then think that you were
+     writing something so witty?
+
+     TRISS. Ah! ah!
+
+     ARM. I have likewise the _ingrate_ in my head,--this ungrateful,
+     unjust, uncivil fever that ill-treats people who entertain her.
+
+     PHIL. In short, both the stanzas are admirable. Let us come quickly
+     to the triplets, I pray.
+
+     ARM. Ah! once more, _whate'er men say_, I beg.
+
+     TRISS. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BÉL. _Whate'er men say!_
+
+     TRISS. From out your chamber, decked so gay,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BÉL. _Chamber decked so gay!_
+
+     TRISS. Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BÉL. That _ingrate_ fever!
+
+     TRISS. Bold she assails your lovely life.
+
+     PHIL. _Your lovely life!_
+
+     ARM. _and_ BÉL. Ah!
+
+     TRISS. What! reckless of your ladyhood, Still fiercely seeks to
+     shed your blood,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BÉL. Ah!
+
+     TRISS. And day and night to work you harm. When to the baths
+     sometime you've brought her, No more ado, with your own arm Whelm
+     her and drown her in the water.
+
+     PHIL. Ah! It is quite overpowering.
+
+     BÉL. I faint.
+
+     ARM. I die from pleasure.
+
+     PHIL. A thousand sweet thrills seize one.
+
+     ARM. _When to the baths sometime you've brought her,_
+
+     BÉL. _No more ado, with your own arm_
+
+     PHIL. _Whelm her and drown her in the water._ With your own arm,
+     drown her there in the baths.
+
+     ARM. In your verses we meet at each step with charming beauty.
+
+     BÉL. One promenades through them with rapture.
+
+     PHIL. One treads on fine things only.
+
+     ARM. They are little lanes all strewn with roses.
+
+     TRISS. Then, the sonnet seems to you--
+
+     PHIL. Admirable, new; and never did any one make any thing more
+     beautiful.
+
+     BÉL. (_to_ HENRIETTE). What! my niece, you listen to what has been
+     read without emotion! You play there but a sorry part!
+
+     HEN. We each of us play the best part we can, my aunt; and to be a
+     wit does not depend on our will.
+
+     TRISS. My verses, perhaps, are tedious to you.
+
+     HEN. No. I do not listen.
+
+     PHIL. Ah! Let us hear the epigram.
+
+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 Molière's time a fashionable study rendered
+such by the contemporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents
+the limitations imposed upon her sex:--
+
+     ARM. It is insulting our sex too grossly to limit our intelligence
+     to the power of judging of a skirt, of the make of a garment, of
+     the beauties of lace, or of a new brocade.
+
+     BÉL. We must rise above this shameful condition, and bravely
+     proclaim our emancipation.
+
+     TRISS. Every one knows my respect for the fairer sex, and that, if
+     I render homage to the brightness of their eyes, I also honor the
+     splendor of their intellect.
+
+     PHIL. And our sex does you justice in this respect: but we will
+     show to certain minds who treat us with proud contempt, that women
+     also have knowledge; that, like men, they can hold learned
+     meetings--regulated, too, by better rules; that they wish to unite
+     what elsewhere is kept apart, join noble language to deep learning,
+     reveal nature's laws by a thousand experiments; and, on all
+     questions proposed, admit every party, and ally themselves to none.
+
+     TRISS. For order, I prefer peripateticism.
+
+     PHIL. For abstractions, I love platonism.
+
+     ARM. Epicurus pleases me, for his tenets are solid.
+
+     BÉL. I agree with the doctrine of atoms; but I find it difficult to
+     understand a vacuum, and I much prefer subtile matter.
+
+     TRISS. I quite agree with Descartes about magnetism.
+
+     ARM. I like his vortices.
+
+     PHIL. And I, his falling worlds.
+
+     ARM. I long to see our assembly opened, and to distinguish
+     ourselves by some great discovery.
+
+     TRISS. Much is expected from your enlightened knowledge, for nature
+     has hidden few things from you.
+
+     PHIL. For my part, I have, without boasting, already made one
+     discovery; I have plainly seen men in the moon.
+
+     BÉL. I have not, I believe, as yet quite distinguished men, but I
+     have seen steeples as plainly as I see you.
+
+     ARM. In addition to natural philosophy, we will dive into grammar,
+     history, verse, ethics, and politics.
+
+     PHIL. I find in ethics charms which delight my heart; it was
+     formerly the admiration of great geniuses: but I give the
+     preference to the Stoics, and I think nothing so grand as their
+     founder.
+
+"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
+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 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:--
+
+     ORGON (_to_ CLÉANTE). Brother, pray excuse me: you will kindly
+     allow me to allay my anxiety by asking news of the family. (_To_
+     DORINE, _a maid-servant_.) Has every thing gone on well these last
+     two days? What has happened? How is everybody?
+
+     DOR. The day before yesterday our mistress was very feverish from
+     morning to night, and suffered from a most extraordinary headache.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. Tartuffe! He is wonderfully well, stout and fat, with blooming
+     cheeks and ruddy lips.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. In the evening she felt very faint, and the pain in her head
+     was so great that she could not touch any thing at supper.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. He ate his supper by himself before her, and very devoutly
+     devoured a brace of partridges, and half a leg of mutton hashed.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. She spent the whole of the night without getting one wink of
+     sleep: she was very feverish, and we had to sit up with her until
+     the morning.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. Overcome by a pleasant sleepiness, he passed from the table to
+     his room, and got at once into his warmed bed, where he slept
+     comfortably till the next morning.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. At last yielding to our persuasions, she consented to be bled,
+     and immediately felt relieved.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. He took heart right valiantly, and fortifying his soul against
+     all evils, to make up for the blood which our lady had lost, drank
+     at breakfast four large bumpers of wine.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. Now, at last, they are both well; and I will go and tell our
+     lady how glad you are to hear of her recovery.
+
+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:--
+
+     MADAME PERNELLE. I can never believe, my son, that he would commit
+     so base an action.
+
+     ORG. What?
+
+     PER. Good people are always subject to envy.
+
+     ORG. What do you mean, mother?
+
+     PER. That you live after a strange sort here, and that I am but too
+     well aware of the ill will they all bear him.
+
+     ORG. What has this ill will to do with what I have just told you?
+
+     PER. I have told it you a hundred times when you were young, that
+     in this world virtue is ever liable to persecution, and that,
+     although the envious die, envy never dies.
+
+     ORG. But what has this to do with what has happened to-day?
+
+     PER. They have concocted a hundred foolish stories against him.
+
+     ORG. I have already told you that I saw it all myself.
+
+     PER. The malice of evil-disposed persons is very great.
+
+     ORG. You would make me swear, mother! I tell you that I saw his
+     audacious attempt with my own eyes.
+
+     PER. Evil tongues have always some venom to pour forth; and here
+     below, there is nothing proof against them.
+
+     ORG. You are maintaining a very senseless argument. I saw it, I
+     tell you,--saw it with my own eyes! what you can call s-a-w, saw!
+     Must I din it over and over into your ears, and shout as loud as
+     half a dozen people?
+
+     PER. Gracious goodness! appearances often deceive us! We must not
+     always judge by what we see.
+
+     ORG. I shall go mad!
+
+     PER. We are by nature prone to judge wrongly, and good is often
+     mistaken for evil.
+
+     ORG. I ought to look upon his desire of seducing my wife as
+     charitable?
+
+     PER. You ought to have good reasons before you accuse another, and
+     you should have waited till you were quite sure of the fact.
+
+     ORG. Heaven save the mark! how could I be more sure? I suppose,
+     mother, I ought to have waited till--you will make me say something
+     foolish.
+
+     PER. In short, his soul is possessed with too pure a zeal; and I
+     cannot possibly conceive that he would think of attempting what you
+     accuse him of.
+
+     ORG. If you were not my mother, I really don't know what I might
+     now say to you, you make me so savage.
+
+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:--
+
+     LOY. (to DORINE _at the farther part of the stage_). Good-day, my
+     dear sister; pray let me speak to your master.
+
+     DOR. He is with friends, and I do not think he can see any one just
+     now.
+
+     LOY. I would not be intrusive. I feel sure that he will find
+     nothing unpleasant in my visit: in fact, I come for something which
+     will be very gratifying to him.
+
+     DOR. What is your name?
+
+     LOY. Only tell him that I come from Mr. Tartuffe, for his benefit.
+
+     DOR. (to ORGON). It is a man who comes in a civil way from Mr.
+     Tartuffe, on some business which will make you glad, he says.
+
+     CLÉ. (to ORGON). You must see who it is, and what the man wants.
+
+     ORG. (to CLÉANTE). He is coming, perhaps, to settle matters between
+     us in a friendly way. How, in this case, ought I to behave to him?
+
+     CLÉ. Don't show any resentment, and, if he speaks of an agreement,
+     listen to him.
+
+     LOY. (to ORGON). Your servant, sir! May heaven punish whoever
+     wrongs you! and may it be as favorable to you, sir, as I wish!
+
+     ORG. (_aside to_ CLÉANTE). This pleasant beginning agrees with my
+     conjectures, and argues some sort of reconciliation.
+
+     LOY. All your family was always dear to me, and I served your
+     father.
+
+     ORG. Sir, I am sorry and ashamed to say that I do not know who you
+     are, neither do I remember your name.
+
+     LOY. My name is Loyal; I was born in Normandy, and am a royal
+     bailiff in spite of envy. For the last forty years I have had the
+     good fortune to fill the office, thanks to Heaven, with great
+     credit; and I come, sir, with your leave, to serve you the writ of
+     a certain order.
+
+     ORG. What! you are here--
+
+     LOY. Gently, sir, I beg. It is merely a summons,--a notice for you
+     to leave this place, you and yours; to take away all your goods and
+     chattels, and make room for others, without delay or adjournment,
+     as hereby decreed.
+
+     ORG. I! leave this place?
+
+     LOY. Yes, sir; if you please. The house incontestably belongs, as
+     you are well aware, to the good Mr. Tartuffe. He is now lord and
+     master of your estates, according to a deed I have in my keeping.
+     It is in due form, and cannot be challenged.
+
+     DAMIS (_to_ MR. LOYAL). This great impudence is, indeed, worthy of
+     all admiration.
+
+     LOY. (_to_ DAMIS). Sir, I have nothing at all to do with you.
+     (_Pointing to_ ORGON.) My business is with this gentleman. He is
+     tractable and gentle, and knows too well the duty of a gentleman to
+     try to oppose authority.
+
+     ORG. But--
+
+     LOY. Yes, sir: I know that you would not, for any thing, show
+     contumacy; and that you will allow me, like a reasonable man, to
+     execute the orders I have received....
+
+The scene gives in conclusion some spirited by-play 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:--
+
+     ORG. Well, mother, you see whether I am right; and you can judge of
+     the rest by the writ. Do you at last acknowledge his rascality?
+
+     PER. I am thunderstruck, and can scarcely believe my eyes and ears.
+
+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:--
+
+     TAR. (_stopping_ ORGON). Gently, sir, gently; not so fast, I beg.
+     You have not far to go to find a lodging, and you are a prisoner in
+     the king's name.
+
+     ORG. Wretch! you had reserved this shaft for the last; by it you
+     finish me, and crown all your perfidies.
+
+     TAR. Your abuse has no power to disturb me, and I know how to
+     suffer every thing for the sake of Heaven.
+
+     CLÉ. Your moderation is really great, we must acknowledge.
+
+     DA. How impudently the infamous wretch sports with Heaven!
+
+     TAR. Your anger cannot move me. I have no other wish but to fulfil
+     my duty.
+
+     MARIANNE. You may claim great glory from the performance of this
+     duty: it is a very honorable employment for you.
+
+     TAR. The employment cannot be otherwise than glorious, when it
+     comes from the power that sends me here.
+
+     ORG. But do you remember that my charitable hand, ungrateful
+     scoundrel, raised you from a state of misery?
+
+     TAR. Yes, I know what help I have received from you; but the
+     interest of my king is my first duty. The just obligation of this
+     sacred duty stifles in my heart all other claims; and I would
+     sacrifice to it friend, wife, relations, and myself with them.
+
+     ELMIRE. The impostor!
+
+     DOR. With what treacherous cunning he makes a cloak of all that men
+     revere!...
+
+     TAR. (_to the_ OFFICER). I beg of you, sir, to deliver me from all
+     this noise, and to act according to the orders you have received.
+
+     OFFICER. I have certainly put off too long the discharge of my
+     duty, and you very rightly remind me of it. To execute my order,
+     follow me immediately to the prison in which a place is assigned to
+     you.
+
+     TAR. Who? I, sir?
+
+     OFFICER. Yes, you.
+
+     TAR. Why to prison?
+
+     OFFICER. To you I have no account to render. (_To_ ORGON.) Pray,
+     sir, recover from your great alarm. We live under a king [Louis
+     XIV.] who is an enemy to fraud,--a king who can read the heart, and
+     whom all the arts of impostors cannot deceive. His great mind,
+     endowed with delicate discernment, at all times sees things in
+     their true, light.... He annuls, by his sovereign will, the terms
+     of the contract by which you gave him [Tartuffe] your property. He
+     moreover forgives you this secret offence in which you were
+     involved by the flight of your friend. This to reward the zeal
+     which you once showed for him in maintaining his rights, and to
+     prove that his heart, when it is least expected, knows how to
+     recompense a good action. Merit with him is never lost, and he
+     remembers good better than evil.
+
+     DOR. Heaven be thanked!
+
+     PER. Ah! I breathe again.
+
+     EL. What a favorable end to our troubles!
+
+     MAR. Who would have foretold it?
+
+     ORG. (to TARTUFFE, _as the_ OFFICER _leads him off_). Ah, wretch!
+     now you  are--
+
+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.
+
+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 Shakspeare,
+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 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 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 universally 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 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 defence 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 defence
+of Arnauld, the writer went on to take up a line of offence 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:--
+
+     "You know," he said, "that the ruling passion of persons in that
+     rank of life [the rank of gentleman] is 'the point of honor,' which
+     is perpetually driving them into acts of violence apparently quite
+     at variance with Christian piety; so that, in fact, they would be
+     almost all of them excluded from our confessionals, had not our
+     fathers relaxed a little from the strictness of religion, to
+     accommodate themselves to the weakness of humanity. Anxious to keep
+     on good terms, both with the gospel, by doing their duty to God,
+     and with the men of the world, by showing charity to their
+     neighbor, they needed all the wisdom they possessed to devise
+     expedients for so nicely adjusting matters as to permit these
+     gentlemen to adopt the methods usually resorted to for vindicating
+     their honor without wounding their consciences, and thus reconcile
+     things apparently so opposite to each other as piety and the point
+     of honor."...
+
+     "I should certainly [so replies M. Montalte, with the most
+     exquisite irony couched under a cover of admiring simplicity],--I
+     should certainly have considered the thing perfectly impracticable,
+     if I had not known, from what I have seen of your fathers, that
+     they are capable of doing with ease what is impossible to other
+     men. This led me to anticipate that they must have discovered some
+     method for meeting the difficulty,--a method which I admire, even
+     before knowing it, and which I pray you to explain to me."
+
+     "Since that is your view of the matter," replied the monk, "I
+     cannot refuse you. Know, then, that this marvellous principle is
+     our grand method of _directing the intention_--the importance of
+     which, in our moral system, is such, that I might almost venture to
+     compare it with the doctrine of probability. You have had some
+     glimpses of it in passing, from certain maxims which I mentioned to
+     you. For example, when I was showing you how servants might execute
+     certain troublesome jobs with a safe conscience, did you not remark
+     that it was simply by diverting their intention from the evil to
+     which they were accessory, to the profit which they might reap from
+     the transaction? Now, that is what we call _directing the
+     intention_. You saw, too, that, were it not for a similar
+     divergence of _the mind_, those who give money for benefices might
+     be downright simoniacs. But I will now show you this grand method
+     in all its glory, as it applies to the subject of homicide,--a
+     crime which it justifies in a thousand instances,--in order that,
+     from this startling result, you may form an idea of all that it is
+     calculated to effect."
+
+     "I foresee already," said I, "that, according to this mode, every
+     thing will be permitted: it will stick at nothing."
+
+     "You always fly from the one extreme to the other," replied the
+     monk; "prithee avoid that habit. For just to show you that we are
+     far from permitting every thing, let me tell you that we never
+     suffer such a thing as a formal intention to sin, with the sole
+     design of sinning; and, if any person whatever should persist in
+     having no other end but evil in the evil that he does, we break
+     with him at once; such conduct is diabolical. This holds true,
+     without exception of age, sex, or rank. But when the person is not
+     of such a wretched disposition as this, we try to put in practice
+     our method of _directing the intention_, which consists in his
+     proposing to himself, as the end of his actions, some allowable
+     object. Not that we do not endeavor, as far as we can, to dissuade
+     men from doing things forbidden; but, when we cannot prevent the
+     action, we at least purify the motive, and thus correct the
+     viciousness of the mean by the goodness of the end. Such is the way
+     in which our fathers have contrived to permit those acts of
+     violence to which men usually resort in vindication of their honor.
+     They have no more to do than to turn off their intention from the
+     desire of vengeance, which is criminal, and direct it to a desire
+     to defend their honor, which, according to us, is quite
+     warrantable. And in this way our doctors discharge all their duty
+     towards God and towards man. By permitting the action, they gratify
+     the world; and by purifying the intention, they give satisfaction
+     to the gospel. This is a secret, sir, which was entirely unknown to
+     the ancients; the world is indebted for the discovery entirely to
+     our doctors. You understand it now, I hope?"
+
+     "Perfectly," was my reply. "To men you grant the outward material
+     effect of the action, and to God you give the inward and spiritual
+     movement of the intention; and, by this equitable partition, you
+     form an alliance between the laws of God and the laws of men. But,
+     my dear sir, to be frank with you, I can hardly trust your
+     premises, and I suspect that your authors will tell another tale."
+
+     "You do me injustice," rejoined the monk; "I advance nothing but
+     what I am ready to prove, and that by such a rich array of
+     passages, that altogether their number, their authority, and their
+     reasonings, will fill you with admiration. To show you, for
+     example, the alliance which our fathers have formed between the
+     maxims of the gospel and those of the world, by thus regulating the
+     intention, let me refer you to Reginald. (_In praxi._, liv. xxi.,
+     num. 62, p. 260.) [These, and all that follow, are verifiable
+     citations from real and undisputed Jesuit authorities, not to this
+     day repudiated by that order.] 'Private persons are forbidden to
+     avenge themselves; for St. Paul says to the Romans (ch. 12th),
+     "Recompense to no man evil for evil;" and Ecclesiasticus says (ch.
+     28th), "He that taketh vengeance shall draw on himself the
+     vengeance of God, and his sins will not be forgotten." Besides all
+     that is said in the gospel about forgiving offences, as in the 6th
+     and 18th chapters of St. Matthew.'"
+
+     "Well, father, if after that, he [Reginald] says any thing contrary
+     to the Scripture, it will, at least, not be from lack of scriptural
+     knowledge. Pray, how does he conclude?"
+
+     "You shall hear," he said. "From all this it appears that a
+     military man may demand satisfaction on the spot from the person
+     who has injured him--not, indeed, with the intention of rendering
+     evil for evil, but with that of preserving his honor--_non ut malum
+     pro malo reddat, sed ut conservat honorem_. See you how carefully,
+     because the Scripture condemns it, they guard against the intention
+     of rendering evil for evil? This is what they will tolerate on no
+     account. Thus Lessius observes (De Just., liv. ii., c. 9, d. 12, n.
+     79), that, 'If a man has received a blow on the face, he must on no
+     account have an intention to avenge himself; but he may lawfully
+     have an intention to avert infamy, and may, with that view, repel
+     the insult immediately, even at the point of the sword--_etiam cum
+     gladio_.' So far are we from permitting any one to cherish the
+     design of taking vengeance on his enemies, that our fathers will
+     not allow any even to _wish their death_--by a movement of hatred.
+     'If your enemy is disposed to injure you,' says Escobar, 'you have
+     no right to wish his death, by a movement of hatred; though you
+     may, with a view to save yourself from harm.' So legitimate,
+     indeed, is this wish, with such an intention, that our great
+     Hurtado de Mendoza says that 'we may _pray God_ to visit with
+     speedy death those who are bent on persecuting us, if there is no
+     other way of escaping from it.'" (In his book, De Spe, vol. ii., d.
+     15, sec. 4, 48.)
+
+     "May it please your reverence," said I, "the Church has forgotten
+     to insert a petition to that effect among her prayers."
+
+     "They have not put every thing into the prayers that one may
+     lawfully ask of God," answered the monk. "Besides, in the present
+     case, the thing was impossible, for this same opinion is of more
+     recent standing than the Breviary. You are not a good chronologist,
+     friend. But, not to wander from the point, let me request your
+     attention to the following passage, cited by Diana from Gaspar
+     Hurtado (De Sub. Pecc., diff. 9; Diana, p. 5; tr. 14, r. 99), one
+     of Escobar's four-and-twenty fathers: 'An incumbent may, without
+     any mortal sin, desire the decease of a life-renter on his
+     benefice, and a son that of his father, and rejoice when it
+     happens; provided always it is for the sake of the profit that is
+     to accrue from the event, and not from personal aversion.'"
+
+     "Good," cried I. "That is certainly a very happy hit, and I can
+     easily see that the doctrine admits of a wide application. But yet
+     there are certain cases, the solution of which, though of great
+     importance for gentlemen, might present still greater
+     difficulties."
+
+     "Propose such, if you please, that we may see," said the monk.
+
+     "Show me, with all your directing of the intention," returned I,
+     "that it is allowable to fight a duel."
+
+     "Our great Hurtado de Mendoza," said the father, "will satisfy you
+     on that point in a twinkling. 'If a gentleman,' says he, in a
+     passage cited by Diana, 'who is challenged to fight a duel, is well
+     known to have no religion, and if the vices to which he is openly
+     and unscrupulously addicted, are such as would lead people to
+     conclude, in the event of his refusing to fight, that he is
+     actuated, not by the fear of God, but by cowardice, and induce them
+     to say of him that he was a _hen_, and not a man--_gallina, et non
+     vir_; in that case he may, to save his honor, appear at the
+     appointed spot--not, indeed, with the express intention of fighting
+     a duel, but merely with that of defending himself, should the
+     person who challenged him come there unjustly to attack him. His
+     action in this case, viewed by itself, will be perfectly
+     indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one's stepping into a
+     field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a person, and
+     defending one's self in the event of being attacked? And thus the
+     gentleman is guilty of no sin whatever; for in fact, it cannot be
+     called accepting a challenge at all, his intention being directed
+     to other circumstances, and the acceptance of a challenge
+     consisting in an express intention to fight, which we are supposing
+     the gentleman never had.'"
+
+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:--
+
+     I have been asked why I employed a pleasant, jocose, and diverting
+     style. I reply... I thought it a duty to write so as to be
+     comprehended by women and men of the world, that they might know
+     the danger of their maxims and propositions which were then
+     universally propagated.... I have been asked, lastly, if I myself
+     read all the books which I quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so,
+     I must have passed a great part of my life in reading very bad
+     books; but I read Escobar twice through, and I employed some of my
+     friends in reading the others. But I did not make use of a single
+     passage without having myself read it in the book from which it is
+     cited, without having examined the subject of which it treats, and
+     without having read what went before and followed, so that I might
+     run no risk of quoting an objection as an answer, which would have
+     been blameworthy and unfair.
+
+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 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 "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 sceptic of
+the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This sceptic represents his
+own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:--
+
+     'I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is,
+     nor what I am myself. I am in a frightful ignorance of all things.
+     I do not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is,
+     and that very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which
+     reflects upon every thing and upon itself, and is no better
+     acquainted with itself than with any thing else. I see these
+     appalling spaces of the universe which enclose me, and I find
+     myself tethered in one corner of this immense expansion without
+     knowing why I am stationed in this place rather than in another, or
+     why this moment of time which is given me to live is assigned me at
+     this point rather than at another of the whole eternity that has
+     preceded me, and of that which is to follow me.
+
+     'I see nothing but infinities on every side, which enclose me like
+     an atom, and like a shadow which endures but for an instant, and
+     returns no more.
+
+     'All that I know, is that I am soon to die; but what I am most
+     ignorant of, is that very death which I am unable to avoid.
+
+     'As I know not whence I came, so I know not whither I go; and I
+     know only, that in leaving this world I fall forever either into
+     nothingness or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing
+     which of these two conditions is to be eternally my lot. Such is my
+     state,--full of misery, of weakness, and of uncertainty.
+
+     'And from all this I conclude, that I ought to pass all the days
+     of my life without a thought of trying to learn what is to befall
+     me hereafter. Perhaps in my doubts I might find some enlightenment;
+     but I am unwilling to take the trouble, or go a single step in
+     search of it; and, treating with contempt those who perplex
+     themselves with such solicitude, my purpose is to go forward
+     without forethought and without fear to try the great event, and
+     passively to approach death in uncertainty of the eternity of my
+     future condition.'
+
+     Who would desire to have for a friend a man who discourses in this
+     manner? Who would select such a one for the confidant of his
+     affairs? Who would have recourse to such a one in his afflictions?
+     And, in fine, for what use of life could such a man be destined?
+
+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:--
+
+     Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking
+     reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to
+     crush him. An exhalation, a drop of water, suffices to kill him.
+     But were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble
+     than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and
+     knows the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe
+     knows nothing of it.
+
+     Our whole dignity consists, then, in 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."
+
+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:)--
+
+     Cæsar was too old, it seems to me, to amuse himself with conquering
+     the world. This amusement was well enough for Augustus or
+     Alexander; they were young people, whom it is difficult to stop;
+     but Cæsar ought to have been more mature.
+
+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:--
+
+     I lay it down as a fact, that, if all men knew what others say of
+     them, there would not be four friends in the world.
+
+Here is one of the most current of Pascal's sayings:--
+
+     Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.
+
+The following "Thought" condenses the substance of the book proposed,
+into three short sentences:--
+
+     The knowledge of God without that of our misery produces pride. The
+     knowledge of our misery without that of God gives despair. The
+     knowledge of Jesus Christ is intermediate, because therein we find
+     God and our misery.
+
+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:--
+
+     Console thyself; thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found
+     me.
+
+     I thought on thee in my agony; such drops of blood I shed for thee.
+
+It is austerity again, but not unjust austerity, that speaks as
+follows:--
+
+     Religion is a thing so great that those who would not take the
+     pains to seek it if it is obscure, should be deprived of it. What
+     do they complain of, then, if it is such that they could find it by
+     seeking it?
+
+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 practising, 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 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 lustre 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 and 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.
+
+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:--
+
+THE ROCKS, Sunday, June 28, 1671.
+
+     You have amply made up to me my late losses; I have received two
+     letters from you which have filled me with transports of joy. The
+     pleasure I take in reading them is beyond all imagination. If I
+     have in any way contributed to the improvement of your style I did
+     it in the thought that I was laboring for the pleasure of others,
+     not for my own. But Providence, who has seen fit to separate us so
+     often, and to place us at such immense distances from each other,
+     has repaid me a little for the privation in the charms of your
+     correspondence, and still more in the satisfaction you express in
+     your situation, and the beauty of your castle; you represent it to
+     me with an air of grandeur and magnificence that enchants me. I
+     once saw a similar account of it by the first Madame de Grignan;
+     but I little thought at that time, that all these beauties were one
+     day to be at your command. I am very much obliged to you for having
+     given me so particular an account of it. If I could be tired in
+     reading your letters, it would not only betray a very bad taste in
+     me, but would likewise show that I could have very little love or
+     friendship for you. Divest yourself of the dislike you have taken
+     to circumstantial details. I have often told you, and you ought
+     yourself to feel the truth of this remark, that they are as dear to
+     us from those we love, as they are tedious and disagreeable from
+     others. If they are displeasing to us, it is only from the
+     indifference we feel for those who write them. Admitting this
+     observation to be true, I leave you to judge what pleasure yours
+     afford me. It is a fine thing, truly, to play the great lady, as
+     you do at present.
+
+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 wholly admire such maternal affection.
+But we should not criticise it too severely.
+
+We choose next a marvellously 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:--
+
+     I was at Versailles last Saturday with the Villarses.... At three
+     the king, the queen, Monsieur [eldest brother to the king], Madame
+     [that brother's wife], Mademoiselle [that brother's eldest
+     unmarried daughter], and every thing else which is royal, together
+     with Madame de Montespan [the celebrated mistress of the king] and
+     train, and all the courtiers, and all the ladies,--all, in short,
+     which constitutes the court of France, is assembled in the
+     beautiful apartment of the king's, which you remember. All is
+     furnished divinely, all is magnificent. Such a thing as heat is
+     unknown; you pass from one place to another without the slightest
+     pressure. A game at _reversis_ [the description is of a gambling
+     scene, in which Dangeau figures as a cool and skilful gamester]
+     gives the company a form and a settlement. The king and Madame de
+     Montespan keep a bank together; different tables are occupied by
+     Monsieur, the queen, and Madame de Soubise, Dangeau and party,
+     Langlée and party. Everywhere you see heaps of louis d'ors; they
+     have no other counters. I saw Dangeau play, and thought what fools
+     we all were beside him. He dreams of nothing but what concerns the
+     game; he wins where others lose; he neglects nothing, profits by
+     every thing, never has his attention diverted; in short, his
+     science bids defiance to chance. Two hundred thousand francs in ten
+     days, a hundred thousand crowns in a month, these are the pretty
+     memorandums he puts down in his pocket-book. He was kind enough to
+     say that I was partners with him, so that I got an excellent seat.
+     I made my obeisance to the king, as you told me; and he returned it
+     as if I had been young and handsome.... The duke said a thousand
+     kind things without minding a word he uttered. Marshal de Lorges
+     attacked me in the name of the Chevalier de Grignan; in short,
+     _tutti quanti_ [the whole company]. You know what it is to get a
+     word from everybody you meet. Madame de Montespan talked to me of
+     Bourbon, and asked me how I liked Vichi, and whether the place did
+     me good. She said that Bourbon, instead of curing a pain in one of
+     her knees, injured both.... Her size is reduced by a good half, and
+     yet her complexion, her eyes, and her lips, are as fine as ever.
+     She was dressed all in French point, her hair in a thousand
+     ringlets, the two side ones hanging low on her cheeks, black
+     ribbons on her head, pearls (the same that belonged to Madame de
+     l'Hôpital), the loveliest diamond earrings, three or four
+     bodkins--nothing else on the head; in short, a triumphant beauty,
+     worthy the admiration of all the foreign ambassadors. She was
+     accused of preventing the whole French nation from seeing the king;
+     she has restored him, you see, to their eyes; and you cannot
+     conceive the joy it has given all the world, and the splendor it
+     has thrown upon the court. This charming confusion, without
+     confusion, of all which is the most select, continues from three
+     till six. If couriers arrive, the king retires a moment to read the
+     despatches, and returns. There is always some music going on, to
+     which he listens, and which has an excellent effect. He talks with
+     such of the ladies as are accustomed to enjoy that honor.... At
+     six the carriages are at the door. The king is in one of them with
+     Madame de Montespan, Monsieur and Madame de Thianges, and honest
+     d'Heudicourt in a fool's paradise on the stool. You know how these
+     open carriages are made; they do not sit face to face, but all
+     looking the same way. The queen occupies another with the princess;
+     and the rest come flocking after, as it may happen. There are then
+     gondolas on the canal, and music; and at ten they come back, and
+     then there is a play; and twelve strikes, and they go to supper;
+     and thus rolls round the Saturday. If I were to tell you how often
+     you were asked after, how many questions were put to me without
+     waiting for answers, how often I neglected to answer, how little
+     they cared, and how much less I did, you would see the _iniqua
+     corte_ [wicked court] before you in all its perfection. However, it
+     never was so pleasant before, and everybody wishes it may last.
+
+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:--
+
+     FRIDAY, 1st Oct. (1677).
+
+     Yesterday evening at Cone, we descended into a veritable hell, the
+     true forges of Vulcan. Eight or ten Cyclops were at work, forging,
+     not arms for Æneas, but anchors for ships. You never saw strokes
+     redoubled so justly, nor with so admirable a cadence. We stood in
+     the middle of four furnaces; and the demons came passing about us,
+     all melting in sweat, with pale faces, wild-staring eyes, savage
+     mustaches, and hair long and black,--a sight enough to frighten
+     less well-bred folks than ourselves. As for me, I could not
+     comprehend the possibility of refusing any thing which these
+     gentlemen, in their hell, might have chosen to exact. We got out at
+     last, by the help of a shower of silver, with which we took care to
+     refresh their souls, and facilitate our exit.
+
+Once more:--
+
+     PARIS, 29th November (1679).
+
+     I have been to the wedding of Madame de Louvois. How shall I
+     describe it? Magnificence, illuminations, all France, dresses all
+     gold and brocade, jewels, braziers full of fire, and stands full of
+     flowers, confusions of carriages, cries out of doors, lighted
+     torches, pushings back, people run over; in short, a whirlwind, a
+     distraction; questions without answers, compliments without knowing
+     what is said, civilities without knowing who is spoken to, feet
+     entangled in trains. From the midst of all this, issue inquiries
+     after your health, which not being answered as quick as lightning,
+     the inquirers pass on, contented to remain in the state of
+     ignorance and indifference in which they [the inquiries] were made.
+     O vanity of vanities! Pretty little De Mouchy has had the
+     small-pox. O vanity, et cætera!
+
+Yet again. The gay writer has been sobered, perhaps hurt, by a friend's
+frankly writing to her, "You are old." To her daughter:--
+
+     So you were struck with the expression of Madame de la Fayette,
+     blended with so much friendship. 'Twas a truth, I own, which I
+     ought to have borne in mind; and yet I must confess it astonished
+     me, for I do not yet perceive in myself any such decay.
+     Nevertheless, I cannot help making many reflections and
+     calculations, and I find the conditions of life hard enough. It
+     seems to me that I have been dragged, against my will, to the fatal
+     period when old age must be endured; I see it; I have come to it;
+     and I would fain, if I could help it, not go any farther; not
+     advance a step more in the road of infirmities, of pains, of losses
+     of memory, of _disfigurements_ ready to do me outrage; and I hear a
+     voice which says, "You must go on in spite of yourself; or, if you
+     will not go on, you must die;" and this is another extremity from
+     which nature revolts. Such is the lot, however, of all who advance
+     beyond middle life. What is their resource? To think of the will of
+     God and of universal law, and so restore reason to its place, and
+     be patient. Be you, then, patient accordingly, my dear child, and
+     let not your affection soften into such tears as reason must
+     condemn.
+
+She dates a letter, and recalls that the day was the anniversary of an
+event in her life:--
+
+     PARIS, Friday, Feb. 5, 1672.
+
+     This day thousand years I was married.
+
+Here is a passage with power in it. The great war minister of Louis has
+died. Madame de Sévigné was now sixty-five years old. The letter is to
+her cousin Coulanges:--
+
+     I am so astonished at the news of the sudden death of M. de
+     Louvois, that I am at a loss how to speak of it. Dead, however, he
+     is, this great minister, this potent being, who occupied so great
+     a place; whose me (_le moi_), as M. Nicole says, had so wide a
+     dominion; who was the centre of so many orbs. What affairs had he
+     not to manage! what designs, what projects, what secrets! what
+     interests to unravel, what wars to undertake, what intrigues, what
+     noble games at chess to play and to direct! Ah! my God, grant me a
+     little time; I want to give check to the Duke of Savoy--checkmate
+     to the Prince of Orange. No, no, you shall not have a moment, not a
+     single moment. Are events like these to be talked of? Not they. We
+     must reflect upon them in our closets.
+
+A glimpse of Bourdaloue:--
+
+     Ah, that Bourdaloue! his sermon on the Passion was, they say, the
+     most perfect thing of the kind that can be imagined; it was the
+     same he preached last year, but revised and altered with the
+     assistance of some of his friends, that it might be wholly
+     inimitable. How can one love God, if one never hears him properly
+     spoken of? You must really possess a greater portion of grace than
+     others.
+
+A distinguished caterer or steward, a gentleman described as possessing
+talent enough to have governed a province, commits suicide on a
+professional point of honor:--
+
+     PARIS, Sunday, April 26, 1671.
+
+     I have just learned from Moreuil, of what passed at Chantilly with
+     regard to poor Vatel. I wrote to you last Friday that he had
+     stabbed himself--these are the particulars of the affair: The king
+     arrived there on Thursday night; the walk, and the collation, which
+     was served in a place set apart for the purpose, and strewed with
+     jonquils, were just as they should be. Supper was served; but there
+     was no roast meat at one or two of the tables, on account of
+     Vatel's having been obliged to provide several dinners more than
+     were expected. This affected his spirits; and he was heard to say
+     several times, "I have lost my honor! I cannot bear this disgrace!"
+     "My head is quite bewildered," said he to Gourville. "I have not
+     had a wink of sleep these twelve nights; I wish you would assist me
+     in giving orders." Gourville did all he could to comfort and assist
+     him, but the failure of the roast meat (which, however, did not
+     happen at the king's table, but at some of the other twenty-five)
+     was always uppermost with him. Gourville mentioned it to the prince
+     [Condé, the great Condé, the king's host], who went directly to
+     Vatel's apartment, and said to him, "Every thing is extremely well
+     conducted, Vatel; nothing could be more admirable than his
+     Majesty's supper." "Your highness's goodness," replied he,
+     "overwhelms me; I am sensible that there was a deficiency of roast
+     meat at two tables." "Not at all," said the prince; "do not perplex
+     yourself, and all will go well." Midnight came; the fireworks did
+     not succeed; they were covered with a thick cloud; they cost
+     sixteen thousand francs. At four o'clock in the morning Vatel went
+     round and found everybody asleep; he met one of the
+     under-purveyors, who was just come in with only two loads of fish.
+     "What!" said he, "is this all?" "Yes, sir," said the man, not
+     knowing that Vatel had despatched other people to all the seaports
+     around. Vatel waited for some time; the other purveyors did not
+     arrive; his head grew distracted; he thought there was no more fish
+     to be had. He flew to Gourville: "Sir," said he, "I cannot outlive
+     this disgrace." Gourville laughed at him. Vatel, however, went to
+     his apartment, and setting the hilt of his sword against the door,
+     after two ineffectual attempts, succeeded, in the third, in forcing
+     his sword through his heart. At that instant the couriers arrived
+     with the fish; Vatel was inquired after to distribute it. They ran
+     to his apartment, knocked at the door, but received no answer; upon
+     which they broke it open, and found him weltering in his blood. A
+     messenger was immediately despatched to acquaint the prince with
+     what had happened, who was like a man in despair. The Duke wept,
+     _for his Burgundy journey depended upon Vatel_.
+
+The italics here are our own. We felt that we must use them.
+
+Is it not all pathetic? But how exquisitely characteristic of the nation
+and of the times! "Poor Vatel," is the extent to which Madame de 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 sincerity as
+unquestionable as the levity is, on the point of personal religion:--
+
+     But, my dear child, the greatest inclination I have at present is
+     to be a little religious. I plague La Mousse about it every day. I
+     belong neither to God nor to the devil. I am quite weary of such a
+     situation; though, between you and me, I look upon it as the most
+     natural one in the world. I am not the devil's, because I fear God,
+     and have at the bottom a principle of religion; then, on the other
+     hand, I am not properly God's, because his law appears hard and
+     irksome to me, and I cannot bring myself to acts of self-denial; so
+     that altogether I am one of those called lukewarm Christians, the
+     great number of which does not in the least surprise me, for I
+     perfectly understand their sentiments, and the reasons that
+     influence them. However, we are told that this is a state highly
+     displeasing to God; if so, we must get out of it. Alas! this is the
+     difficulty. Was ever any thing so mad as I am, to be thus eternally
+     pestering you with my rhapsodies?
+
+Madame de Sévigné involuntarily becomes a maxim-maker:--
+
+     The other day I made a maxim off-hand, without once thinking of it;
+     and I liked it so well that I fancied I had taken it out of M. de
+     la Rochefoucauld's. Pray tell me whether it is so or not, for in
+     that case my memory is more to be praised than my judgment. I said,
+     with all the ease in the world, that "ingratitude begets reproach,
+     as acknowledgment begets new favors." Pray, where did this come
+     from? Have I read it? Did I dream it? Is it my own idea? Nothing
+     can be truer than the thing itself, nor than that I am totally
+     ignorant how I came by it. I found it properly arranged in my
+     brain, and at the end of my tongue.
+
+The partial mother lets her daughter know whom the maxim was meant for.
+She says, "It is intended for your brother." This young fellow had, we
+suspect, been first earning his mother's "reproaches" for spendthrift
+habits, and then getting more money from her by "acknowledgment."
+
+She hears that son of hers read "some chapters out of Rabelais," "which
+were enough," she declares, "to make us die with laughing." "I cannot
+affect," she says, "a prudery which is not natural to me." No, indeed, a
+prude this woman was not. She had the strong æsthetic 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 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:--
+
+     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 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:--
+
+     There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way
+     of being delivered from it but by ingratitude.
+
+     Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.
+
+     Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would
+     appear to be. The world is not unjust long.
+
+Madame de Sévigné makes a confession, which will comfort readers who may
+have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks:--
+
+     I send you M. de Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," revised and corrected,
+     with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I
+     can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others that,
+     to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. God knows how
+     it will be with you.
+
+What was it changed this woman's mood to serious? She could not have
+been hearing Massillon's celebrated sermon on the "fewness of the
+elect," for Massillon was yet only a boy of nine years; she may have
+been reading Pascal's "Thoughts,"--Pascal had been dead ten years, and
+the "Thoughts" had been published; or she may have been listening to one
+of those sifting, heart-searching discourses of Bourdaloue,--the date of
+her letter is March 16, 1672, and during the Lent of that year
+Bourdaloue preached at Versailles,--when she wrote sombrely as
+follows:--
+
+     You ask me if I am as fond of life as ever. I must own to you that
+     I experience mortifications, and severe ones too; but I am still
+     unhappy at the thoughts of death; I consider it so great a
+     misfortune to see the termination of all my pursuits, that I should
+     desire nothing better, if it were practicable, than to begin life
+     again. I find myself engaged in a scene of confusion and trouble; I
+     was embarked in life without my own consent, and know I must leave
+     it again; this distracts me, for how shall I leave it? In what
+     manner? By what door? At what time? In what disposition? Am I to
+     suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a
+     state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some
+     sudden accident? How shall I stand with God? What shall I have to
+     offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall
+     I have no other sentiment but that of fear? What have I to hope? Am
+     I worthy of heaven? Or have I deserved the torments of hell?
+     Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater
+     madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet
+     what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the
+     foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently
+     buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so
+     dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it, than I
+     do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me,
+     then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it; but, if I had
+     been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse's arms;
+     it would have spared me many vexations, and would have insured
+     heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something
+     else.
+
+A memorable sarcasm saved for us by Madame de Sévigné, at the very close
+of one of her letters:--
+
+     Guillenagues said yesterday that Pelisson abused the privilege men
+     have of being ugly.
+
+Readers familiar with Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities," will recognize in
+the following narrative a state of society not unlike that described by
+the novelist as immediately preceding the French Revolution:--
+
+     The Archbishop of Rheims, as he returned yesterday from St.
+     Germain, met with a curious adventure. He drove at his usual rate,
+     like a whirlwind. If he thinks himself a great man, his servants
+     think him still greater. They passed through Nanterre, when they
+     met a man on horseback, and in an insolent tone bid him clear the
+     way. The poor man used his utmost endeavors to avoid the danger
+     that threatened him, but his horse proved unmanageable. To make
+     short of it, the coach-and-six turned them both topsy-turvy; but at
+     the same time the coach, too, was completely overturned. In an
+     instant the horse and the man, instead of amusing themselves with
+     having their limbs broken, rose almost miraculously; the man
+     remounted, and galloped away, and is galloping still, for aught I
+     know; while the servants, the archbishop's coachman, and the
+     archbishop himself at the head of them, cried out, "Stop that
+     villain, stop him! thrash him soundly!" The rage of the archbishop
+     was so great, that afterward, in relating the adventure, he said,
+     if he could have caught the rascal, he would have broke all his
+     bones, and cut off both his ears.
+
+If such things were done by the aristocracy--and the spiritual
+aristocracy at that!--in the green tree, what might not be expected in
+the dry? The writer makes no comment--draws no moral. "Adieu, my dear,
+delightful child. I cannot express my eagerness to see you," are her
+next words. She rattles along, three short sentences more, and finishes
+her letter.
+
+We should still not have done with these letters, were we to go on a
+hundred pages, or two hundred, farther. Readers have already seen truly
+what Madame de 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 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, 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.
+
+It was perhaps not without its influence on the style of Corneille, that
+a youthful labor of his in authorship was to translate, wholly or
+partially, the "Pharsalia" of Lucan. Corneille always retained his
+fondness for Lucan. This taste on his part, and the rhymed Alexandrines
+in which he wrote tragedy, may together help account for the
+hyper-heroic style which is Corneille's great fault. A lady criticised
+his tragedy, "The Death of Pompey," by saying: "Very fine, but too many
+heroes in it." Corneille's tragedies generally have, if not too many
+heroes, at least too much hero, in them. Concerning the historian
+Gibbon's habitual pomp of expression, it was once wittily said that
+nobody could possibly tell the truth in such a style as that. It would
+be equally near the mark if we should say of Corneille's chosen mould
+of verse, that nobody could possibly be simple and natural in that.
+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 in this kind with no commanding success; but
+at thirty he wrote the tragedy of "The Cid," and instantly became
+famous. His subsequent plays were chiefly on classical subjects. The
+subject of "The Cid" was drawn from Spanish literature. This was
+emphatically what has been called an "epoch-making" production.
+Richelieu's "Academy," at the instigation, indeed almost under the
+dictation, of Richelieu, who was jealous of Corneille, tried to write it
+down. They succeeded about as Balaam succeeded in prophesying against
+Israel. "The Cid" triumphed over them, and over the great minister. It
+established not only Corneille's fame, but his authority. The man of
+genius taken alone, proved stronger than the men of taste taken
+together.
+
+For all this, however, our readers would hardly relish "The Cid." Let us
+go at once to that tragedy of Corneille's which, by the general consent
+of French critics, is the best work of its author, the "Polyeuctes." The
+following is the rhetorical climax of praise in which Gaillard, one of
+the most enlightened of Corneille's eulogists, arranges the different
+masterpieces of his author: "'The Cid' raised Corneille above his
+rivals; the 'Horace' and the 'Cinna' above his models; the 'Polyeuctes'
+above himself." This tragedy will, we doubt not, prove to our readers
+the most interesting of all the tragedies of Corneille.
+
+"The great Corneille"--to apply the traditionary designation which,
+besides attributing to our tragedian his conceded general eminence in
+character and genius, serves also to distinguish him by merit from his
+younger brother, who wrote very good tragedy--was an illustrious figure
+at the 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 de Rambouillet, and
+that awful court decided against the play. Corneille, like Michel
+Angelo, had to a good degree the courage of his own productions; but, in
+the face of adverse decision so august on his work, he needed
+encouragement, which happily he did not fail to receive, before he would
+allow his "Polyeuctes" to be represented. The theatre crowned it with
+the laurels of victory. It thus fell to Corneille to triumph
+successively, single-handed, over two great adversary courts of critical
+appreciation,--the Academy of Richelieu and the not less formidable
+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 judge the poet,--Corneille used, before putting them
+on the stage, to take his plays to the "Church,"--that is, to the
+priestly hierarchy who constituted the "Church,"--that they might be
+authoritatively judged as to their possible influence on the cause of
+Christian truth.
+
+In the "Polyeuctes," the motive is religion. Polyeuctes is an historic
+or traditional saint of the Roman-Catholic church. His conversion from
+paganism is the theme of the play. Polyeuctes has a friend Nearchus who
+is already a Christian convert, and who labors earnestly to make
+Polyeuctes a proselyte to the faith. Polyeuctes has previously married a
+noble Roman lady, daughter of Felix, governor of Armenia, in which
+province the action of the story occurs. (The persecuting Emperor Decius
+is on the throne of the Roman world.) Paulina is the daughter's name.
+Paulina married Polyeuctes against her own choice, for she loved Roman
+Severus better. Her father had put his will upon her, and Paulina had
+filially obeyed in marrying Polyeuctes. Such are the relations of the
+different persons of the drama. It will be seen that there is ample room
+for the play of elevated and tragic passions. Paulina, in fact, is the
+lofty, the impossible, ideal of wifely and daughterly truth and
+devotion. Pagan though she is, she is pathetically constant, both to the
+husband that was forced upon her, and to the father that did the
+forcing; while still she loves, and cannot but love, the man whom, in
+spite of her love for him, she, with an act like prolonged suicide,
+stoically separates from her torn and bleeding heart.
+
+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 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 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 gods; 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
+noblest things in French tragedy--a French critic would be likely to
+say, the very noblest 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 sturdy
+     independence that animated Johnson in annotating Shakspeare, 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. The Greeks were frigid declaimers in
+     comparison with this passage of Corneille."] Severus, learn to know
+     Paulina all in all.
+
+     My Polyeuctes touches on his last hour; he has but a moment to
+     live; you are the cause of this, though innocently so. I know not
+     if your heart, yielding to your desires, may have dared build any
+     hope on his destruction; but know that there is no death so cruel
+     that to it with firm brow I would not bend my steps, that there are
+     in hell no horrors that I would not endure, rather than soil a
+     glory so pure, rather than espouse, after his sad fate, a man that
+     was in any wise the cause of his death; and if you suppose me of a
+     heart so little sound, the love which I had for you would all turn
+     to hate. You are generous; be so even to the end. My father is in a
+     state to yield every thing to you; he fears you; and I further
+     hazard this saying, that, if he destroys my husband, it is to you
+     that he sacrifices him. Save this unhappy man, use your influence
+     in his favor, exert yourself to become his support. I know that
+     this is much that I ask; but the greater the effort, the greater
+     the glory from it. To preserve a rival of whom you are jealous,
+     that is a trait of virtue which appertains only to you. And if your
+     renown is not motive sufficient, it is much that a woman once so
+     well beloved, and the love of whom perhaps is still capable of
+     touching you, will owe to your great heart the dearest possession
+     that she owns; remember, in short, that you are Severus. Adieu.
+     Decide with yourself alone what you ought to do; if you are not
+     such as I dare hope that you are, then, in order that I may
+     continue to esteem you, I wish not to know it.
+
+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):--
+
+     That advice might be good for some common soul. Though he [the
+     Emperor Decius] holds in his hands my life and my fortune, I am yet
+     Severus; and all that mighty power is powerless over my glory, and
+     powerless over my duty. Here honor compels me, and I will satisfy
+     it; whether fate afterward show itself propitious or adverse,
+     perishing glorious I shall perish content.
+
+     I will tell thee further, but under confidence, the sect of
+     Christians is not what it is thought to be. They are hated, why I
+     know not; and I see Decius unjust only in this regard. From
+     curiosity I have sought to become acquainted with them. They are
+     regarded as sorcerers taught from hell; and, in this supposition,
+     the punishment of death is visited on secret mysteries which we do
+     not understand. But Eleusinian Ceres and the Good Goddess have
+     their secrets, like those at Rome and in Greece; still we freely
+     tolerate everywhere, their god alone excepted, every kind of god;
+     all the monsters of Egypt have their temples in Rome; our fathers,
+     at their will, made a god of a man; and, their blood in our veins
+     preserving their errors, we fill heaven with all our emperors; but,
+     to speak without disguise of deifications so numerous, the effect
+     is very doubtful of such metamorphoses.
+
+     Christians have but one God, absolute master of all, whose mere
+     will does whatever he resolves; but, if I may venture to say what
+     seems to me true, our gods very often agree ill together; and,
+     though their wrath crush me before your eyes, we have a good many
+     of them for them to be true gods. Finally, among the Christians,
+     morals are pure, vices are hated, virtues flourish; they offer
+     prayers on behalf of us who persecute them; and, during all the
+     time since we have tormented them, have they ever been seen
+     mutinous? Have they ever been seen rebellious? Have our princes
+     ever had more faithful soldiers? Fierce in war, they submit
+     themselves to our executioners; and, lions in combat, they die like
+     lambs. I pity them too much not to defend them. Come, let us find
+     Felix; let us commune with his son-in-law; and let us thus, with
+     one single action, gratify at once Paulina, and my glory, and my
+     compassion.
+
+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 him to be a
+prudent man. Felix at length says, "Adore the 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 Corneille, the father of French
+tragedy, 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 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.
+
+Besides his plays, there is a translation in verse by him of the
+"Imitation of Christ;" there are metrical versions of a considerable
+number of the Psalms; there are odes, madrigals, sonnets, stanzas,
+addresses to the king. Then there are discourses in prose on dramatic
+poetry, on tragedy, and on the three unities. Add to these, elaborate
+appreciations by himself of a considerable number of his own plays,
+prefaces, epistles, arguments to his pieces, and you have, what with the
+notes, the introductions, the eulogies, and other such things that the
+faithful French editor knows so well how to accumulate, matter enough of
+Corneille to swell out eleven, or, in one edition,--that issued under
+Napoleon as First Consul,--even twelve, handsome volumes of his works.
+
+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
+friend 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 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 theatre, 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.
+
+The "Thebaïd" was Racine's first tragedy,--at least his first that
+attained to the honor of being represented. Molière brought it out in
+his theatre, the Palais Royal. His second tragedy, the "Alexander the
+Great," was also put into the hands of Molière.
+
+This latter play the author took to 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 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.
+
+The "Andromache" followed the "Alexander," and then Racine did try his
+hand in another poetical line; for he wrote a comedy, his only one, "The
+Suitors," as is loosely translated "Les Plaideurs," a title which has a
+legal, and not an amorous, meaning. This play, after it had at first
+failed, Louis XIV. laughed into court favor. It became thenceforward a
+great success. It still keeps its place on the stage. It is, however, a
+farce, rather than a comedy.
+
+We pass over now one or two of the subsequent productions of Racine, to
+mention next a play of his which had a singular history. It was a 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 in "The Suitors," hurt the old
+man's pride. That pride suffered a worse hurt still. The chief Parisian
+theatre, 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 theatre
+were all bought by his enemies, and left solidly vacant. The best seats
+at Pradon's theatre 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 theatre, 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 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 Athaliah,
+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 "Athaliah," as in the "Esther," Racine
+introduced the feature of the chorus, a restoration which had all the
+effect of an innovation. The chorus in "Athaliah" 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 "Athaliah" is almost proof against
+technical criticism. It is acknowledged to be, after its kind, a nearly
+ideal product of art.
+
+There is a curious story about the fortune of this piece with the
+public, that will interest our readers. The first success of "Athaliah"
+was not great. In fact, it was almost a flat failure. But a company of
+wits, playing at forfeits somewhere in the country, severely sentenced
+one of their number to go by himself, and read the first act of
+"Athaliah." The victim went, and did not return. Sought at length, he
+was found just commencing a second perusal of the play entire. He
+reported of it so enthusiastically, that he was asked to read it before
+the company, which he did, to their delight. This started a reaction in
+favor of the condemned play, which soon came to be counted the
+masterpiece of its author.
+
+First, in specimen of the choral feature of the drama, we content
+ourselves with giving a single chorus from the "Athaliah." 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 a 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, is the state of feeling represented in the
+present chorus. Salomith is the leading singer:--
+
+      SALOMITH.
+
+        The Lord hath deigned to speak,
+      But what he to his prophet now hath shown--
+      Who unto us will make it clearly known?
+        Arms he himself to save us, poor and weak?
+        Arms he himself to have us overthrown?
+
+      THE WHOLE CHORUS.
+
+      O promises! O threats! O mystery profound!
+        What woe, what weal, are each in turn foretold?
+      How can so much of wrath be found
+        So much of love to enfold?
+
+      A VOICE.
+
+      Zion shall be no more; a cruel flame
+        Will all her ornaments devour.
+
+      A SECOND VOICE.
+
+        God shelters Zion; she has shield and tower
+      In His eternal name.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      I see her splendor all from vision disappear.
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+      I see on every side her glory shine more clear.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      Into a deep abyss is Zion sunk from sight.
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+      Zion lifts up her brow amid celestial light.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      What dire despair!
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+        What praise from every tongue!
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      What cries of grief!
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+        What songs of triumph sung!
+
+      A THIRD VOICE.
+
+      Cease we to vex ourselves; our God, one day,
+        Will this great mystery make clear.
+
+      ALL THREE VOICES.
+
+        Let us his wrath revere,
+      While on his love, no less, our hopes we stay.
+
+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:--
+
+     What pity touches you? Is it that in a holocaust to be this day
+     offered, I, like Jephtha's daughter in other times, must pacify by
+     my death the anger of the Lord? Alas, a son has nothing that does
+     not belong to his father!
+
+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, 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:--
+
+     JOASH. I feel myself ready, if he wishes it, to give to him my
+     life.
+
+     JEHOIADA. You have often heard read the history of our kings. Do
+     you remember, my son, what strict laws a king worthy of the crown
+     ought to impose upon himself?
+
+     JOASH. A wise and good king, so hath God himself declared, puts not
+     his reliance upon riches and gold; he fears the Lord his God, has
+     ever before him his precepts, his laws, his judgments severe, and
+     does not with unjust burdens overwhelm his brethren.
+
+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 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:--
+
+      God of the Jews, 'tis thou that dost prevail!
+      Ay, it is Joash; all without avail
+      Seek I to cheat myself with other thought:
+      I know the wound my weapon on him wrought;
+      I see his father Ahaziah's face;
+      Naught but brings back to me that hated race.
+      David doth triumph, Ahab only fall,--
+      Unpitying God, thou only hast done all!
+      'Tis thou that flattering me to hope in vain
+      For easy vengeance, o'er and o'er again
+      Hast with myself myself embroiled anew,
+      Now pangs of conscience rousing, not a few,
+      Now dazzling me with thy rich treasures rare,
+      Which I to burn or pillage did not dare.
+      Let him, then, reign, this son, thy care, thy toil,
+      And, so to signalize his new-got spoil,
+      Let him into my bosom plunge the knife,
+      And take with filial hand his mother's life.
+      Hearken what wish for him she dying breathes--
+      Wish? nay, what hope, assured hope, bequeaths,--
+      That, disobedient, proud, rebellious, he,
+      Faithful to Ahab's blood received from me,
+      To his grandfather, to his father, like,
+      Abhorrent heir of David, down may strike
+      Thy worship and thy fane, avenger fell
+      Of Athaliah, Ahab, Jezebel!
+
+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 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 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.
+
+
+We group three names in one title, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon, to
+represent the pulpit orators of France. There are other great names,--as
+Fléchier, with Claude and Saurin, the last two, Protestants both,--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 pure and classic style, became at once, and permanently became, a
+part of French literature.
+
+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 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
+everybody knows Louis sincerely practised--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."
+
+In proceeding now to give, from the three 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 the last one left of the children of 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
+Bourdaloue, we succeeded in obtaining a printed translation which we
+could modify to suit our purpose.) Bossuet:--
+
+     It was then reserved for my lot to pay this funereal tribute to the
+     high and potent princess, Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans.
+     She whom I had seen so attentive while I was discharging a like
+     office for the queen her mother, was so soon after to be the
+     subject of a similar discourse, and my sad voice was predestined to
+     this melancholy service. O vanity! O nothingness! O mortals!
+     ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago, would she have believed
+     it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was
+     shedding so many tears in this place, that she was so soon to
+     assemble you here to deplore her own loss? O princess! the worthy
+     object of the admiration of two great kingdoms, was it not enough
+     that England should deplore your absence, without being yet further
+     compelled to deplore your death? France, who with so much joy
+     beheld you again, surrounded with a new brilliancy, had she not in
+     reserve other pomps and other triumphs for you, returned from that
+     famous voyage whence you had brought hither so much glory, and
+     hopes so fair? "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Nothing is left
+     for me to say but that; that is the only sentiment which, in
+     presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well-grounded and so
+     poignant, permits me to indulge. Nor have I explored the Holy
+     Scriptures in order to find therein some text which I might apply
+     to this princess; I have taken, without premeditation and without
+     choice, the first expression presented to me by the Preacher, with
+     whom vanity, although it has been so often named, is yet, to my
+     mind, not named often enough to suit the purpose that I have in
+     view. I wish, in a single misfortune, to lament all the calamities
+     of the human race, and in a single death to exhibit the death and
+     the nothingness of all human greatness. This text, which suits all
+     the circumstances and all the occurrences of our life, becomes, by
+     a special adaptedness, appropriate to my mournful theme; since
+     never were the vanities of the earth either so clearly disclosed or
+     so openly confounded. No, after what we have just seen, health is
+     but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and
+     pleasures are but a dangerous diversion. Every thing is vain within
+     us, except the sincere acknowledgment made before God of our
+     vanity, and the fixed judgment of the mind, leading us to despise
+     all that we are.
+
+     But did I speak the truth? Man, whom God made in his own image, is
+     he but a shadow? That which Jesus Christ came from heaven to earth
+     to seek, that which he deemed that he could, without degrading
+     himself, ransom with his own blood, is that a mere nothing? Let us
+     acknowledge our mistake; surely this sad spectacle of the vanity of
+     things human was leading us astray, and public hope, baffled
+     suddenly by the death of this princess, was urging us too far. It
+     must not be permitted to man to despise himself entirely, lest he,
+     supposing, in common with the wicked, that our life is but a game
+     in which chance reigns, take his way without rule and without
+     self-control, at the pleasure of his own blind wishes. It is for
+     this reason that the Preacher, after having commenced his inspired
+     production by the expressions which I have cited, after having
+     filled all its pages with contempt for things human, is pleased at
+     last to show man something more substantial, by saying to him,
+     "Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of
+     man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every
+     secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil." Thus
+     every thing is vain in man, if we regard what he gives to the
+     world; but, on the contrary, every thing is important, if we
+     consider what he owes to God. Once again, every thing is vain in
+     man, if we regard the course of his mortal life; but every thing is
+     of value, every thing is important, if we contemplate the goal
+     where it ends, and the account of it which he must render. Let us,
+     therefore, meditate to-day, in presence of this altar and of this
+     tomb, the first and the last utterance of the Preacher; of which
+     the one shows the nothingness of man, the other establishes his
+     greatness. Let this tomb convince us of our nothingness, provided
+     that this altar, where is daily offered for us a Victim of price so
+     great, teach us at the same time our dignity. The princess whom we
+     weep shall be a faithful witness, both of the one and of the other.
+     Let us survey that which a sudden death has taken away from her;
+     let us survey that which a holy death has bestowed upon her. Thus
+     shall we learn to despise that which she quitted without regret, in
+     order to attach all our regard to that which she embraced with so
+     much ardor,--when her soul, purified from all earthly sentiments,
+     full of the heaven on whose border she touched, saw the light
+     completely revealed. Such are the truths which I have to treat, and
+     which I have deemed worthy to be proposed to so great a prince, and
+     to the most illustrious assembly in the world.
+
+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
+orator against "the most illustrious assembly in the world."
+
+The ordinary sermons of Bossuet are less read, and they less deserve
+perhaps 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. 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 levelled 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 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:--
+
+     I have said more particularly that in the world in which you
+     live,--I mean the court,--the disease of a perverted conscience is
+     far more common, and far more difficult to be avoided; and I am
+     sure that in this you will agree with me. For it is at the court
+     that the passions bear sway, that desires are more ardent, that
+     self-interest is keener, and that, by infallible consequence,
+     self-blinding is more easy, and consciences, even the most
+     enlightened and the most upright, become gradually perverted. It is
+     at the court that the goddess of the world, I mean fortune,
+     exercises over the minds of men, and in consequence over their
+     consciences, a more absolute dominion. It is at the court that the
+     aim to maintain one's self, the impatience to raise one's self, the
+     frenzy to push one's self, the fear of displeasing, the desire of
+     making one's self agreeable, produce consciences, which anywhere
+     else would pass for monstrous, but which, finding themselves there
+     authorized by custom, seem to have acquired a right of possession
+     and of prescription. People, from living at court, and from no
+     other cause than having lived there, are filled with these errors.
+     Whatever uprightness of conscience they may have brought thither,
+     by breathing its air and by hearing its language, they are
+     habituated to iniquity, they come to have less horror of vice, and,
+     after having long blamed it, a thousand times condemned it, they at
+     last behold it with a more favorable eye, tolerate it, excuse it;
+     that is to say, without observing what is happening, they make over
+     their consciences, and, by insensible steps, from Christian, which
+     they were, by little and little become quite worldly, and not far
+     from pagan.
+
+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?--
+
+     You would say, and it really seems, that for the court, there are
+     other principles of religion than for the rest of the world, and
+     that the courtier has a right to make for himself a conscience
+     different in kind and in quality from that of other men; for such
+     is the prevailing idea of the matter,--an idea well sustained, or
+     rather unfortunately justified, by experience.... Nevertheless, my
+     dear hearers, St. Paul assures us, that there is but one God and
+     one faith; and woe to the man who dividing Him, this one God, shall
+     represent Him as at court less an enemy to human transgressions
+     than He is outside of the court; or, severing this one faith, shall
+     suppose it in the case of one class more indulgent than in the case
+     of another.
+
+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:--
+
+     Behold one of the abuses of our time. Means have been found to
+     consecrate slander, to change it into a virtue, and even into one
+     of the holiest virtues--that means is, zeal for the glory of
+     God.... We must humble those people, is the cry; and it is for the
+     good of the Church to tarnish their reputation and to diminish
+     their credit. That idea becomes, as it were, a principle; the
+     conscience is fashioned accordingly, and there is nothing that is
+     not permissible to a motive so noble. You fabricate, you
+     exaggerate, you give things a poisonous taint, you tell but half
+     the truth; you make your prejudices stand for indisputable facts;
+     you spread abroad a hundred falsehoods; you confound what is
+     individual with what is general; what one man has said that is bad,
+     you pretend that all have said; and what many have said that is
+     good, you pretend that nobody has said; and all that, once again,
+     for the glory of God. For such direction of the intention justifies
+     all that. Such direction of the intention will not suffice to
+     justify a prevarication, but it is more than sufficient to justify
+     calumny, provided only you are convinced that you are serving God
+     thereby.
+
+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. 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:--
+
+     There are some just, fervent, perfect souls, who, like children in
+     the house of the Heavenly Father, strive to please and possess him,
+     in order only to possess and to love him; and who, incessantly
+     animated by this unselfish motive, inviolably adhere to his divine
+     precepts, and lay it down as a rigorous and unalterable rule, to
+     obey the least intimation of his will. They serve him with an
+     affection entirely filial. But there are also dastards, worldlings,
+     sinners, terrestrial and sensual men, who are scarcely susceptible
+     of any other impressions than those of the judgments and vengeance
+     of God. Talk to them of his greatness, of his perfections, of his
+     benefits, or even of his rewards, and they will hardly listen to
+     you; and, if they are prevailed upon to pay some attention and
+     respect to your words, they will sound in their ears, but not reach
+     their hearts.... Therefore, to move them, to stir them up, to
+     awaken them from the lethargic sleep with which they are
+     overwhelmed, the thunder of divine wrath and the decree that
+     condemns them to eternal flames must be dinned into their ears:
+     "Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire" (Matt. XXV.).
+     Make them consider attentively, and represent to them with all the
+     force of grace, the consequences and horror of this word
+     "eternal."...
+
+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:--
+
+     ...Struck with horror at so doleful a destiny, I apply to this
+     eternity all the powers of my mind; I examine and scrutinize it in
+     all its parts; and I survey, as it were, its whole dimensions.
+     Moreover, to express it in more lively colors, and to represent it
+     in my mind more conformably to the senses and the human
+     understanding, I borrow comparisons from the Fathers of the Church,
+     and I make, if I may so speak, the same computations. I figure to
+     myself all the stars of the firmament; to this innumerable
+     multitude I add all the drops of water in the bosom of the ocean;
+     and if this be not enough, I reckon, or at least endeavor to
+     reckon, all the grains of sand on its shore. Then I interrogate
+     myself, I reason with myself, and I put to myself the question--If
+     I had for as many ages, and a thousand times as many, undergone
+     torments in that glowing fire which is kindled by the breath of the
+     Lord in his anger to take eternal vengeance, would eternity be at
+     an end? No; and why? Because it is eternity, and eternity is
+     endless. To number up the stars that shine in the heavens, to count
+     the drops of water that compose the sea, to tell the grains of sand
+     that lie upon the shore, is not absolutely impossible; but to
+     measure in eternity the number of days, of years, of ages, is what
+     cannot be compassed, because the days, the years, and the ages are
+     without number; or, to speak more properly, because in eternity
+     there are neither days, nor years, nor ages, but a single, endless,
+     infinite duration.
+
+     To this thought I devote my mind. I imagine I see and rove through
+     this same eternity, and discover no end, but find it to be always a
+     boundless tract. I imagine the wide prospect lies open on all
+     sides, and encompasseth me around; that if I rise up, or if I sink
+     down, or what way soever I turn my eyes, this eternity meets them;
+     and that after a thousand efforts to get forward, I have made no
+     progress, but find it still eternity. I imagine that after long
+     revolutions of time, I behold in the midst of this eternity a
+     damned soul, in the same state, in the same affliction, in the same
+     misery still; and putting myself mentally in the place of this
+     soul, I imagine that in this eternal punishment I feel myself
+     continually devoured by that fire which nothing extinguishes; that
+     I continually shed those floods of tears which nothing can dry up;
+     that I am continually gnawed by the worm of conscience, which
+     never dies; that I continually express my despair and anguish by
+     that gnashing of teeth, and those lamentable cries, which never can
+     move the compassion of God. This idea of myself, this
+     representation, amazes and terrifies me. My whole body shudders, I
+     tremble with fear, I am filled with horror, I have the same
+     feelings as the royal prophet, when he cried, "Pierce thou my flesh
+     with thy fear, for I am afraid of thy judgments."
+
+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 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 deep 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 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 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
+marvellous 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 dialectic, could have
+accomplished. But there immediately follows a culmination in power, such
+as was distinctly beyond the height of Bourdaloue. Genius must be
+superadded to talent if you would have the supreme, either in poetry or
+in eloquence. There was an extreme point in Massillon's discourse 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:--
+
+     I confine myself to you, my brethren, who are gathered here. I
+     speak no longer of the rest of mankind. I look at you as if you
+     were the only ones on the earth; and here is the thought that
+     seizes me, and that terrifies me. I make the supposition that this
+     is your last hour, and the end of the world; that the heavens are
+     about to open above your heads, that Jesus Christ is to appear in
+     his glory in the midst of this sanctuary, and that you are gathered
+     here only to wait for him, and as trembling criminals on whom is to
+     be pronounced either a sentence of grace or a decree of eternal
+     death. For, vainly do you flatter yourselves; you will die such in
+     character as you are to-day. All those impulses toward change with
+     which you amuse yourselves, you will amuse yourselves with them
+     down to the bed of death. Such is the experience of all
+     generations. The only thing new you will then find in yourselves
+     will be, perhaps, a reckoning a trifle larger than that which you
+     would to-day have to render; and according to what you would be if
+     you were this moment to be judged, you may almost determine what
+     will befall you at the termination of your life.
+
+     Now I ask you, and I ask it smitten with terror, not separating in
+     this matter my lot from yours, and putting myself into the same
+     frame of mind into which I desire you to come,--I ask you, then, If
+     Jesus Christ were to appear in this sanctuary, in the midst of this
+     assembly, the most illustrious in the world, to pass judgment on
+     us, to draw the dread line of distinction between the goats and the
+     sheep, do you believe that the majority of all of us who are here
+     would be set on his right hand? Do you believe that things would
+     even be equal? Nay, do you believe there would be found so many as
+     the ten righteous men whom anciently the Lord could not find in
+     five whole cities? I put the question to you, but you know not; I
+     know not myself. Thou only, O my God, knowest those that belong to
+     thee! But if we know not those who belong to him, at least we know
+     that sinners do not belong to him. Now, of what classes of persons
+     do the professing Christians in this assembly consist? Titles and
+     dignities must be counted for naught; of these you shall be
+     stripped before Jesus Christ. Who make up this assembly? Sinners,
+     in great number, who do not wish to be converted; in still greater
+     number, sinners who would like it, but who put off their
+     conversion; many others who would be converted, only to relapse
+     into sin; finally, a multitude who think they have no need of
+     conversion. You have thus made up the company of the reprobate. Cut
+     off these four classes of sinners from this sacred assembly, for
+     they will be cut off from it at the great day! Stand forth now, ye
+     righteous! where are you? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right
+     hand! True wheat of Jesus Christ, disengage yourselves from this
+     chaff, doomed to the fire! O God! where are thine elect? and what
+     remains there for thy portion?
+
+     Brethren, our perdition is well-nigh assured, and we do not give it
+     a thought. Even if in that dread separation which one day shall be
+     made, there were to be but a single sinner out of this assembly
+     found on the side of the reprobate, and if a voice from heaven
+     should come to give us assurance of the fact in this sanctuary,
+     without pointing out the person intended, who among us would not
+     fear that he might himself be the wretch? Who among us would not at
+     once recoil upon his conscience, to inquire whether his sins had
+     not deserved that penalty? Who among us would not, seized with
+     dismay, ask of Jesus Christ, as did once the apostles, "Lord, is it
+     I?"
+
+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
+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.
+
+
+
+
+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:--
+
+  Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye,
+  In every gesture dignity and love.
+
+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 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 has 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 lustre 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 the
+portrait in words, drawn by him from the life, of Fénelon's princely
+pupil, we transfer here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon
+says:--
+
+     In the first place, it must be said that Monseigneur the Duke of
+     Burgundy had by nature a most formidable disposition. He was
+     passionate to the extent of wishing to dash to pieces his clocks
+     when they struck the hour which called him to what he did not like,
+     and of flying into the utmost rage against the rain if it
+     interfered with what he wanted to do. Resistance threw him into
+     paroxysms of fury. I speak of what I have often witnessed in his
+     early youth. Moreover, an ungovernable impulse drove him into
+     whatever indulgence, bodily or mental, was forbidden him. His
+     sarcasm was so much the more cruel as it was witty and piquant, and
+     as it seized with precision upon every point open to ridicule. All
+     this was sharpened by a vivacity of body and of mind that proceeded
+     to the degree of impetuosity, and that during his early days never
+     permitted him to learn any thing except by doing two things at
+     once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a violent avidity, and
+     all this with a pride and a haughtiness impossible to describe;
+     dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men and things, and to
+     detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and to reason
+     himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers. But at
+     the same time, as soon as his passion was spent, reason resumed
+     her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes
+     with such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively,
+     alert, penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling
+     literally in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time
+     piety and grace made of him a different being, and transformed
+     faults so numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite.
+
+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 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 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 perfectly 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 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 it 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, till 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 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 his 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 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 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 to Louis XIV., and the state of France, in mind, 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:--
+
+     The king's authority over the subject is absolute, but the
+     authority of the law is absolute over him. His power to do good is
+     unlimited, but he is restrained from doing evil. The laws have put
+     the people into his hands, as the most valuable deposit, upon
+     condition that he shall treat them as his children. It is the
+     intent of the law that the wisdom and equity of one man shall be
+     the happiness of many, and not that the wretchedness and slavery of
+     many should gratify the pride and luxury of one. The king ought to
+     possess nothing more than the subject, except what is necessary to
+     alleviate the fatigue of his station, and impress upon the minds of
+     the people a reverence of that authority by which the laws are
+     executed. Moreover, the king should indulge himself less, as well
+     in ease as in pleasure, and should be less disposed to the pomp and
+     the pride of life than any other man. He ought not to be
+     distinguished from the rest of mankind by the greatness of his
+     wealth, or the vanity of his enjoyments, but by superior wisdom,
+     more heroic virtue, and more splendid glory. Abroad he ought to be
+     the defender of his country, by commanding her armies; and at home
+     the judge of his people, distributing justice among them, improving
+     their morals, and increasing their felicity. It is not for himself
+     that the gods have intrusted him with royalty. He is exalted above
+     individuals, only that he may be the servant of the people. To the
+     public he owes all his time, all his attention, and all his love;
+     he deserves dignity only in proportion as he gives up private
+     enjoyments for the public good.
+
+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 free-thinkers, 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 truly foreshadowed? The "Telemachus:"--
+
+     Remember, that the sovereign who is most absolute is always least
+     powerful; he seizes upon all, and his grasp is ruin. He is, indeed,
+     the sole proprietor of whatever his state contains; but, for that
+     reason, his state contains nothing of value: the fields are
+     uncultivated, and almost a desert; the towns lose some of their few
+     inhabitants every day; and trade every day declines. The king, who
+     must cease to be a king when he ceases to have subjects, and who is
+     great only in virtue of his people, is himself insensibly losing
+     his character and his power, as the number of his people, from
+     whom alone both are derived, insensibly diminishes. His dominions
+     are at length exhausted of money and of men: the loss of men is the
+     greatest and the most irreparable he can sustain. Absolute power
+     degrades every subject to a slave. The tyrant is flattered, even to
+     an appearance of adoration, and every one trembles at the glance of
+     his eye; but, at the least revolt, this enormous power perishes by
+     its own excess. It derived no strength from the love of the people;
+     it wearied and provoked all that it could reach, and rendered every
+     individual of the state impatient of its continuance. At the first
+     stroke of opposition, the idol is overturned, broken to pieces, and
+     trodden under foot. Contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust,
+     and every other passion of the soul, unite against so hateful a
+     despotism. The king who, in his vain prosperity, found no man bold
+     enough to tell him the truth, in his adversity finds no man kind
+     enough to excuse his faults, or to defend him against his enemies.
+
+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:--
+
+     Telemachus observed the countenance of these criminals to be pale
+     and ghastly, strongly expressive of the torment they suffered at
+     the heart. They looked inward with a self-abhorrence, now
+     inseparable from their existence. Their crimes themselves had
+     become their punishment, and it was not necessary that greater
+     should be inflicted. They haunted them like hideous spectres, and
+     continually started up before them in all their enormity. They
+     wished for a second death, that might separate them from these
+     ministers of vengeance, as the first had separated their spirits
+     from the body,--a death that might at once extinguish all
+     consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the depths of hell
+     to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in impenetrable
+     darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance, which,
+     though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth,
+     from which they fled, has overtaken them, an invincible and
+     unrelenting enemy. The ray which once might have illuminated them,
+     like the mild radiance of the day, now pierces them like
+     lightning,--a fierce and fatal fire, that, without injury to the
+     external parts, infixes a burning torment at the heart. By truth,
+     now an avenging flame, the very soul is melted like metal in a
+     furnace; it dissolves all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the
+     first elements of life, yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as
+     it were, divided against himself, without rest and without comfort;
+     animated by no vital principle, but the rage that kindles at his
+     own misconduct, and the dreadful madness that results from despair.
+
+If the "perpetual feast of nectared 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:"--
+
+     In this place resided all the good kings who had wisely governed
+     mankind from the beginning of time. They were separated from the
+     rest of the just; for, as wicked princes suffer more dreadful
+     punishment than other offenders in Tartarus, so good kings enjoy
+     infinitely greater felicity than other lovers of virtue, in the
+     fields of Elysium.
+
+     Telemachus advanced towards these kings, whom he found in groves of
+     delightful fragrance, reclining upon the downy turf, where the
+     flowers and herbage were perpetually renewed. A thousand rills
+     wandered through these scenes of delight, and refreshed the soil
+     with a gentle and unpolluted wave; the song of innumerable birds
+     echoed in the groves. Spring strewed the ground with her flowers,
+     while at the same time autumn loaded the trees with her fruit. In
+     this place the burning heat of the dog-star was never felt, and the
+     stormy north was forbidden to scatter over it the frosts of winter.
+     Neither War that thirsts for blood, nor Envy that bites with an
+     envenomed tooth, like the vipers that are wreathed around her arms,
+     and fostered in her bosom, nor Jealousy, nor Distrust, nor Fears,
+     nor vain Desires, invade these sacred domains of peace. The day is
+     here without end, and the shades of night are unknown. Here the
+     bodies of the blessed are clothed with a pure and lambent light,
+     as with a garment. This light does not resemble that vouchsafed to
+     mortals upon earth, which is rather darkness visible; it is rather
+     a celestial glory than a light--an emanation that penetrates the
+     grossest body with more subtilety than the rays of the sun
+     penetrate the purest crystal, which rather strengthens than dazzles
+     the sight, and diffuses through the soul a serenity which no
+     language can express. By this ethereal essence the blessed are
+     sustained in everlasting life; it pervades them; it is incorporated
+     with them, as food with the mortal body; they see it, they feel it,
+     they breathe it, and it produces in them an inexhaustible source of
+     serenity and joy. It is a fountain of delight, in which they are
+     absorbed as fishes are absorbed in the sea; they wish for nothing,
+     and, having nothing, they possess all things. This celestial light
+     satiates the hunger of the soul; every desire is precluded; and
+     they have a fulness of joy which sets them above all that mortals
+     seek with such restless ardor, to fill the vacuity that aches
+     forever in their breast. All the delightful objects that surround
+     them are disregarded; for their felicity springs up within, and,
+     being perfect, can derive nothing from without. So the gods,
+     satiated with nectar and ambrosia, disdain, as gross and impure,
+     all the dainties of the most luxurious table upon earth. From these
+     seats of tranquillity all evils fly far away; death, disease,
+     poverty, pain, regret, remorse, fear, even hope,--which is
+     sometimes not less painful than fear itself,--animosity, disgust,
+     and resentment can never enter there.
+
+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 moulding 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 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."
+
+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 is, in quantity as in quality,
+enough, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the
+perverse inclination of the balance.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+MONTESQUIEU.
+
+1689-1755.
+
+
+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 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:--
+
+     This body [the Roman Senate] erected itself into a tribunal for the
+     judgment of all peoples, and at the end of every war it decided
+     upon the punishments and the recompenses which it conceived each to
+     be entitled to. It took away parts of the lands of the conquered
+     states, in order to bestow them upon the allies of Rome, thus
+     accomplishing two objects at once,--attaching to Rome those kings
+     of whom she had little to fear and much to hope, and weakening
+     those of whom she had little to hope and all to fear.
+
+     Allies were employed to make war upon an enemy, but the destroyers
+     were at once destroyed in their turn. Philip was beaten with the
+     half of the Ætolians, who were immediately afterwards annihilated
+     for having joined themselves to Antiochus. Antiochus was beaten
+     with the help of the Rhodians, who, after having received signal
+     rewards, were humiliated forever, under the pretext that they had
+     requested that peace might be made with Perseus.
+
+     When they had many enemies on hand at the same time, they accorded
+     a truce to the weakest, which considered itself happy in obtaining
+     such a respite, counting it for much to be able to secure a
+     postponement of its ruin.
+
+     When they were engaged in a great war, the senate affected to
+     ignore all sorts of injuries, and silently awaited the arrival of
+     the proper time for punishment; when, if it saw that only some
+     individuals were culpable, it refused to punish them, choosing
+     rather to hold the entire nation as criminal, and thus reserve to
+     itself a useful vengeance.
+
+     As they inflicted inconceivable evils upon their enemies, there
+     were not many leagues formed against them; for those who were most
+     distant from danger were not willing to draw nearer to it. The
+     consequence of this was, that they were rarely attacked; whilst, on
+     the other hand, they constantly made war at such time, in such
+     manner, and against such peoples, as suited their convenience; and,
+     among the many nations which they assailed, there were very few
+     that would not have submitted to every species of injury at their
+     hands if they had been willing to leave them in peace.
+
+     It being their custom to speak always as masters, the ambassadors
+     whom they sent to nations which had not yet felt their power were
+     certain to be insulted; and this was an infallible pretext for a
+     new war.
+
+     As they never made peace in good faith, and as, with the design of
+     universal conquest, their treaties were, properly speaking, only
+     suspensions of war, they always put conditions in them which began
+     the ruin of the states which accepted them. They either provided
+     that the garrisons of strong places should be withdrawn, or that
+     the number of troops should be limited, or that the horses or the
+     elephants of the vanquished party should be delivered over to
+     themselves; and if the defeated people was powerful on sea, they
+     compelled it to burn its vessels, and sometimes to remove, and
+     occupy a place of habitation farther inland.
+
+     After having destroyed the armies of a prince, they ruined his
+     finances by excessive taxes, or by the imposition of a tribute
+     under pretext of requiring him to pay the expenses of the war,--a
+     new species of tyranny, which forced the vanquished sovereign to
+     oppress his own subjects, and thus to alienate their affection.
+
+     When they granted peace to a king, they took some of his brothers
+     or children as hostages. This gave them the means of troubling his
+     kingdom at their pleasure. If they held the nearest heir, they
+     intimidated the possessor; if only a prince of a remote degree,
+     they used him to stir up revolts against the legitimate ruler.
+
+     Whenever any people or prince withdrew their obedience from their
+     sovereign, they immediately accorded to them the title of allies of
+     the Roman people, and thus rendered them sacred and inviolable; so
+     that there was no king, however great he might be, who could for a
+     moment be sure of his subjects, or even of his family.
+
+     Although the title of Roman ally was a species of servitude, it
+     was, nevertheless, very much sought after; for the possession of
+     this title made it certain that the recipients of it would receive
+     injuries from the Romans only, and there was ground for the hope
+     that this class of injuries would be rendered less grievous than
+     they would otherwise be.
+
+     Thus, there was no service which nations and kings were not ready
+     to perform, nor any humiliation which they did not submit to, in
+     order to obtain this distinction....
+
+     These customs were not merely some particular facts which happened
+     at hazard. They were permanently established principles, as may be
+     readily seen; for the maxims which the Romans acted upon against
+     the greatest powers were precisely those which they had employed in
+     the beginning of their career against the small cities which
+     surrounded them....
+
+     But nothing served Rome more effectually than the respect which she
+     inspired among all nations. She immediately reduced kings to
+     silence, and rendered them as dumb. With the latter, it was not a
+     mere question of the degree of their power: their very persons were
+     attacked. To risk a war with Rome was to expose themselves to
+     captivity, to death, and to the infamy of a triumph. Thus it was
+     that kings, who lived in pomp and luxury, did not dare to look with
+     steady eyes upon the Roman people, and, losing courage, they hoped,
+     by their patience and their obsequiousness, to obtain some
+     postponement of the calamities with which they were menaced.
+
+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. It acquired great contemporary
+fame, both at home and abroad. It was promptly translated into English,
+the translator earning the merited compliment of the author's own
+hearty approval of his work. Horace Walpole, who was something of a
+Gallomaniac, makes repeated allusion to Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws,"
+in letters of his written at about the time of the appearance of the
+book. But Walpole's admiring allusions themselves contain evidence that
+admiration equal to his own of the work that he praised, was by no means
+universal in England.
+
+The general aspect of the book is that of a composition meant to be
+luminously analyzed and arranged. Divisions and titles abound. There are
+thirty-one "books"; and each book contains, on the average, perhaps
+about the same number of chapters. The library edition, in English,
+consists of two volumes, comprising together some eight hundred open
+pages, in good-sized type. The books and chapters are therefore not
+formidably long. The look of the work is as if it were readable; and its
+character, on the whole, corresponds. It would hardly be French, if such
+were not the case. Except that Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws" is, as we
+have indicated, a highly organized, even an over-organized, book, which,
+by emphasis, Montaigne's "Essays" is not, these two works may be said,
+in their contents, somewhat to resemble each other. Montesquieu is
+nearly as discursive as Montaigne. He wishes to be philosophical, but he
+is not above supplying his reader with interesting historical instances.
+
+We shall not do better, in giving our readers a comprehensive idea of
+Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," than to begin by showing them the titles
+of a number of the books:--
+
+     Book I. Of Laws in General. Book II. Of Laws Directly Derived from
+     the Nature of Government. Book III. Of the Principles of the Three
+     Kinds of Government. Book IV. That the Laws of Education ought to
+     be Relative to the Principles of Government. Book V. That the Laws
+     given by the Legislator ought to be Relative to the Principle of
+     Government. Book VI. Consequences of the Principles of Different
+     Governments with Respect to the Simplicity of Civil and Criminal
+     Laws, the Form of Judgments, and the Inflicting of Punishments.
+     Book VII. Consequences of the Different Principles of the Three
+     Governments with Respect to Sumptuary Laws, Luxury, and the
+     Condition of Women. Book VIII. Of the Corruption of the Principles
+     of the Three Governments. Book XIV. Of Laws as Relative to the
+     Nature of the Climate.
+
+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 three 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 monarchy, _honor_, so
+_fear_ is necessary in a despotic government." The 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.:--
+
+     AN EXCELLENT CUSTOM OF THE SAMNITES.
+
+     The Samnites had a custom which in so small a republic, and
+     especially in their situation, must have been productive of
+     admirable effects. The young people were all convened in one place,
+     and their conduct was examined. He that was declared the best of
+     the whole assembly, had leave given him to take which girl he
+     pleased for his wife; the second best chose after him, and so on.
+     Admirable institution! The only recommendation that young men could
+     have on this occasion, was their virtue, and the service done their
+     country. He who had the greatest share of these endowments, chose
+     which girl he liked out of the whole nation. Love, beauty,
+     chastity, virtue, birth, and even wealth itself, were all, in some
+     measure, the dowry of virtue. A nobler and grander recompense, less
+     chargeable to a petty state, and more capable of influencing both
+     sexes, could scarce be imagined.
+
+     The Samnites were descended from the Lacedæmonians; and Plato,
+     whose institutes are only an improvement of those of Lycurgus,
+     enacted nearly the same law.
+
+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 Samnite 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 nearly the whole of the philosophy underlying M. Taine's
+essays on the history of literature:--
+
+     OF THE DIFFERENCE OF MEN IN DIFFERENT CLIMATES.
+
+     A cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibres of
+     the body; this increases their elasticity, and favors the return of
+     the blood from the extreme parts to the heart. It contracts those
+     very fibres; consequently it increases also their force. On the
+     contrary, a warm air relaxes and lengthens the extremes of the
+     fibres; of course it diminishes their force and elasticity.
+
+     People are therefore more vigorous in cold climates. Here the
+     action of the heart and the reaction of the extremities of the
+     fibres are better performed, the temperature of the humors is
+     greater, the blood moves freer towards the heart, and reciprocally
+     the heart has more power. This superiority of strength must produce
+     various effects; for instance, a greater boldness,--that is, more
+     courage; a greater sense of superiority,--that is, less desire of
+     revenge; a greater opinion of security,--that is, more frankness,
+     less suspicion, policy and cunning. In short, this must be
+     productive of very different tempers. Put a man into a close, warm
+     place, and, for the reasons above given, he will feel a great
+     faintness. If under this circumstance you propose a bold enterprise
+     to him, I believe you will find him very little disposed towards
+     it; his present weakness will throw him into a despondency; he will
+     be afraid of every thing, being in a state of total incapacity. The
+     inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the
+     people in cold countries are, like young men, brave.
+
+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:"--
+
+     When the Christian religion, two centuries ago, became unhappily
+     divided into Catholic and Protestant, the people of the north
+     embraced the Protestant, and those south adhered still to the
+     Catholic.
+
+     The reason is plain: the people of the north have, and will forever
+     have, a spirit of liberty and independence, which the people of the
+     south have not; and therefore, a religion which has no visible
+     head, is more agreeable to the independency of the climate, than
+     that which has one.
+
+Climate is a "great matter" with Montesquieu. In treating of the subject
+of a state changing its religion, he says:--
+
+     The ancient religion is connected with the constitution of the
+     kingdom, and the new one is not; the former _agrees with the
+     climate_, and very often the new one is opposite to it.
+
+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 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.
+
+The latter part of "The Spirit of Laws" contains discussions exhibiting
+no little research on the part of the author. There is, for one example,
+a discussion of the course of commerce in different ages of the world,
+and of the influences that have wrought from time to time to bring about
+the changes occurring. For another example, there is a discussion of the
+feudal system.
+
+Montesquieu was an admirer of the English constitution. His work,
+perhaps, contains no extended chapters more likely to instruct the
+general reader and to furnish a good idea of the writer's genius and
+method, than the two chapters--chapter six, Book XI., and chapter
+twenty-seven, Book XIX.--in which the English nation and the English
+form of government are sympathetically described. We simply indicate,
+for we have no room to exhibit, these chapters. Voltaire, too, expressed
+Montesquieu's admiration of English liberty and English law.
+
+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 contrast of these two different sets of expressions from his
+pen. In earlier manhood he says:--
+
+     Study has been for me the sovereign remedy for all the
+     dissatisfactions of life, having never had a sense of chagrin that
+     an hour's reading would not dissipate. I wake in the morning with a
+     secret joy to behold the light. I behold the light with a kind of
+     ravishment, and all the rest of the day I am happy.
+
+Within a few years of his death, the brave, cheerful tone had declined
+to this:--
+
+     I am broken down with fatigue; I must repose for the rest of my
+     life.
+
+Then further to this:--
+
+     I have expected to kill myself for the last three months, finishing
+     an addition to my work on the origin and changes of the French
+     civil law. It will take only three hours to read it; but, I assure
+     you, it has been such a labor to me, that my hair has turned white
+     under it all.
+
+Finally it touches nadir:--
+
+     It [his work] has almost cost me my life; I must rest; I can work
+     no more.
+
+     My candles are all burned out; I have set off all my cartridges.
+
+When Montesquieu died, only Diderot, among Parisian men of letters,
+followed him to his tomb.
+
+
+
+
+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 single great
+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 works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven
+volumes (equivalent, probably, in the aggregate, to three 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 to extinguish 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. 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 Shakspeare'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 either the merit 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 coming shortly and easily at a
+knowledge of Voltaire.
+
+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 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:--
+
+     "I have heard great talk of the Senator Pococuranté, who lives in
+     that fine house at the Brenta, where they say he entertains
+     foreigners in the most polite manner. They pretend this man is a
+     perfect stranger to uneasiness."--"I should be glad to see so
+     extraordinary a being," said Martin. Candide thereupon sent a
+     messenger to Signor Pococuranté, desiring permission to wait on him
+     the next day.
+
+     Candide and his friend Martin went into a gondola on the Brenta,
+     and arrived at the palace of the noble Pococuranté: the gardens
+     were laid out in elegant taste, and adorned with fine marble
+     statues; his palace was built after the most approved rules of
+     architecture. The master of the house, who was a man of sixty, and
+     very rich, received our two travellers with great politeness, but
+     without much ceremony, which somewhat disconcerted Candide, but was
+     not at all displeasing to Martin.
+
+     As soon as they were seated, two very pretty girls, neatly dressed,
+     brought in chocolate, which was extremely well frothed. Candide
+     could not help making encomiums upon their beauty and graceful
+     carriage. "The creatures are well enough," said the senator. "I
+     make them my companions, for I am heartily tired of the ladies of
+     the town, their coquetry, their jealousy, their quarrels, their
+     humors, their meannesses, their pride, and their folly. I am weary
+     of making sonnets, or of paying for sonnets to be made, on them;
+     but, after all, these two girls begin to grow very indifferent to
+     me."
+
+     After having refreshed himself, Candide walked into a large
+     gallery, where he was struck with the sight of a fine collection of
+     paintings. "Pray," said Candide, "by what master are the two first
+     of these?"--"They are Raphael's," answered the senator. "I gave a
+     great deal of money for them seven years ago, purely out of
+     curiosity, as they were said to be the finest pieces in Italy: but
+     I cannot say they please me; the coloring is dark and heavy; the
+     figures do not swell nor come out enough; and the drapery is very
+     bad. In short, notwithstanding the encomiums lavished upon them,
+     they are not, in my opinion, a true representation of nature. I
+     approve of no paintings but where I think I behold Nature herself;
+     and there are very few, if any, of that kind to be met with. I have
+     what is called a fine collection, but I take no manner of delight
+     in them."
+
+     While dinner was getting ready, Pococuranté ordered a concert.
+     Candide praised the music to the skies. "This noise," said the
+     noble Venetian, "may amuse one for a little time; but if it was to
+     last above half an hour, it would grow tiresome to everybody,
+     though perhaps no one would care to own it. Music is become the art
+     of executing what is difficult; now, whatever is difficult cannot
+     be long pleasing.
+
+     "I believe I might take more pleasure in an opera, if they had not
+     made such a monster of that species of dramatic entertainment as
+     perfectly shocks me; and I am amazed how people can bear to see
+     wretched tragedies set to music, where the scenes are contrived for
+     no other purpose than to lug in, as it were by the ears, three or
+     four ridiculous songs, to give a favorite actress an opportunity of
+     exhibiting her pipe. Let who will or can die away in raptures at
+     the trills of a eunuch quavering the majestic part of Cæsar or
+     Cato, and strutting in a foolish manner upon the stage. For my
+     part, I have long ago renounced these paltry entertainments, which
+     constitute the glory of modern Italy, and are so dearly purchased
+     by crowned heads." Candide opposed these sentiments, but he did it
+     in a discreet manner. As for Martin, he was entirely of the old
+     senator's opinion.
+
+     Dinner being served up, they sat down to table, and after a very
+     hearty repast, returned to the library. Candide, observing Homer
+     richly bound, commended the noble Venetian's taste. "This," said
+     he, "is a book that was once the delight of the great Pangloss, the
+     best philosopher in Germany."--"Homer is no favorite of mine,"
+     answered Pococuranté very coolly. "I was made to believe once that
+     I took a pleasure in reading him; but his continual repetitions of
+     battles must have all such a resemblance with each other; his gods
+     that are forever in a hurry and bustle, without ever doing any
+     thing; his Helen, that is the cause of the war, and yet hardly acts
+     in the whole performance; his Troy, that holds out so long without
+     being taken; in short, all these things together make the poem very
+     insipid to me. I have asked some learned men whether they are not
+     in reality as much tired as myself with reading this poet. Those
+     who spoke ingenuously assured me that he had made them fall asleep,
+     and yet that they could not well avoid giving him a place in their
+     libraries; but that it was merely as they would do an antique, or
+     those rusty medals which are kept only for curiosity, and are of no
+     manner of use in commerce."
+
+     "But your excellency does not surely form the same opinion of
+     Virgil?" said Candide. "Why, I grant," replied Pococuranté, "that
+     the second, third, fourth, and sixth books of his 'Æneid' are
+     excellent; but as for his pious Æneas, his strong Cloanthus, his
+     friendly Achates, his boy Ascanius, his silly King Latinus, his
+     ill-bred Amata, his insipid Lavinia, and some other characters much
+     in the same strain, I think there cannot in nature be any thing
+     more flat and disagreeable. I must confess I prefer Tasso far
+     beyond him; nay, even that sleepy tale-teller Ariosto."
+
+     "May I take the liberty to ask if you do not receive great pleasure
+     from reading Horace?" said Candide. "There are maxims in this
+     writer," replied Pococuranté, "from whence a man of the world may
+     reap some benefit; and the short measure of the verse makes them
+     more easily to be retained in the memory. But I see nothing
+     extraordinary in his journey to Brundusium, and his account of his
+     bad dinner; nor in his dirty, low quarrel between one Rupilius,
+     whose words, as he expresses it, were full of poisonous filth; and
+     another, whose language was dipped in vinegar. His indelicate
+     verses against old women and witches have frequently given me great
+     offence; nor can I discover the great merit of his telling his
+     friend Mæcenas, that, if he will but rank him in the class of lyric
+     poets, his lofty head shall touch the stars. Ignorant readers are
+     apt to advance every thing by the lump in a writer of reputation.
+     For my part, I read only to please myself. I like nothing but what
+     makes for my purpose." Candide, who had been brought up with a
+     notion of never making use of his own judgment, was astonished at
+     what he heard; but Martin found there was a good deal of reason in
+     the senator's remarks.
+
+     "Oh, here is a Tully!" said Candide; "this great man, I fancy, you
+     are never tired of reading."--"Indeed, I never read him at all,"
+     replied Pococuranté. "What a deuce is it to me whether he pleads
+     for Rabirius or Cluentius? I try causes enough myself. I had once
+     some liking to his philosophical works; but when I found he doubted
+     of every thing, I thought I knew as much as himself, and had no
+     need of a guide to learn ignorance."
+
+     "Ha!" cried Martin, "here are fourscore volumes of the 'Memoirs of
+     the Academy of Sciences;' perhaps there may be something curious
+     and valuable in this collection."--"Yes," answered Pococuranté; "so
+     there might, if any one of these compilers of this rubbish had only
+     invented the art of pin-making. But all these volumes are filled
+     with mere chimerical systems, without one single article conducive
+     to real utility."
+
+     "I see a prodigious number of plays," said Candide, "in Italian,
+     Spanish, and French."--"Yes," replied the Venetian; "there are, I
+     think, three thousand, and not three dozen of them good for any
+     thing. As to those huge volumes of divinity, and those enormous
+     collections of sermons, they are not all together worth one single
+     page of Seneca; and I fancy you will readily believe that neither
+     myself nor any one else ever looks into them."
+
+     Martin, perceiving some shelves filled with English books, said to
+     the senator, "I fancy that a republican must be highly delighted
+     with those books, which are most of them written with a noble
+     spirit of freedom."--"It is noble to write as we think," said
+     Pococuranté; "it is the privilege of humanity. Throughout Italy we
+     write only what we do not think; and the present inhabitants of the
+     country of the Cæsars and Antoninuses dare not acquire a single
+     idea without the permission of a father Dominican. I should be
+     enamoured of the spirit of the English nation did it not utterly
+     frustrate the good effects it would produce by passion and the
+     spirit of party."
+
+     Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think
+     that author a great man. "Who!" said Pococuranté sharply. "That
+     barbarian, who writes a tedious commentary, in ten books of
+     rambling verse, on the first chapter of Genesis! That slovenly
+     imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation by making the
+     Messiah take a pair of compasses from heaven's armory to plan the
+     world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole
+     universe by his fiat! Can I think you have any esteem for a writer
+     who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer,
+     sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him
+     say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses
+     him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation
+     of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils
+     and angels cannonading each other in heaven! Neither I, nor any
+     other Italian, can possibly take pleasure in such melancholy
+     reveries. But the marriage of Sin and Death, and snakes issuing
+     from the womb of the former, are enough to make any person sick
+     that is not lost to all sense of delicacy. This obscene, whimsical,
+     and disagreeable poem met with the neglect that it deserved at its
+     first publication; and I only treat the author now as he was
+     treated in his own country by his contemporaries."
+
+     Candide was sensibly grieved at this speech, as he had a great
+     respect for Homer, and was very fond of Milton. "Alas!" said he
+     softly to Martin, "I am afraid this man holds our German poets in
+     great contempt."--"There would be no such great harm in that," said
+     Martin.--"Oh, what a surprising man!" said Candide to himself.
+     "What a prodigious genius is this Pococuranté! Nothing can please
+     him."
+
+     After finishing their survey of the library they went down into the
+     garden, when Candide commended the several beauties that offered
+     themselves to his view. "I know nothing upon earth laid out in such
+     bad taste," said Pococuranté; "every thing about it is childish and
+     trifling; but I shall have another laid out to-morrow upon a nobler
+     plan."
+
+     As soon as our two travellers had taken leave of his excellency,
+     "Well," said Candide to Martin, "I hope you will own that this man
+     is the happiest of all mortals, for he is above every thing he
+     possesses."--"But do you not see," answered Martin, "that he
+     likewise dislikes every thing he possesses? It was an observation
+     of Plato long since, that those are not the best stomachs that
+     reject, without distinction, all sorts of aliments."--"True," said
+     Candide; "but still, there must certainly be a pleasure in
+     criticising every thing, and in perceiving faults where others
+     think they see beauties."--"That is," replied Martin, "there is a
+     pleasure in having no pleasure."--"Well, well," said Candide, "I
+     find that I shall be the only happy man at last, when I am blessed
+     with the sight of my dear Cunegund."--"It is good to hope," said
+     Martin.
+
+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 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.
+
+It was a happy editorial thought of Mr. Henry Morley, in his cheap
+library, now issuing, of standard books for the people, to bind up
+Johnson's "Rasselas" in one volume with Voltaire's "Candide." The two
+stories, nearly contemporaneous in their production, offer a stimulating
+contrast in treatment, at the hands of two sharply contrasted writers,
+of much the same subject,--the unsatisfactoriness of the world.
+
+Mr. John Morley, a very different writer and a very different man from
+his namesake just mentioned, has an elaborate monograph on Voltaire in a
+volume perhaps twice as large as the present. This work claims the
+attention of all students desirous of exhaustive acquaintance with its
+subject. Mr. John Morley 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. It is only in his
+two volumes on "Diderot and the Encyclopædists," that Mr. Morley finds
+himself able to write without reserve in full moral accord with the men
+whom he describes. Of course, in all these books the biographer and
+critic feels, as Englishman, obliged to concede much to his English
+audience, in the way of condemning impurities in his authors. The
+concession thus made is made with great adroitness of manner, the
+writer's aim evidently being to imply that his infidels and atheists, if
+they are somewhat vicious in taste, had the countenance of good
+Christian example or parallel for all the lapses they show. Mr. Morley
+wishes to be fair, but his atheist zeal overcomes him. This is
+especially evident in his work on "Diderot and the Encyclopædists,"
+where his propagandist desire to clear the character of his hero bribes
+him once and again to unconscious false dealing. In his "Voltaire," and
+in his "Rousseau," Mr. Morley is so lofty in tone, expressing himself
+against the moral obliquities of the men with whom he is dealing, that
+often you feel the ethic atmosphere of the books to be pure and bracing,
+almost beyond the standard of biblical and Christian. But in his
+"Diderot and the Encyclopædists," such fine severity is conspicuously
+absent. Mr. Morley is so deeply convinced that atheism is what we all
+most need just now, that when he has--not halting mere infidels, like
+Voltaire and Rousseau--but good thorough-going atheists, like Diderot
+and his fellows, to exhibit, he can hardly bring himself to injure their
+exemplary influence with his readers, by allowing to exist any damaging
+flaws in their character.
+
+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, 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 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
+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 theatre. 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."
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+1712-1778.
+
+
+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.
+
+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:--
+
+     I purpose an undertaking that never had an example, and whose
+     execution never will have an imitator. I would exhibit to my
+     fellows a man in all the truth of nature, and that man--myself.
+
+     Myself alone. I know my own heart, and I am acquainted with men. I
+     am made unlike any one I have ever seen,--I dare believe unlike any
+     living being. If no better than, I am at least different from,
+     others. Whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mould
+     wherein I was cast, can be determined only after having read me.
+
+     Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I will come, with this
+     book in my hand, and present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I
+     will boldly proclaim: Thus have I acted, thus have I thought, such
+     was I. With equal frankness have I disclosed the good and the evil.
+     I have omitted nothing bad, added nothing good; and if I have
+     happened to make use of some unimportant ornament, it has, in every
+     case, been simply for the purpose of filling up a void occasioned
+     by my lack of memory. I may have taken for granted as true what I
+     knew to be possible, never what I knew to be false. Such as I was,
+     I have exhibited myself,--despicable and vile, when so; virtuous,
+     generous, sublime, when so. I have unveiled my interior being, such
+     as Thou, Eternal Existence, hast beheld it. Assemble around me the
+     numberless throng of my fellow-mortals; let them listen to my
+     confessions, let them blush at my depravities, let them shrink
+     appalled at my miseries. Let each of them, in his turn, with equal
+     sincerity, lay bare his heart at the foot of thy throne, and then
+     let a single one tell thee, if he dare, _I was better than that
+     man_.
+
+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 pretence 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:--
+
+     I was born at Geneva, in 1712, of Isaac Rousseau and Susannah
+     Bernard, citizens.... I came into the world weak and sickly. I cost
+     my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes.
+
+     I never learned how my father supported his loss, but I know that
+     he remained ever after inconsolable.... When he used to say to me,
+     "Jean Jacques, let us speak of your mother," my usual reply was,
+     "Well, father, we'll cry, then," a reply which would instantly
+     bring the tears to his eyes. "Ah!" he would exclaim with agitation,
+     "give me her back, console me for her loss, fill up the void she
+     has left in my soul. Could I love thee thus wert thou but _my_
+     son?" Forty years after having lost her he expired in the arms of a
+     second wife, but with the name of the first on his lips, and her
+     image engraven on his heart.
+
+     Such were the authors of my being. Of all the gifts Heaven had
+     allotted them, a feeling heart was the only one I had inherited.
+     While, however, this had been the source of their happiness, it
+     became the spring of all my misfortunes.
+
+"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; but heart's blood was the ink in
+which almost every word of Rousseau's was written. This was the spring
+of his marvellous power. Rousseau:--
+
+     My mother had left a number of romances. These father and I betook
+     us to reading during the evenings. At first the sole object was, by
+     means of entertaining books, to improve me in reading; but, ere
+     long, the charm became so potent, that we read turn about without
+     intermission, and passed whole nights in this employment. Never
+     could we break up till the end of the volume. At times my father,
+     hearing the swallows of a morning, would exclaim, quite ashamed of
+     himself, "Come, let's to bed; I'm more of a child than you are!"
+
+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:--
+
+     I soon acquired, by this dangerous course, not only an extreme
+     facility in reading and understanding, but, for my age, a quite
+     unprecedented acquaintance with the passions. I had not the
+     slightest conception of things themselves, at a time when the whole
+     round of sentiments was already perfectly familiar to me. I had
+     apprehended nothing--I had felt all.
+
+Some hint now of other books read by the boy:--
+
+     With the summer of 1719 the romance-reading terminated.... "The
+     History of the Church and Empire" by Lesueur, Bossuet's
+     "Dissertation on Universal History," Plutarch's "Lives," Nani's
+     "History of Venice," Ovid's "Metamorphoses," "La Bruyère,"
+     Fontenelle's "Worlds," his "Dialogues of the Dead," and a few
+     volumes of Molière, were transported into my father's shop; and I
+     read them to him every day during his work. For this employment I
+     acquired a rare, and, for my age, perhaps unprecedented, taste.
+     Plutarch especially became my favorite reading. The pleasure which
+     I found in incessantly reperusing him, cured me in some measure of
+     the romance madness; and I soon came to prefer Agesilaus, Brutus,
+     and Aristides, to Orondates, Artemenes, and Juba. From these
+     interesting studies, joined to the conversations to which they gave
+     rise with my father, resulted that free, republican spirit, that
+     haughty and untamable character, fretful of restraint or
+     subjection, which has tormented me my life long, and that in
+     situations the least suitable for giving it play. Incessantly
+     occupied with Rome and Athens, living, so to speak, with their
+     great men, born myself the citizen of a republic [Geneva], the son
+     of a father with whom patriotism was the ruling passion, I caught
+     the flame from him--I imagined myself a Greek or a Roman, and
+     became the personage whose life I was reading.
+
+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 thus in part was 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:--
+
+     I had a brother, my elder by seven years.... He fell into the ways
+     of debauchery, even before he was old enough to be really a
+     libertine.... I remember once when my father was chastising him
+     severely and in anger, that I impetuously threw myself between
+     them, clasping him tightly. I thus covered him with my body,
+     receiving the blows that were aimed at him; and I held out so
+     persistently in this position, that whether softened by my cries
+     and tears, or fearing that I should get the worst of it, my father
+     was forced to forgive him. In the end my brother turned out so bad
+     that he ran away and disappeared altogether.
+
+It is pathetic--Rousseau's attempted contrast following, between the
+paternal neglect of his older brother and the paternal indulgence of
+himself:--
+
+     If this poor lad was carelessly brought up, it was quite otherwise
+     with his brother.... My desires were so little excited, and so
+     little crossed, that it never came into my head to have any. I can
+     solemnly aver, that, till the time when I was bound to a master, I
+     never knew what it was to have a whim.
+
+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!
+The "Confessions" truly say:--
+
+     Thus commenced the formation or the manifestation in me of that
+     heart at once so haughty and so tender, of that effeminate and yet
+     unconquerable character which, ever vacillating between courage and
+     weakness, between virtue and yielding to temptation, has all along
+     set me in contradiction to myself, and has resulted in my failing
+     both of abstinence and enjoyment, both of prudence and pleasure.
+
+The half-orphan becomes orphan entire, not by the death, but by the
+withdrawing, of the father. That father, having been accused of a
+misdemeanor, "preferred," Rousseau somewhat vaguely says, "to quit
+Geneva for the remainder of his life, rather than give up a point
+wherein honor and liberty appeared to him compromised." Jean Jacques was
+sent to board with a parson, who taught him Latin, and, along with
+Latin, supplied, Rousseau scornfully says, "all the accompanying mass of
+paltry rubbish styled education." He adds:--
+
+     The country was so entirely new to me, that I could never grow
+     weary in my enjoyment of it; and I acquired so strong a liking for
+     it, that it has never become extinguished.
+
+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:--
+
+     I learned to covet in silence, to dissemble, to dissimulate, to
+     lie, and at last to steal,--a propensity for which I had never
+     hitherto had the slightest inclination, and of which I have never
+     since been able quite to cure myself....
+
+     My first theft was the result of complaisance, but it opened the
+     door to others which had not so laudable a motive.
+
+     My master had a journeyman named M. Verrat.... [He] took it into
+     his head to rob his mother of some of her early asparagus and sell
+     it, converting the proceeds into some extra good breakfasts. As he
+     did not wish to expose himself, and not being very nimble, he
+     selected me for this expedition.... Long did I stickle, but he
+     persisted. I never could resist kindness, so I consented. I went
+     every morning to the garden, gathered the best of the asparagus,
+     and took it to "the Molard," where some good creature, perceiving
+     that I had just been stealing it, would insinuate that little fact,
+     so as to get it the cheaper. In my terror I took whatever she chose
+     to give me, and carried it to M. Verrat.
+
+     This little domestic arrangement continued for several days before
+     it came into my head to rob the robber, and tithe M. Verrat for the
+     proceeds of the asparagus.... I thus learned that to steal was,
+     after all, not so very terrible a thing as I had conceived; and ere
+     long I turned this discovery to so good an account, that nothing I
+     had an inclination for could safely be left within my reach....
+
+     And now, before giving myself over to the fatality of my destiny,
+     let me, for a moment, contemplate what would naturally have been my
+     lot had I fallen into the hands of a better master. Nothing was
+     more agreeable to my tastes, nor better calculated to render me
+     happy, than the calm and obscure condition of a good artisan, more
+     especially in certain lines, such as that of an engraver at
+     Geneva.... In my native country, in the bosom of my religion, of my
+     family, and my friends, I should have led a life gentle and
+     uncheckered as became my character, in the uniformity of a pleasing
+     occupation and among connections dear to my heart. I should have
+     been a good Christian, a good citizen, a good father, a good
+     friend, a good artisan, and a good man in every respect. I should
+     have loved my station; it may be I should have been an honor to it:
+     and after having passed an obscure and simple, though even and
+     happy, life, I should peacefully have departed in the bosom of my
+     kindred. Soon, it may be, forgotten, I should at least have been
+     regretted as long as the remembrance of me survived.
+
+     Instead of this... what a picture am I about to draw!
+
+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. (Apprentice Jean Jacques has left his
+master, and entered on a vagabond life.) This lady is a character very
+difficult for us Protestant Americans in our contrasted society to
+conceive as real or as possible. She kept a house of, what shall we call
+it? detention, for souls doubtfully in the way of being reclaimed from
+Protestant error into the bosom of the Roman-Catholic Church. She was
+herself a Roman-Catholic convert from Protestantism. She 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 loathness
+of self-respect to prevent his detailing the absurd adventures with
+which he diverted himself on the way. For example:--
+
+     Not a country-seat could I see, either to the right or left,
+     without going after the adventure which I was certain awaited me.
+     I could not muster courage to enter the mansion, nor even to knock,
+     for I was excessively timid; but I sang beneath the most inviting
+     window, very much astonished to find, after wasting my breath, that
+     neither lady nor miss made her appearance, attracted by the beauty
+     of my voice, or the spice of my songs,--seeing that I knew some
+     capital ones that my comrades had taught me, and which I sang in
+     the most admirable manner.
+
+Rousseau describes the emotions he experienced in his first meeting with
+Madame de Warens:--
+
+     I had pictured to myself a grim old devotee--M. de Pontverre's
+     "worthy lady" could, in my opinion, be none other. But lo, a
+     countenance beaming with charms, beautiful, mild blue eyes, a
+     complexion of dazzling fairness, the outline of an enchanting neck!
+     Nothing escaped the rapid glance of the young proselyte; for that
+     instant I was hers, sure that a religion preached by such
+     missionaries could not fail to lead to paradise!
+
+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:--
+
+     My father was not only an honorable man, but a person of the most
+     reliable probity, and endowed with one of those powerful minds that
+     perform deeds of loftiest heroism. I may add, he was a good father,
+     especially to me. Tenderly did he love me, but he loved his
+     pleasures also; and, since our living apart, other ties had, in a
+     measure, weakened his paternal affection. He had married again, at
+     Nyon; and though his wife was no longer of an age to present me
+     with brothers, yet she had connections; another family-circle was
+     thus formed, other objects engrossed his attention, and the new
+     domestic relations no longer so frequently brought back the
+     remembrance of me. My father was growing old, and had nothing on
+     which to rely for the support of his declining years. My brother
+     and I had something coming to us from my mother's fortune; the
+     interest of this my father was to receive during our absence. This
+     consideration did not present itself to him directly, nor did it
+     stand in the way of his doing his duty; it had, however, a silent,
+     and to himself imperceptible, influence, and at times slackened his
+     zeal, which, unacted upon by this, would have been carried much
+     farther. This, I think, was the reason, that, having traced me as
+     far as Annecy, he did not follow me to Chamberi, where he was
+     morally certain of overtaking me. This will also explain why, in
+     visiting him many times after my flight, I received from him on
+     every occasion a father's kindness, though unaccompanied by any
+     very pressing efforts to retain me.
+
+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:--
+
+     This conduct on the part of a father of whose affection and virtue
+     I have had so many proofs, has given rise within me to reflections
+     on my own character which have not a little contributed to maintain
+     my heart uncorrupted. I have derived therefrom this great maxim of
+     morality, perhaps the only one of any use in practice; namely, to
+     avoid such situations as put our duty in antagonism with our
+     interest, or disclose our own advantage in the misfortunes of
+     another, certain that in such circumstances, however sincere the
+     love of virtue we bring with us, it will sooner or later, and
+     whether we perceive it or not, become weakened, and we shall come
+     to be unjust and culpable in our acts without having ceased to be
+     upright and blameless in our intentions.
+
+The fruitful maxim thus deduced by Rousseau, he thinks he tried
+faithfully to put in practice. With apparent perfect assurance
+concerning himself, he says:--
+
+     I have sincerely desired to do what was right. I have, with all the
+     energy of my character, shunned situations which set my interest in
+     opposition to the interest of another, thus inspiring me with a
+     secret though involuntary desire prejudicial to that man.
+
+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 this 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:--
+
+     From the first day, the most affectionate familiarity sprang up
+     between us, and that to the same degree in which it continued
+     during all the rest of her life. _Petit_--Child--was my name,
+     _Maman_--Mamma--hers; and _Petit_ and _Maman_ we remained, even
+     when the course of time had all but effaced the difference of our
+     ages. These two names seem to me marvellously well to express our
+     tone towards each other, the simplicity of our manners, and, more
+     than all, the relation of our hearts. She was to me the tenderest
+     of mothers, never seeking her own pleasure, but ever my welfare;
+     and if the senses had any thing to do with my attachment for her,
+     it was not to change its nature, but only to render it more
+     exquisite, and intoxicate me with the charm of having a young and
+     pretty mamma whom it was delightful for me to caress. I say quite
+     literally, to caress; for it never entered into her head to deny me
+     the tenderest maternal kisses and endearments, nor into my heart to
+     abuse them. Some may say that, in the end, quite other relations
+     subsisted between us. I grant it; but have patience,--I cannot tell
+     every thing at once.
+
+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 he forsook her.
+Rousseau's whole life was a series of self-indulgences, grovelling,
+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:--
+
+     I remember, particularly, having passed a delicious night without
+     the city on a road that skirted the Rhone or the Saône, for I
+     cannot remember which. On the other side were terraced gardens. It
+     had been a very warm day; the evening was charming; the dew
+     moistened the faded grass; a calm night, without a breeze; the air
+     was cool without being cold; the sun in setting had left crimson
+     vapors in the sky, which tinged the water with its roseate hue,
+     while the trees along the terrace were filled with nightingales
+     gushing out melodious answers to each other's song. I walked along
+     in a species of ecstasy, giving up heart and senses to the
+     enjoyment of the scene, only slightly sighing with regret at
+     enjoying it alone. Absorbed in my sweet reverie, I prolonged my
+     walk far into the night, without perceiving that I was wearied out.
+     At length I discovered it. I lay voluptuously down on the tablet of
+     a sort of niche or false door sunk in the terrace wall. The canopy
+     of my couch was formed by the over-arching boughs of the trees; a
+     nightingale sat exactly above me; its song lulled me to sleep; my
+     slumber was sweet, and my awaking still more so. It was broad day;
+     my eyes, on opening, fell on the water, the verdure, and the
+     admirable landscape spread out before me. I arose and shook off
+     dull sleep; and, growing hungry, I gayly directed my steps towards
+     the city, bent on transforming two _pièces de six blancs_ that I
+     had left, into a good breakfast. I was so cheerful that I went
+     singing along the whole way.
+
+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:--
+
+     One day, among others, having purposely turned aside to get a
+     closer view of a spot that appeared worthy of all admiration, I
+     grew so delighted with it, and wandered round it so often, that I
+     at length lost myself completely. After several hours of useless
+     walking, weary and faint with hunger and thirst, I entered a
+     peasant's hut which did not present a very promising appearance,
+     but it was the only one I saw around. I conceived it to be here as
+     at Geneva and throughout Switzerland, where all the inhabitants in
+     easy circumstances are in the situation to exercise hospitality. I
+     entreated the man to get me some dinner, offering to pay for it. He
+     presented me with some skimmed milk and coarse barley bread,
+     observing that that was all he had. I drank the milk with delight,
+     and ate the bread, chaff and all; but this was not very restorative
+     to a man exhausted with fatigue. The peasant, who was watching me
+     narrowly, judged of the truth of my story by the sincerity of my
+     appetite. All of a sudden, after having said that he saw perfectly
+     well that I was a good and true young fellow that did not come to
+     betray him, he opened a little trap-door by the side of his
+     kitchen, went down and returned a moment afterwards with a good
+     brown loaf of pure wheat, the remains of a toothsome ham, and a
+     bottle of wine, the sight of which rejoiced my heart more than all
+     the rest. To these he added a good thick omelette, and I made such
+     a dinner as none but a walker ever enjoyed. When it came to pay,
+     lo! his disquietude and fears again seized him; he would none of my
+     money, and rejected it with extraordinary manifestations of
+     disquiet. The funniest part of the matter was, that I could not
+     conceive what he was afraid of. At length, with fear and trembling,
+     he pronounced those terrible words, _Commissioners_ and
+     _Cellar-rats_. He gave me to understand that he concealed his wine
+     because of the excise, and his bread on account of the tax, and
+     that he was a lost man if they got the slightest inkling that he
+     was not dying of hunger. Every thing he said to me touching this
+     matter, whereof, indeed, I had not the slightest idea, produced an
+     impression on me that can never be effaced. It became the germ of
+     that inextinguishable hatred that afterwards sprang up in my heart
+     against the vexations to which these poor people are subject, and
+     against their oppressors. This man, though in easy circumstances,
+     dared not eat the bread he had gained by the sweat of his brow, and
+     could escape ruin only by presenting the appearance of the same
+     misery that reigned around him.
+
+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 we
+emphatically call character was sadly wanting in Rousseau--how sadly,
+witness such an acted piece of mad folly as the following:--
+
+     I, without knowing aught of the matter,... gave myself out for a
+     [musical] composer. Nor was this all: having been presented to M.
+     de Freytorens, law-professor, who loved music, and gave concerts at
+     his house, nothing would do but I must give him a sample of my
+     talent; so I set about composing a piece for his concert quite as
+     boldly as though I had really been an adept in the science. I had
+     the constancy to work for fifteen days on this fine affair, to copy
+     it fair, write out the different parts, and distribute them with as
+     much assurance as though it had been a masterpiece of harmony.
+     Then, what will scarcely be believed, but which yet is gospel
+     truth, worthily to crown this sublime production, I tacked to the
+     end thereof a pretty minuet which was then having a run on the
+     streets.... I gave it as my own just as resolutely as though I had
+     been speaking to inhabitants of the moon.
+
+     They assembled to perform my piece. I explain to each the nature of
+     the movement, the style of execution, and the relations of the
+     parts--I was very full of business. For five or six minutes they
+     were tuning; to me each minute seemed an age. At length, all being
+     ready, I rap with a handsome paper _bâton_ on the leader's desk the
+     five or six beats of the "_Make ready_." Silence is made--I gravely
+     set to beating time--they commence! No, never since French operas
+     began, was there such a _charivari_ heard. Whatever they might have
+     thought of my pretended talent, the effect was worse than they
+     could possibly have imagined. The musicians choked with laughter;
+     the auditors opened their eyes, and would fain have closed their
+     ears. But that was an impossibility. My tormenting set of
+     symphonists, who seemed rather to enjoy the fun, scraped away with
+     a din sufficient to crack the tympanum of one born deaf. I had the
+     firmness to go right ahead, however, sweating, it is true, at every
+     pore, but held back by shame; not daring to retreat, and glued to
+     the spot. For my consolation I heard the company whispering to each
+     other, quite loud enough for it to reach my ear: "It is not
+     bearable!" said one. "What music gone mad!" cried another. "What a
+     devilish din!" added a third. Poor Jean Jacques, little dreamed
+     you, in that cruel moment, that one day before the King of France
+     and all the court, thy sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and
+     applause, and that in all the boxes around thee the loveliest
+     ladies would burst forth with, "What charming sounds! what
+     enchanting music! every strain reaches the heart!"
+
+     But what restored every one to good humor was the minuet. Scarcely
+     had they played a few measures than I heard bursts of laughter
+     break out on all hands. Every one congratulated me on my fine
+     musical taste; they assured me that this minuet would make me
+     spoken about, and that I merited the loudest praises. I need not
+     attempt depicting my agony, nor own that I well deserved it.
+
+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 a later 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):--
+
+     I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my
+     genius, and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in
+     my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of
+     thinking.... It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for 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 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 "Émile"), to change the habit of a nation in
+the matter of 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 that had lately set all Europe in ferment with
+the "Émile" 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
+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 sombre, in
+spirit, but "beautiful exceedingly," in form of expression. Such works
+as the "Réné" of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French
+literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau's "Walks." We
+introduce two specimen extracts. The shadow of Rousseau's monomania will
+be felt thick upon them:--
+
+     It is now fifteen years since I have been in this strange
+     situation, which yet appears to me like a dream; ever imagining
+     that, disturbed by indigestion, I sleep uneasily, but shall soon
+     awake, freed from my troubles, but surrounded by my friends....
+
+     How could I possibly foresee the destiny that awaited me?... Could
+     I, if in my right senses, suppose that one day, the man I was, and
+     yet remain, should be taken, without any kind of doubt, for a
+     monster, a poisoner, an assassin, the horror of the human race, the
+     sport of the rabble, my only salutation to be spit upon, and that a
+     whole generation would unanimously amuse themselves in burying me
+     alive? When this strange revolution first happened, taken by
+     unawares, I was overwhelmed with astonishment; my agitation, my
+     indignation, plunged me into a delirium, which ten years have
+     scarcely been able to calm: during this interval, falling from
+     error to error, from fault to fault, and folly to folly, I have, by
+     my imprudence, furnished the contrivers of my fate with
+     instruments, which they have artfully employed to fix it without
+     resource....
+
+     * * *
+
+     Every future occurrence will be immaterial to me; I have in the
+     world neither relative, friend, nor brother; I am on the earth as
+     if I had fallen into some unknown planet; if I contemplate any
+     thing around me, it is only distressing, heart-rending objects;
+     every thing I cast my eyes on conveys some new subject either of
+     indignation or affliction; I will endeavor henceforward to banish
+     from my mind all painful ideas which unavailingly distress me.
+     Alone for the rest of my life, I must only look for consolation,
+     hope, or peace in my own breast; and neither ought nor will,
+     henceforward, think of any thing but myself. It is in this state
+     that I return to the continuation of that severe and just
+     examination which formerly I called my Confessions; I consecrate my
+     latter days to the study of myself, and to the preparation of that
+     account which I must shortly render up of my actions. I resign my
+     thoughts entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my own soul;
+     that being the only consolation that man cannot deprive me of. If
+     by dint of reflection on my internal propensities, I can attain to
+     putting them in better order, and correcting the evil that remains
+     in me, these meditations will not be utterly useless; and though I
+     am accounted worthless on earth, shall not cast away my latter
+     days. The leisure of my daily walks has frequently been filled with
+     charming contemplations, which I regret having forgot; but I will
+     write down those that occur in future; then, every time I read them
+     over, I shall forget my misfortunes, disgraces, and persecutors,
+     in recollecting and contemplating the integrity of my own heart.
+
+Rousseau'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:--
+
+     I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures
+     strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its
+     influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with
+     all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they,
+     compared with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so
+     simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible
+     that the Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be
+     himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an
+     enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in
+     his manners! What an affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What
+     sublimity in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses!
+     What presence of mind, what subtilety, what truth, in his replies!
+     How great the command over his passions! Where is the man, where
+     the philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness and
+     without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man
+     loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest reward
+     of virtue, he described exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the
+     resemblance was so striking that all the Fathers perceived it.
+
+     What prepossession, what blindness, must it be to compare the son
+     of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion
+     there is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy,
+     easily supported his character to the last; and if his death,
+     however easy, had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted
+     whether Socrates, with all his wisdom, was any thing more than a
+     vain sophist. He invented, it is said, the theory of morals.
+     Others, however, had before put them in practice; he had only to
+     say what they had done, and reduce their examples to precepts.
+     Aristides had been _just_ before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas
+     gave up his life for his country before Socrates declared
+     patriotism to be a duty; the Spartans were a sober people before
+     Socrates recommended sobriety; before he had even defined virtue,
+     Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where could Jesus learn, among
+     his compatriots, that pure and sublime morality of which he only
+     has given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made
+     known amidst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the
+     most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on the earth.
+     The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing with his friends,
+     appears the most agreeable that could be wished for; that of Jesus,
+     expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed
+     by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared.
+     Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the
+     weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of
+     excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if
+     the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and
+     death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic
+     history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks
+     of fiction; on the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody
+     presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ.
+     Such a supposition, in fact, only shifts the difficulty without
+     removing it; it is more inconceivable that a number of persons
+     should agree to write such a history, than that one only should
+     furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the
+     diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the gospel, the
+     marks of whose truth are so striking and inimitable that the
+     inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero.
+
+So far in eloquent ascription of incomparable excellence to the Bible
+and to the Founder of Christianity. But then immediately Rousseau's
+Curate proceeds:--
+
+     And yet, with all this, the same gospel abounds with incredible
+     relations, with circumstances repugnant to reason, and which it is
+     impossible for a man of sense either to conceive or admit.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+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 implication, awaiting the unwary
+feet of the reader. 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 any thing 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 over-earnest 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 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 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 theatre.
+This brought out Rousseau in an eloquent harangue against the theatre 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, D'Holbach, with many others
+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 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.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+EPILOGUE.
+
+
+In looking backward over the preceding pages, we think of many things
+which we should like still to say. Of these many things, we limit
+ourselves to saying here, as briefly as we can, some four or five only.
+
+To begin with, in nearly every successive case, we have found ourselves
+lamenting afresh that, from the authors to be represented, the
+representative extracts must needs be so few and so short. We have,
+therefore, sincerely begrudged to ourselves every line of room that we
+felt obliged to occupy with matter, preparatory, explanatory, or
+critical, of our own. Whatever success we may have achieved in
+fulfilling our purpose, our purpose has been to say ourselves barely so
+much as was indispensable in order finally to convey, upon the whole, to
+our readers, within the allotted space, the justest and the fullest
+impression of the selected authors, through the medium of their own
+quoted words.
+
+In the second place, it was with great regret that we yielded to the
+necessity of omitting entirely, or dismissing with scant mention, such
+literary names, for example, as Boileau, of the age of Louis Quatorze,
+and, a little later than he, Fontenelle, spanning with his century of
+years the space from 1657 to 1757,--these, and, belonging to the period
+that ushered in the Revolution, Bernardin St. Pierre, the teller of the
+tale of "Paul and Virginia," with also that hero of a hundred romantic
+adventures, Beaumarchais, half Themistocles, half Alcibiades, the author
+of "The Barber of Seville." The line had to be drawn somewhere; and,
+whether wisely or not, at least thoughtfully, we drew it to run as it
+does.
+
+A third, and a yet graver, occasion of regret was that we must stop
+short on the threshold, without crossing it, of the nineteenth-century
+literature of France. With so many shining names seen just ahead of us,
+beacon-like, to invite our advance, we felt it as a real self-denial to
+stay our steps at that point. We hope still to deal with Chateaubriand,
+Madame de Staël, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo,
+and perhaps others, in a future volume.
+
+Our eye is caught with the antithetical terms, "classicism" and
+"romanticism," occurring here and there; and the observation is forced
+upon us, that these terms, in their mutual relation, are nowhere by us
+defined. The truth is, they scarcely, as thus used, admit of hard and
+fast definition. It is in a somewhat loose conventional sense of each
+term, that, in late literary language, they are set off, one over
+against the other. They name two different, but by no means necessarily
+antagonistic, forces or tendencies in literature. Classicism stands for
+what you might call the established order, against which romanticism is
+a revolt. Paradoxical though it be to say so, both the established
+order, and the revolt against it, are good things. The established
+order, which was never really any thing more or less than the dominance
+in literature of rules and standards derived through criticism from the
+acknowledged best models, especially the ancient, tended at last to
+cramp and stifle the life which it should, of course, only serve to
+shape and conform. The mould, always too narrow perhaps, but at any rate
+grown too rigid, needed itself to be fashioned anew. Fresh life, a full
+measure, would do this. Such is the true mission of romanticism,--not to
+break the mould that classicism sought to impose on literary production,
+but to expand that mould, make it more pliant, more free. A mould, for
+things living and growing, should be plastic in the passive, as well as
+in the active, sense of that word,--should accept form, as well as give
+form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not
+when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when it
+shall have made classicism over, after the law of a larger life. To risk
+a concrete illustration--among our American poets, Bryant, in the
+perfectly self-consistent unity of his whole intellectual development,
+may be said to represent classicism; while in Lowell, as Lowell appears
+in the later, more protracted, phase of his genius, romanticism is
+represented. The "Thanatopsis" of Bryant and the "Cathedral" of Lowell
+may stand for individual examples respectively of the classic and the
+romantic styles in poetry. Compare these two productions, and in the
+difference between the chaste, well-pruned severity of the one, and the
+indulged, perhaps stimulated, luxuriance of the other, you will feel the
+difference between classicism and romanticism. But Victor Hugo is the
+great recent romanticist; and when, hereafter, we come to speak somewhat
+at large of him, it will be seasonable to enter more fully into the
+question of these two tendencies in literature.
+
+We cannot consent to have said here our very last word, without
+emphasizing once again our sense of the really extraordinary
+pervasiveness in French literature of that element in it which one does
+not like to name, even to condemn it,--we mean its impurity. The
+influence of French literary models, very strong among us just now, must
+not be permitted insensibly to pervert our own cleaner and sweeter
+national habit and taste in this matter. But we, all of us together,
+need to be both vigilant and firm; for the beginnings of corruption here
+are very insidious. Let us never grow ashamed of our saving Saxon
+shamefacedness. They may nickname it prudery, if they will; but let us,
+American and English, for our part, always take pride in such prudery.
+
+
+
+
+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.]
+
+[Transcriber's note on diacritical marks used:
+
+[)] indicates that a concave line appears over the letter in the original.
+
+[=] indicates that a straight line appears over the letter in the original.
+
+[^] indicates that a caret appears over the letter in the original.
+
+A word surrounded with equal signs (=) indicates that the word was
+in bold-type in the original.]
+
+
+Ab'é-lard (1079-1142), 6.
+
+Academy, French, 10, 12, 75, 156, 287.
+
+Æs'chy-lus, 94, 152, 166, 168.
+
+Æ'sop, 85.
+
+Al-ci-bi'a-des, 289.
+
+Alembert. _See_ D'Alembert.
+
+Al-ex-an'der (the Great), 5, 131.
+
+Al-ex-an'drine, 5, 86, 153.
+
+Am-y-ot' (ä-me-o´), Jacques (1513-1593), 8.
+
+An'ge-lo, Michel, 156.
+
+Ariosto, 245, 247.
+
+Ar'is-tot-le, 50.
+
+Ar-nauld' (ar-n[=o]´), Antoine (1612-1694), 119.
+
+Ar'thur (King), 5.
+
+Au'gus-t[=i]ne, St., Latin Christian Father, 83.
+
+Au'gus'tus (the Emperor), 131.
+
+
+Ba'con, Francis, 48, 63.
+
+Ba'ker, Jehu, 226.
+
+B[=a]´laam, 154.
+
+B[)a]l´zac, Jean Louis Guez de (1594-1654), 10, 11.
+
+Beau-mar-chais´, de (b[=o]-mar-sh[=a]´), Pierre Augustin Caron
+(1732-1799), 287, 289.
+
+Benedictines, 29.
+
+Boi-leau´-Des-pré-aux´ (bwä-l[=o]´-d[=a]-pr[=a]-o´), Nicolas
+(1636-1711), 9, 12, 14, 83, 84, 167, 168, 171, 289.
+
+Bolton, A. S., 69.
+
+=BOS-SU-ET=´(bo-sü-[=a]´), Jacques Bénigne (1627-1704), 11, 12, 77, 127,
+166, 170, 182-188, 205, 206, 224, 225.
+
+=BOUR-DA-LOUE=´, Louis (1632-1704), 3, 12, 77, 143, 148, 182, 185, 188,
+189-197, 198, 201, 202.
+
+Brook Farm, 38.
+
+Bry´ant, William Cullen, 290, 291.
+
+Buckle, Henry Thomas, 234.
+
+Buffon (büf-foN´), Georges Louis Leclerc de (1707-1788), 287.
+
+Bur´gun-dy, Duke of (1682-1712), 177, 207, 208, 209, 214, 216.
+
+Burke, Edmund, 48, 75.
+
+Bussy (büs-se´), Count, 135.
+
+By´ron, Lord, 48.
+
+
+Cæsar, Julius, 56, 131.
+
+Calas (cä-lä´), Jean, 253.
+
+Calvin, John (1509-1564), 7.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, 251, 255.
+
+Catherine (Empress of Russia), 285.
+
+Cham-fort´ (shäN-for´), Sébastien Roch Nicolas (1741-1794), 85.
+
+_Chanson _(shäN-soN´), 5.
+
+Char-le-magne´ (shar-le-m[=a]n´), 5.
+
+Charles I. (of England), 170, 185.
+
+Charles IX. (of France), 63.
+
+Cha-teau-bri-and´ (shä-t[=o]-bre-äN´), François Auguste de (1768-1848),
+3, 13, 14, 206, 277, 289.
+
+Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 20.
+
+"Classicism," 10, 14, 224, 289, 290.
+
+Claude, Jean (1619-1687), 182.
+
+Coleridge, S. T., 7, 34, 43.
+
+Comines (k[=o]-meen´), Philippe de (1445-1509), 7, 25, 28.
+
+Condé (koN-d[=a]´), Prince of, "The Great Condé" (1621-1686), 144.
+
+Condillac (koNde-yäk´), Étienne Bonnot de (1715-1780), 287.
+
+Condorcet (koN-dor-s[=a]´), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat de
+(1743-1794), 128.
+
+=CORNEILLE= (kor-n[=a]l´), Pierre (1606-1684), 2, 11, 12, 16, 78, 79, 80,
+151-166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 182, 183, 239.
+
+Cotin (ko-t[)a]N´), Abbé, 100.
+
+Cotton, Charles (1630-1687), 44, 48.
+
+Cousin (koo-z[)a]N´), Victor (1792-1867), 128.
+
+
+D'Alembert (dä-läN-bêr´), Jean le Rond (1717-1783), 13, 251, 286, 287.
+
+Dante, 50, 93, 94, 114.
+
+David (King), 198.
+
+Descartes (d[=a]-kärt´), René (1596-1650), 11, 12, 104, 115.
+
+D'Holbach (d[=o]l-bäk´), Paul Henri Thyry (1723-1789), 287.
+
+Dickens, Charles, 35, 149.
+
+Diderot (de-dr[=o]´), Denis (1713-1784), 13, 237, 250, 284, 285, 286,
+287.
+
+Dryden, John, 48, 166.
+
+Duclos (dü-kl[=o]´), Charles Pineau (1704-1772), 287.
+
+
+"_Écrasez l'Infâme_," 252.
+
+Edinburgh Review, 140.
+
+Edward (the Black Prince), 21-25.
+
+Edwards, President, 194.
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 49, 51, 52, 61.
+
+Encyclopædia Britannica, 18.
+
+=ENCYCLOPÆDISTS=, 13, 218, 249, 250, 282-288.
+
+Epictetus, 65.
+
+Epicurus, 50.
+
+Erasmus, 43, 126.
+
+Euripides, 153, 166, 171.
+
+
+_Fabliaux_ (fab´le-[=o]´), 6.
+
+Faugère (f[=o]-zhêr´), Arnaud Prosper (1810- ), 128.
+
+=FÉNELON= (f[=a]n-loN´), François de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715), 12,
+85, 177, 178, 181, 205-224.
+
+Fléchier (fl[=a]-she-[=a]´), Esprit (1632-1710), 182.
+
+Foix (fwä), Count de, 26, 27.
+
+Fontenelle (foNt-n[)e]l´), Bernard le Bovier (1657-1757), 289.
+
+Franciscans, 29.
+
+Frederick (the Great), 254.
+
+Friar John, 40.
+
+=FROISSART= (frwä-sar´), Jean (1337-1410?), 7, 18-28.
+
+
+Gaillard (g[)a]-yar´), Gabriel Henri (1726-1806), 155.
+
+Gar-gant´ua, 29, 36, 37, 39.
+
+Gibbon, Edward, 153.
+
+Goldsmith, Oliver, 83, 225.
+
+Grignan (green-yäN´), Madame de, 138.
+
+Grimm, Friedrich Melchior (1723-1807), 287.
+
+Gulliver's Travels, 37.
+
+Guyon ([=g]e-yoN´), Madame (1648-1717), 210.
+
+
+Hallam, Henry, 18, 34.
+
+Havet (ä-va´) (editor of Pascal's works), 128, 129.
+
+Hawkesworth, Dr., 222.
+
+Hazlitt, W. Carew, 48.
+
+Helvétius ([=e]l-v[=a]-se-üss´), Claude Adrien (1715-1771), 287.
+
+Henriette, Princess, 170.
+
+Henry of Navarre, 63.
+
+Herod (King), 198.
+
+Herodotus, 7, 18.
+
+Holbach. _See_ D'Holbach.
+
+Homer, 244.
+
+Hooker ("The judicious"), 205.
+
+Horace, 245.
+
+Hugo (ü-go´), Victor. _See_ Victor Hugo.
+
+Hume, David, 48, 276.
+
+
+Isaiah (the prophet), 94.
+
+Israel, 154.
+
+
+James (King), 210.
+
+Job, 94, 210.
+
+John (the Baptist), 198.
+
+John (King), 21, 22.
+
+Johnes, Thomas, 19.
+
+Johnson, Samuel, 160, 249.
+
+Joinville (zhw[)a]N-vel´), Jean de (1224?-1319?), 7.
+
+Julian (the Apostate), 178.
+
+
+Kant, Emmanuel, 42.
+
+Knox, John, 198.
+
+
+La Boëtie (lä b[=o]-[)a]-t[=e]´), Étienne (1530-1563), 58, 59.
+
+=LA BRUYÈRE= (lä brü-e-y [^e]r´), Jean (1646?-1696), 12, 75-81, 153.
+
+=LA FONTAINE= (lä foN-t[=a]n´), Jean de (1621-1695), 12, 81-92.
+
+Lamartine (lä-mar-t[=e]n´), Alphonse Marie Louis de (1780-1869), 14, 206, 289.
+
+_Langue d'oc_, 4.
+
+_Langue d'oïl_, 4.
+
+Lanier, Sidney (1842-1881), 25.
+
+=LA ROCHEFOUCAULD= (lä r[=o]sh-foo-k[=o]´), François, Duc de (1613-1680),
+12, 48, 66-75, 131, 147, 148.
+
+Longfellow, Henry W., 50.
+
+Louis IX. (1215-1270) (St. Louis), 6, 7.
+
+Louis XI. (1423-1483), 7.
+
+Louis XIII. (1601-1643), 10, 95.
+
+Louis XIV. (1638-1715) (Quatorze), 10, 12, 113, 135, 136, 169, 172, 176,
+181, 184, 189, 190, 198, 199, 200, 207, 208, 213, 217-219, 223, 255.
+
+Louis XV. (1710-1774), 199, 214, 254.
+
+Louvois (loo-vwä´), Marquis de, 142.
+
+Lowell, James Russell, 291.
+
+Lucan, 151, 153, 240.
+
+Lucretius, 94, 166.
+
+Luther, Martin, 7, 40.
+
+
+Maintenon (m[)a]N-teh-noN´), Madame de (1635-1719), 172, 181, 210, 211.
+
+Malherbe (mäl-[^e]rb´), François (1555-1628), 9, 10, 14.
+
+Martin (mar-t[)a]N´), Henri (1810- ), 183.
+
+Mary, Queen of Scots, 8, 198.
+
+=MASSILLON= (mäs-se-yoN´), Jean Baptiste (1663-1742), 3, 12, 148, 182,
+185, 188, 197-205.
+
+M'Crie, Thomas, 119.
+
+Michael (the Archangel), 205.
+
+Milton, John, 92, 182, 206, 247.
+
+=MOLIÈRE= (mo-le-êr´) (real name, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673), 12,
+16, 83, 92-114, 127, 154, 165, 167, 169, 240.
+
+Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 151.
+
+=MONTAIGNE= (mon-t[=a]n´), Michel Eyquem de (1533-1592), 2, 7, 8, 44-65,
+67, 75, 131, 230, 234, 257, 268.
+
+Montespan (moN-t[)e]ss-päN´), Madame de (1641-1707), 138, 139, 140.
+
+=MONTESQUIEU=, de (moN-t[)e]s-k[^e]-uh´), Charles de Secondat (1689-1755),
+13, 218, 225-237.
+
+Morley, Henry, 249.
+
+Morley, John, 249, 251, 285.
+
+Motteux, Peter Anthony (1660-1718), 30.
+
+Musset (mü-s[=a]´) (1810-1857), Alfred de, 289.
+
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte, 13, 166.
+
+Nathan (the prophet), 198.
+
+Newton, Sir Isaac, 115.
+
+Nicole (ne-k[)o]l´), Pierre (1625-1695), 3, 143, 147, 168.
+
+
+"Obscurantism" (disposition, in the sphere of the intellect, to love
+darkness rather than light), 252.
+
+
+Pan-tag´-ru-el, 29, 40, 41, 42.
+
+Panurge (pä-nürzh´), 40, 41, 42.
+
+=PASCAL=, Blaise (1623-1662), 3, 12, 48, 62, 65, 80, 115-133, 193.
+
+Pascal, Jacqueline, 116.
+
+Pelisson (p[)e]l-[=e]-soN´), 149.
+
+Petrarch, Francesco, 20.
+
+Phædrus, 85.
+
+Plato, 50, 51, 59.
+
+Pleiades (pl[=e]´ya-d[=e]z), 8, 10, 13.
+
+Plutarch, 8, 48, 56.
+
+Po-co-cu´rant-ism, 248.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, 254.
+
+Pompey, 56.
+
+Pope, Alexander, 48, 166.
+
+Poquelin (po-ke-l[)a]N´). _See_ Molière, 94, 95.
+
+Port Royal, 119, 127, 128, 147, 168.
+
+Pradon (prä-doN´), 171.
+
+_Provençal_ (pro-väN-sal), 4.
+
+Ptolemy Philadelphus, 8.
+
+
+Quentin Durward, 7.
+
+
+=RABELAIS= (r[)a]-bl[=a]´), François (1495?-1553?), 3, 7, 28-43, 60, 65,
+83, 146.
+
+=RACINE= (rä-seen´), Jean (1639-1699), 12, 78, 79, 80, 83, 151, 152, 153,
+166-181, 205.
+
+Rambouillet (räN-boo-y[=a]´), Hôtel de, 10, 11, 12, 100, 105, 155, 156,
+183.
+
+Raphael (archangel), 205.
+
+Récamier (r[=a]-kä-me-[=a]´), Madame (1777-1849), 11.
+
+Richard, the Lion-hearted, 117.
+
+Richelieu (r[=e]sh-le-uh´), Cardinal, 10, 12, 95, 154, 156.
+
+_Roman_ (ro-mäN´), 5.
+
+"Romanticism," 224, 289, 290.
+
+"Romanticists," 14.
+
+Ronsard (roN-sar´), Pierre de (1524-1585), 8, 9.
+
+Ronsardism, 14.
+
+Rousseau (roo-s[=o]´), Jean Baptiste (1670-1741), 255.
+
+=ROUSSEAU=, Jean Jacques (1712-1778), 3, 13, 14, 48, 206, 218, 249, 250,
+251, 255-281, 287.
+
+Ruskin, John, 73.
+
+Rutebeuf (rü-te-buf´) (_b._ 1230), _trouvère,_ 6.
+
+
+Sablíère (sä-blï-êr´), Madame de la, 83, 84.
+
+Saci (sä-se´), M. de, 65.
+
+Saintsbury, George, 17, 58.
+
+Sainte-Beuve (s[)a]Nt-buv´), Charles Augustin (1804-1869), 9, 14, 189,
+193, 199, 235, 289.
+
+Sal´a-din (Saracen antagonist of Richard the Lion-hearted), 117.
+
+_Salon_ (sä-loN´), 11.
+
+Sand (säNd), George (Madame Dudevant, 1804-1876), 3, 14.
+
+Saurin (s[=o]-r[)a]N´), Jacques (1677-1730), 182.
+
+"Savoyard Curate's Confession," 279.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, 7, 19, 25, 105.
+
+Selden, John ("The learned"), 205.
+
+Seneca, 48, 50.
+
+SÉVIGNÉ (s[=a]-v[=e]n-y[=a]´), Madame de, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
+(1626-1696), 11, 105, 134-151, 170.
+
+Shakspeare, 16, 48, 63, 92, 94, 114, 160, 240.
+
+Socrates (contrasted by Rousseau with Jesus), 280, 281.
+
+Sophocles, 153, 166, 168.
+
+Staël-Holstein (stä-[)e]l´ ol-st[)a]N´), Anne Louise Grermanie de
+(1766-1817), 13, 289.
+
+Stanislaus (King of Poland), 285.
+
+St. John, Bayle, 56, 58, 59.
+
+St. Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de (1737-1814), 289.
+
+St. Simon (s[=e]-moN´), Louis de Rouvroi, Duc de (1675-1755), 208, 209.
+
+Swift, Dean, 37.
+
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 94.
+
+
+Tacitus, 7.
+
+Taine, H. (1828-), 233.
+
+Tartuffe (tar-tüf´), 106-114, 147.
+
+Tasso, 245, 247.
+
+Thélème (t[=a]-l[)e]m´), 38, 40.
+
+Themistocles, 289.
+
+Thibaud (t[=e]-b[=o]´), _troubadour_ (1201-1253), 6.
+
+Trajan, 254.
+
+_Troubadour_, 4.
+
+_Trouvère_ (troo-vêr´), 5, 6.
+
+Tully (Cicero), 246.
+
+Turgot (tür-g[=o]´), Anne RobertJacques (1727-1781), 287.
+
+
+Urquhart, Sir Thomas, 30.
+
+
+Van Laun, H., 17.
+
+Vatel, 143, 144, 145.
+
+Vauvenargues (v[=o]-ve-narg´), Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de (1715-1747),
+79, 80, 81.
+
+Vercingetorix, 226.
+
+Victor Hugo (1802-1885), 14, 16, 94, 289, 291.
+
+Villehardouin (v[=e]l-ar-doo-[)a]N´), Geoffrey (1165?-1213?), 7.
+
+Villemain (v[=e]l-m[)a]N´), Abel François (1790-1870), 118.
+
+Virgil, 5, 9, 81, 166, 172, 245.
+
+Voiture (vwä-tür´), Vincent (1598-1648), 11.
+
+=VOLTAIRE= (vol-têr´), François Marie Arouet de (1694-1778), 2, 13, 38,
+48, 68, 80, 127, 152, 153, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 204, 218, 234,
+235, 238-255, 285, 286, 287.
+
+
+Wall, C. H., 106.
+
+Walpole, Horace, 151, 230.
+
+Warens (vä-räN´), Madame de, 264, 265, 268, 269, 275.
+
+Webster, Daniel, 188.
+
+Wright, Elizur, 86.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Classic French Course in English, by 
+William Cleaver Wilkinson
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Classic French Course in English, by 
+William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Classic French Course in English
+
+Author: William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+Release Date: October 14, 2007 [EBook #23033]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE IN ENGLISH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Vachuska, Chuck Greif and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h3><b><i>THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES.</i></b></h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 10%;" />
+
+<h1>CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE<br/>
+IN ENGLISH.</h1>
+
+<p class="c">BY</p>
+
+<h3>WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON.</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 10%;" />
+
+<p class="c">
+NEW YORK:<br />
+CHAUTAUQUA PRESS,<br />
+C. L. S. C. DEPARTMENT,<br />
+805 <span class="smcap">Broadway.</span><br />
+1886.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1886,</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">By</span> PHILLIPS &amp; HUNT.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><i><span class="smcap">Other Volumes in the After-School Series</span></i></p>
+
+<p class="c">BY THE SAME AUTHOR.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 10%;" />
+
+<table summary="volumes" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0">
+<tr><td align="center">*</td><td><span class="smcap">Preparatory Greek Course in English</span></td><td align="right">$1.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">**</td><td><span class="smcap">Preparatory Latin Course in English</span></td><td align="right">1.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">***</td><td><span class="smcap">College Greek Course in English</span></td><td align="right">1.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center">****</td><td><span class="smcap">College Latin Course in English</span></td><td align="right">1.00</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="top"><i>The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of
+six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not
+involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every
+principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended.</i></p>
+
+<p class="c"><small>
+ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED<br />
+BY RAND, AVERY, &amp; COMPANY.<br />
+BOSTON.</small><br />
+</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<table summary="toc1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
+<tr><td align="center"><a href="#CONTENTS"><b>CONTENTS.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CLASSIC_FRENCH_COURSE_IN_ENGLISH"><b>CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE IN ENGLISH.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX.</b></a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The preparation of the present volume proposed to the author a task more
+difficult far than that undertaken in any one of the four preceding
+volumes of the group, <span class="smcap">The After-School Series</span>, to which it belongs.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The greater difficulty seen thus to inhere already in the nature itself
+of the task proposed for accomplishment, was gravely increased by the
+much more severe compression deemed to be in the present instance
+desirable. The room placed at the author's disposal for a display of
+French literature was less than half the room allowed him for the
+display of either the Greek or the Latin.</p>
+
+<p>The plan, therefore, of this volume, imposed the necessity of
+establishing from the outset certain limits, to be very strictly
+observed. First, it was resolved to restrict the attention bestowed upon
+the national history, the national geography, and the national language,
+of the French, to such brief occasional notices as, in the course of the
+volume, it might seem necessary, for illustration of the particular
+author, from time to time to make. The only introductory general matter
+here to be found will accordingly consist of a rapid and summary review
+of that literature, as a whole, which is the subject of the book. It was
+next determined to limit the authors selected for representation to
+those of the finished centuries. A third decision was to make the number
+of authors 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is proposed to follow the present volume with a volume similar in
+general character, devoted to German literature.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS.</h2>
+<table summary="toc" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#I">I.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">French Literature</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">Page 1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#II"><br />II.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Froissart</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#III"><br />III.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Rabelais</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#IV"><br />IV.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Montaigne</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_44">44</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#V"><br />V.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">La Rochefoucauld (La Bruy&egrave;re; Vauvenargues)</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#VI"><br />VI.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">La Fontaine</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#VII"><br />VII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Moli&egrave;re</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#VIII"><br />VIII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Pascal</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#IX"><br />IX.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_134">134</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#X"><br />X.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Corneille</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#XI"><br />XI.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Racine</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#XII"><br />XII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_182">182</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#XIII"><br />XIII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">F&eacute;nelon</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#XIV"><br />XIV.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Montesquieu</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_225">225</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#XV"><br />XV.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Voltaire</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_238">238</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#XVI"><br />XVI.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Rousseau</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_255">255</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#XVII"><br />XVII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Encyclop&aelig;dists</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_282">282</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><a href="#XVIII"><br />XVIII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Epilogue</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_288">288</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#INDEX"><br />Index</a></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#INDEX">293</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Page 1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2 class="t"><a name="CLASSIC_FRENCH_COURSE_IN_ENGLISH" id="CLASSIC_FRENCH_COURSE_IN_ENGLISH"></a>CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE IN ENGLISH.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 5%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">FRENCH LITERATURE.</p>
+
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;the <i>jeu d'esprit</i>, the <i>bon mot</i>, <i>persiflage</i>, the <i>phrase</i>; 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span> proper,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>What constitutes the charm&mdash;partly a perilous charm&mdash;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,&mdash;impulsion so strong as
+often to land it in mockery; the 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,&mdash;decorum, we mean,
+in taste, as distinguished from morals; its infinite patience and labor
+of art, achieving the perfection of grace and of ease,&mdash;in one word, its
+style.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> 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,&mdash;not to mention the moralists by profession,
+such as Nicole, and the preachers Bourdaloue and Massillon,&mdash;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,&mdash;were
+so far from being always light-heartedly gay, that not seldom they
+spread over their page a sombre atmosphere almost of gloom,&mdash;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 if regarded as possessing the general characteristics in
+style that we have now sought briefly to indicate.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;<i>oc</i> or <i>o&iuml;l</i>,
+yes&mdash;severally peculiar to them, and thus to be known respectively as
+<i>langue d'oc</i>, and <i>langue d'o&iuml;l</i>. The future belonged to the latter of
+the two forms of speech,&mdash;the one spoken in the northern part of the
+country. This, the <i>langue d'o&iuml;l</i>, became at length the French language.
+But the <i>langue d'oc</i>, 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. Proven&ccedil;al is an alternative name of the language.</p>
+
+<p>Side by side with the southern <i>troubadours</i>, or a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> little later than
+they, the <i>trouv&egrave;res</i> of the north sang, with more manly ambition, of
+national themes, and, like Virgil, of arms and of heroes. Some
+productions of the <i>trouv&egrave;res</i> may fairly be allowed an elevation of aim
+and of treatment entitling them to be called epic in character.
+<i>Chansons de geste</i> (songs of exploit), or <i>romans</i>, is the native name
+by which those primitive French poems are known. They exist in three
+principal cycles, or groups, of productions,&mdash;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 centre 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,&mdash;namely, the deeds of Alexander the Great,&mdash;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 metre that followed. From
+this latter store of stock and example, Chaucer drew to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> supply his muse
+with material. The <i>fabliaux</i>, so called,&mdash;fables, that is, or
+stories,&mdash;were still another form of early French literature in verse.
+It is only now, within the current decade of years, that a really ample
+collection of <i>fabliaux</i>&mdash;hitherto, with the exception of a few printed
+volumes of specimens, extant exclusively in manuscript&mdash;has been put
+into course of publication. Rutebeuf, a <i>trouv&egrave;re</i> 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,&mdash;in both these respects anticipating, as probably also to
+some extent by example conforming, the subsequent literary spirit of his
+nation. The <i>fabliaux</i> 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
+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 B&eacute;ranger of the thirteenth century. To Thibaud is said
+to be due the introduction of the feminine rhyme into French poetry,&mdash;a
+metrical variation of capital importance. The songs of Ab&eacute;lard, in the
+century preceding Thibaud, won a wide popularity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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
+Saint 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.</p>
+
+<p>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"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> in French as well as in Latin, showing once and for
+all, that in the right hands 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 lifetime
+more universal and more splendid than was the fame of Ronsard. A high
+court of literary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span> 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 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 ac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>quaintance,&mdash;for Malherbe was poet himself,&mdash;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&mdash;that of literary wantonness on the one hand, and that of
+literary prudery on the other&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 H&ocirc;tel de Rambouillet was one, and the French
+Academy was the other. The H&ocirc;tel de Rambouillet has become the adopted
+name of a literary society, presided over by the fine inspiring genius
+of the beautiful and accomplished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> 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
+S&eacute;vign&eacute; 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
+H&ocirc;tel 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 R&eacute;camier ceased, about
+the middle of the present century, to hold her famous <i>salons</i> in Paris.
+The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 H&ocirc;tel de Rambouillet or the Academy,&mdash;more than
+both these two 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, F&eacute;nelon, Massillon, Moli&egrave;re, La Fontaine, Boileau, La
+Rochefoucauld, La Bruy&egrave;re,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 centre 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The eighteenth century was an age of universal reaction in France.
+Religion, or rather ecclesiasticism,&mdash;for, in the France of those times,
+religion was the Church, and the Church was the Roman Catholic
+hierarchy,&mdash;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 Encyclop&aelig;dists and the
+Philosophers,&mdash;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, earth-shaking explosion would
+follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called,&mdash;the
+usurpation, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte,&mdash;literature was well-nigh
+extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpassingly brilliant,
+of Chateaubriand and Madame de Sta&euml;l, belong to this period.</p>
+
+<p>Three centuries have now elapsed since the date of "The Pleiades."
+Throughout this long period, French literature has been chiefly under
+the sway of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> that spirit of classicism in style which the reaction
+against Ronsardism, led first by Malherbe and afterwards 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 at length would sink, was thence withdrawn,
+and at last, if not resolutely cast upon the opposite side of the
+balance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span> was left wavering in a kind of equipoise between the one and
+the other. But our preliminary sketch has already passed the limit
+within which our choice of authors for representation is necessarily
+confined.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing, perhaps, to strike the thoughtful mind in a
+comprehensive view of the subject, is not so much the length&mdash;though
+this is remarkable&mdash;as the long <i>continuity</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> 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
+Moli&egrave;re 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&mdash;especially Shakspeare&mdash;was largely
+the pregnant cause of this attempted emancipation of the French literary
+mind from the burden of classicism.</p>
+
+<p>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, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>French literature, it will at once be seen, is a study possessing,
+beyond the literary, a social, a political, and even a religious,
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>Readers desiring to push their conversance with the literary history of
+France farther 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, if the truth must be told, diffuses himself too widely to
+do his best possible work. He has, however, made French literature a
+specialty, and he is in general a trustworthy authority on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;extracts, however, not unfrequently
+marred by wretched translation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> The cyclop&aelig;dias 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
+cyclop&aelig;dias, or several successive editions of some one cyclop&aelig;dia, as,
+for example, the "Encyclop&aelig;dia 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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="II" id="II"></a>II.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">FROISSART.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1337-1410.</p>
+
+
+<p>French literature, for the purposes of the present volume, may be said
+to commence with Froissart. Froissart is a kind of medi&aelig;val Herodotus.
+His time is, indeed, almost this side the middle ages; but he belongs by
+character and by sympathy rather to the medi&aelig;val than to the modern
+world. He is delightfully like Herodotus in the style and the spirit of
+his narrative. Like Herodotus, he became a traveller in order to become
+an historian. Like Herodotus, he was cosmopolite enough not to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Jehan or Jean Froissart was a native of Valenciennes. His father meant
+to make a priest of him, but the boy had other 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 son that naturally attached him to rank and royalty. The
+people&mdash;that is, the promiscuous mass of mankind&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> the glories of the world of
+chivalry&mdash;a world, as we have said, already dying, and so soon to
+disappear&mdash;are fixed forever on an ample canvas, in moving form and
+shifting color, to delight the backward-looking imagination of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 a 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> out to their
+completeness his "Chronicles of England, France, and the Adjoining
+Countries."</p>
+
+<p>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 had been able to 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>King John 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There was much pressing at this time, through eagerness to take the
+king; and those who were nearest to him, and knew him, cried out,
+"Surrender yourself, surrender yourself, or you are a dead man!" In
+that part of the field was a young knight from St. Omer, who was
+engaged by a salary in the service of the King of England; his name
+was Denys de Morbeque; who for five years had attached himself to
+the English, on account of having been banished in his younger days
+from France, for a murder committed in an affray at St. Omer. It
+fortunately happened for this knight, that he was at the time near
+to the King of France, when he was so much pulled about. He, by
+dint of force, for he was very strong and robust, pushed through
+the crowd, and said to the king, in good French, "Sire, sire,
+surrender yourself!" The king, who found himself very disagreeably
+situated, turning to him, asked, "To whom shall I surrender myself?
+to whom? Where is my cousin, the Prince of Wales? If I could see
+him, I would speak to him."&mdash;"Sire," replied Sir Denys, "he is not
+here; but surrender yourself to me, and I will lead you to
+him."&mdash;"Who are you?" said the king. "Sire, I am Denys de Morbeque,
+a knight from Artois; but I serve the King of England because I
+cannot belong to France, having forfeited all I possessed there."
+The king then gave him his right-hand glove, and said, "I surrender
+myself to you." There was much crowding and pushing about; for
+every one was eager to cry out, "I have taken him!" Neither the
+king nor his youngest son Philip were able to get forward, and free
+themselves from the throng....</p>
+
+<p>The Prince [of Wales] asked them [his marshals] if they knew any
+thing of the King of France: they replied, "No,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> sir, not for a
+certainty; but we believe he must be either killed or made
+prisoner, since he has never quitted his battalion." The prince
+then, addressing the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cobham, said, "I beg
+of you to mount your horses, and ride over the field, so that on
+your return you may bring me some certain intelligence of him." The
+two barons, immediately mounting their horses, left the prince, and
+made for a small hillock, that they might look about them. From
+their stand they perceived a crowd of men-at-arms on foot, who were
+advancing very slowly. The King of France was in the midst of them,
+and in great danger; for the English and Gascons had taken him from
+Sir Denys de Morbeque, and were disputing who should have him, the
+stoutest bawling out, "It is I that have got him."&mdash;"No, no,"
+replied the others: "we have him." The king, to escape from this
+peril, said, "Gentlemen, gentlemen, I pray you conduct me and my
+son in a courteous manner to my cousin the prince; and do not make
+such a riot about my capture, for I am so great a lord that I can
+make all sufficiently rich." These words, and others which fell
+from the king, appeased them a little; but the disputes were always
+beginning again, and they did not move a step without rioting. When
+the two barons saw this troop of people, they descended from the
+hillock, and, sticking spurs into their horses, made up to them. On
+their arrival, they asked what was the matter. They were answered,
+that it was the King of France, who had been made prisoner, and
+that upward of ten knights and squires challenged him at the same
+time, as belonging to each of them. The two barons then pushed
+through the crowd by main force, and ordered all to draw aside.
+They commanded, in the name of the prince, and under pain of
+instant death, that every one should keep his distance, and not
+approach unless ordered or desired so to do. They all retreated
+behind the king; and the two barons, dismounting, advanced to the
+king with profound reverences, and conducted him in a peaceable
+manner to the Prince of Wales. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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):&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When evening was come, the Prince of Wales gave a supper in his
+pavilion to the King of France, and to the greater part of the
+princes and barons who were prisoners. The prince seated the King
+of France, and his son the Lord Philip, at an elevated and
+well-covered table: with them were Sir James de Bourbon, the Lord
+John d'Artois, the earls of Tancarville, of Estampes, of Dammartin,
+of Graville, and the Lord of Partenay. The other knights and
+squires were placed at different tables. The prince himself served
+the king's table, as well as the others, with every mark of
+humility, and would not sit down at it, in spite of all his
+entreaties for him so to do, saying that "he was not worthy of such
+an honor, nor did it appertain to him to seat himself at the table
+of so great a king, or of so valiant a man as he had shown himself
+by his actions that day." He added, also, with a noble air, "Dear
+sir, do not make a poor meal, because the Almighty God has not
+gratified your wishes in the event of this day; for be assured that
+my lord and father will show you every honor and friendship in his
+power, and will arrange your ransom so reasonably, that you will
+henceforward always remain friends. In my opinion, you have cause
+to be glad that the success of this battle did not turn out as you
+desired; for you have this day acquired such high renown for
+prowess, that you have surpassed all the best knights on your side.
+I do not, dear sir, say this to flatter you; for all those of our
+side who have seen and observed the actions of each party, have
+unanimously allowed this to be your due, and decree you the prize
+and garland for it." At the end of this speech, there were murmurs
+of praise heard from every one; and the French said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> the prince had
+spoken nobly and truly, and that he would be one of the most
+gallant princes in Christendom if God should grant him life to
+pursue his career of glory. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 who
+have read both the old chronicles and the modern romances.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of the congenial labors of Sidney Lanier&mdash;pure flame of
+genius that late burned itself out so swiftly among us!&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever reads Froissart needs to remember that the old chronicler is too
+much enamoured 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;we may not unfitly so
+apply a royal word&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Count Gaston Phoebus de Foix, of whom I am now speaking, was at
+that time fifty-nine years old; and I must say, that although I
+have seen very many knights, kings, princes, and others, I have
+never seen any so handsome, either in the form of his limbs and
+shape, or in countenance, which was fair and ruddy, with gray and
+amorous eyes, that gave delight whenever he chose to express
+affection. He was so perfectly formed, one could not praise him too
+much. He loved earnestly the things he ought to love, and hated
+those which it was becoming him so to hate. He was a prudent
+knight, full of enterprise and wisdom. He had never any men of
+abandoned character with him, reigned prudently, and was constant
+in his devotions. There were regular nocturnals from the Psalter,
+prayers from the rituals to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> Virgin, to the Holy Ghost, and
+from the burial service. He had every day distributed as alms, at
+his gate, five florins in small coin, to all comers. He was liberal
+and courteous in his gifts, and well knew how to take when it was
+proper, and to give back where he had confidence. He mightily loved
+dogs above all other animals, and during the summer and winter
+amused himself much with hunting....</p>
+
+<p>When he quitted his chamber at midnight for supper, twelve servants
+bore each a lighted torch before him, which were placed near his
+table, and gave a brilliant light to the apartment. The hall was
+full of knights and squires, and there were plenty of tables laid
+out for any person who chose to sup. No one spoke to him at his
+table, unless he first began a conversation. He commonly ate
+heartily of poultry, but only the wings and thighs; for in the
+daytime, he neither ate nor drank much. He had great pleasure in
+hearing minstrels; as he himself was a proficient in the science,
+and made his secretaries sing songs, ballads, and roundelays. He
+remained at table about two hours, and was pleased when fanciful
+dishes were served up to him, which having seen, he immediately
+sent them to the tables of his knights and squires.</p>
+
+<p>In short, every thing considered, though I had before been in
+several courts of kings, dukes, princes, counts, and noble ladies,
+I was never at one that pleased me more, nor was I ever more
+delighted with feats of arms, than at this of the Count de Foix.
+There were knights and squires to be seen in every chamber, hall,
+and court, going backwards and forwards, and conversing on arms and
+amours. Every thing honorable was there to be found. All
+intelligence from distant countries was there to be learnt, for the
+gallantry of the count had brought visitors from all parts of the
+world. It was there I was informed of the greater part of those
+events which had happened in Spain, Portugal, Arragon, Navarre,
+England, Scotland, and on the borders of Languedoc; for I saw,
+during my residence, knights and squires<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> arrive from every nation.
+I therefore made inquiries from them, or from the count himself,
+who cheerfully conversed with me. </p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We take now a somewhat long forward step, in going, as we do, at once
+from Froissart to Rabelais. Comines, lying between, we must reluctantly
+pass, with thus barely mentioning his name.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="III" id="III"></a>III.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">RABELAIS.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1495-1553.</p>
+
+
+<p>Rabelais is one of the most famous of writers. But he is at the same
+time incomparably the coarsest.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Of the life of Fran&ccedil;ois Rabelais the man, these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> few facts will be
+sufficient to know. In early youth he joined the monastic order of the
+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.</p>
+
+<p>This work is "The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel," a 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+to avow; or else he is playfully misleading you on a false scent, which,
+however long held to, will bring you out nowhere&mdash;in short, is quizzing
+you. Let the reader judge for himself. Here is the opening passage,&mdash;the
+"Author's Prologue," it is called in the English translation executed by
+Sir Thomas Urquhart and Motteux; 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious
+pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my
+writings), Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's which is
+entitled, "The Banquet," whilst he was setting forth the praises of
+his schoolmaster Socrates (without all question<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> the prince of
+philosophers), amongst other discourses to that purpose said that
+he resembled the Sileni. Sileni of old were little boxes, like
+those we now may see in the shops of apothecaries, painted on the
+outside with wanton toyish figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled
+geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts,
+and other such counterfeited pictures, at pleasure, to excite
+people unto laughter, as Silenus himself, who was the foster-father
+of good Bacchus, was wont to do; but within those capricious
+caskets called Sileni, were carefully preserved and kept many rich
+and fine drugs, such as balm, ambergreese, amomon, musk, civet,
+with several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great
+price. Just such another thing was Socrates; for to have eyed his
+outside, and esteemed of him by his exterior appearance, you would
+not have given the peel of an onion for him, so deformed he was in
+body, and ridiculous in his gesture.... Opening this box, you would
+have found within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than
+human understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning,
+invincible courage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of
+mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible disregard of all that
+for which men commonly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel,
+toil, and turmoil themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble
+tend? For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly
+fools of ease and leisure,... are too ready to judge, that there is
+nothing in them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and
+recreative lies;... therefore is it, that you must open the book,
+and seriously consider of the matter treated in it. Then shall you
+find that it containeth things of far higher value than the box did
+promise; that is to say, that the subject thereof is not so
+foolish, as by the title at the first sight it would appear to be.</p>
+
+<p>...Did you ever see a dog with a marrow-bone in his mouth?... Like
+him, you must, by a sedulous lecture<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> [reading], and frequent
+meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow; that is, my
+allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be
+signified by these Pythagorical symbols;... the most glorious
+doctrines and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth our
+religion, as matters of the public state and life economical. </p></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was
+couching his Iliad and Odyssey, had any thought upon those
+allegories which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius,
+Phornutus, squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again
+from them? If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come
+near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little
+dreamed of by Homer, as the gospel sacraments were by Ovid, in his
+Metamorphoses; though a certain gulligut friar, and true
+bacon-picker, would have undertaken to prove it, if, perhaps, he
+had met with as very fools as himself, and, as the proverb says, "a
+lid worthy of such a kettle."</p>
+
+<p>If you give any credit thereto, why do not you the same to these
+jovial new Chronicles of mine? Albeit, when I did dictate them, I
+thought thereof no more than you, who possibly were drinking the
+whilst, as I was. For, in the composing of this lordly book, I
+never lost nor bestowed any more, nor any other time, than what was
+appointed to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> serve me for taking of my bodily refection; that is,
+whilst I was eating and drinking. And, indeed, that is the fittest
+and most proper hour, wherein to write these high matters and deep
+sentences; as Homer knew very well, the paragon of all philologues,
+and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace calls him,
+although a certain sneaking jobbernol alleged that his verses
+smelled more of the wine than oil. </p></div>
+
+<p>Does this writer quiz his reader, or, in good faith, give him a needed
+hint? Who shall decide?</p>
+
+<p>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 redun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>dant 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 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.</p>
+
+<p>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' 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 the allegorical sense hidden deep
+underneath the monstrous mass of the Rabelaisian buffoonery. A more
+judicial 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."</p>
+
+<p>The supply of animal gayety in this man was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span> 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,&mdash;an afterthought, probably, of continuation to his
+unexpectedly successful first book,&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And, therefore, to make an end of this Prologue, even as I give
+myself to an hundred thousand panniers-full of fair devils, body
+and soul,... in case that I lie so much as one single word in this
+whole history; after the like manner, St. Anthony's fire burn you,
+Mahoom's disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your
+side, and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize
+upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender
+and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into
+you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into
+sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly
+believe all that I shall relate unto you in this present Chronicle. </p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> the thirty-eighth
+chapter of the first book, which is staggeringly entitled, "How
+Gargantua did eat up Six Pilgrims in a Sallad":&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The story requireth that we relate that which happened unto six
+pilgrims, who came from Sebastian near to Nantes; and who, for
+shelter that night, being afraid of the enemy, had hid themselves
+in the garden upon the chickling peas, among the cabbages and
+lettuces. Gargantua, finding himself somewhat dry, asked whether
+they could get any lettuce to make him a salad; and, hearing that
+there were the greatest and fairest in the country,&mdash;for they were
+as great as plum trees, or as walnut trees,&mdash;he would go thither
+himself, and brought thence in his hand what he thought good, and
+withal carried away the six pilgrims, who were in so great fear
+that they did not dare to speak nor cough. Washing them, therefore,
+first at the fountain, the pilgrims said one to another, softly,
+"What shall we do? We are almost drowned here amongst these
+lettuce: shall we speak? But, if we speak, he will kill us for
+spies." And, as they were thus deliberating what to do, Gargantua
+put them, with the lettuce, into a platter of the house, as large
+as the huge tun of the White Friars of the Cistertian order; which
+done, with oil, vinegar, and salt, he ate them up, to refresh
+himself a little before supper, and had already swallowed up five
+of the pilgrims, the sixth being in the platter, totally hid under
+a lettuce, except his bourbon, or staff, that appeared, and nothing
+else. Which Grangousier [Gargantua's father] seeing, said to
+Gargantua, "I think that is the horn of a shell snail: do not eat
+it."&mdash;"Why not?" said Gargantua; "they are good all this month:"
+which he no sooner said, but, drawing up the staff, and therewith
+taking up the pilgrim, he ate him very well, then drank a terrible
+draught of excellent white wine. The pilgrims, thus devoured, made
+shift to save themselves, as well as they could, by drawing their
+bodies out of the reach of the grinders of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> teeth, but could
+not escape from thinking they had been put in the lowest dungeon of
+a prison. And, when Gargantua whiffed the great draught, they
+thought to have drowned in his mouth, and the flood of wine had
+almost carried them away into the gulf of his stomach.
+Nevertheless, skipping with their bourbons, as St. Michael's
+palmers used to do, they sheltered themselves from the danger of
+that inundation under the banks of his teeth. But one of them, by
+chance, groping, or sounding the country with his staff, to try
+whether they were in safety or no, struck hard against the cleft of
+a hollow tooth, and hit the mandibulary sinew or nerve of the jaw,
+which put Gargantua to very great pain, so that he began to cry for
+the rage that he felt. To ease himself, therefore, of his smarting
+ache, he called for his tooth-picker, and, rubbing towards a young
+walnut-tree, where they lay skulking, unnestled you my gentlemen
+pilgrims. For he caught one by the legs, another by the scrip,
+another by the pocket, another by the scarf, another by the band of
+the breeches; and the poor fellow that had hurt him with the
+bourbon, him he hooked to him by [another part of his clothes]....
+The pilgrims, thus dislodged, ran away. </p></div>
+
+<p>Rabelais closes his story with jocose irreverent application of
+Scripture,&mdash;a manner of his which gives some color to the tradition of a
+biblical pun made by him on his death-bed.</p>
+
+<p>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, differs from Rabelais as well as resembles him. Whereas
+Rabelais is simply monstrous in invention, Swift in invention submits<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+himself loyally to law. Give Swift his world of Liliput 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,&mdash;Swift is Rabelais in his
+senses.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most celebrated&mdash;justly celebrated&mdash;of Rabelais's
+imaginations is that of the Abbey of Th&eacute;l&egrave;me [Thelema]. This constitutes
+a kind of Rabelaisian Utopia. It was proper of the released monk to give
+his Utopian dream the form of an abbey, but 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 Th&eacute;l&egrave;me,&mdash;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&mdash;for everybody to eat, and nobody to prepare:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but
+according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of
+their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labor,
+sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None
+did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor
+to do any other thing;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> for so had Gargantua established it. In all
+their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this
+one clause to be observed,&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">DO WHAT THOU WILT.</span></p>
+
+
+<p>...By this liberty they entered into a very laudable emulation, to
+do all of them what they saw did please one. If any of the gallants
+or ladies should say, Let us drink, they would all drink. If any
+one of them said, Let us play, they all played. If one said, Let us
+go a walking into the fields, they went all.... There was neither
+he nor she amongst them, but could read, write, sing, play upon
+several musical instruments, speak five or six several languages,
+and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and prose.
+Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so
+dextrous and skilful both on foot and a horseback, more brisk and
+lively, more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of
+weapons than were there. Never were seen ladies so proper and
+handsome, so miniard and dainty, less forward, or more ready with
+their hand, and with their needle, in every honest and free action
+belonging to that sex, than were there. For this reason, when the
+time came, that any man of the said abbey, either at the request of
+his parents, or for some other cause, had a mind to go out of it,
+he carried along with him one of the ladies, namely her who had
+before that accepted him as her lover, and they were married
+together. </p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The same colossal Gargantua who had that eating adventure with the six
+pilgrims, is made, in Rabelais's second book, to write his youthful son
+Pantagruel&mdash;also<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> a giant, but destined to be, when mature, a model of
+all princely virtues&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Fail not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian,
+and Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists;
+and by frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of that
+other world, called the microcosm, which is man. And at some of the
+hours of the day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy
+Scriptures: first, in Greek, the New Testament, with the Epistles
+of the Apostles; and then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In brief,
+let me see thee an abyss and bottomless pit of knowledge....</p>
+
+<p>...It behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to
+cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and, by faith formed in
+charity, to cleave unto him, so that thou mayst never be separated
+from him by thy sins. Suspect the abuses of the world. Set not thy
+heart upon vanity, for this life is transitory; but the Word of the
+Lord endureth forever. </p></div>
+
+<p>"Friar John" is a mighty man of valor, who figures equivocally in the
+story of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Abbey of Th&eacute;l&egrave;me 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.</p>
+
+<p>Panurge is the hero of the romance of Pantagruel,&mdash;almost more than
+Pantagruel himself. It would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;thereby
+transforming Panurge into a comparatively proper and virtuous person:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He had threescore and three tricks to come by it [money] at his
+need, of which the most honorable and most ordinary was in manner
+of thieving, secret purloining, and filching, for he was a wicked,
+lewd rogue, a cozener, drinker, roysterer, rover, and a very
+dissolute and debauched fellow, if there were any in Paris;
+otherwise, and in all matters else, the best and most virtuous man
+in the world; and he was still contriving some plot, and devising
+mischief against the serjeants and the watch.</p>
+
+<p>At one time he assembled three or four especial good hacksters and
+roaring boys; made them in the evening drink like Templars,
+afterwards led them till they came under St. Genevieve, or about
+the college of Navarre, and, at the hour that the watch was coming
+up that way,&mdash;which he knew by putting his sword upon the pavement,
+and his ear by it, and, when he heard his sword shake, it was an
+infallible sign that the watch was near at that instant,&mdash;then he
+and his companions took a tumbrel or garbage-cart, and gave it the
+brangle, hurling it with all their force down the hill, and then
+ran away upon the other side; for in less than two days he knew all
+the streets, lanes, and turnings in Paris, as well as his <i>Deus
+det.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At another time he laid, in some fair place where the said watch
+was to pass, a train of gunpowder, and, at the very instant that
+they went along, set fire to it, and then made himself sport to see
+what good grace they had in running away, thinking that St.
+Anthony's fire had caught them by the legs.... In one of his
+pockets he had a great many little horns full of fleas and lice,
+which he borrowed from the beggars of St. Innocent, and cast them,
+with small canes or quills to write with, into the necks of the
+daintiest gentlewomen that he could find, yea, even in the church;
+for he never seated himself above in the choir, but always in the
+body of the church amongst the women, both at mass, at vespers, and
+at sermon. </p></div>
+
+<p>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":&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>By the means of a little Pantagruelism (which, you know, is <i>a
+certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune</i>), you see
+me now ["at near seventy years of age," his translator says], hale
+and cheery, as sound as a bell, and ready to drink, if you will. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">MONTAIGNE.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1533-1592.</p>
+
+
+<p>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 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,"&mdash;that has become, as it were, a
+personal name in literary history.</p>
+
+<p>The "Essays" are one hundred and seven in number, divided into three
+books. They are very unequal in length; and they are on the most various
+topics,&mdash;topics often the most whimsical in character. We give a few of
+his titles, taking them as found in Cotton's translation:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>That men by various ways arrive at the same end; Whether the
+governor of a place ought himself to go out to parley; Of liars; Of
+quick or slow speech; A proceeding of some ambassadors; Various
+events from the same counsel; Of cannibals; That we laugh and cry
+from the same thing; Of smells; That the mind hinders itself; Of
+thumbs; Of virtue; Of coaches; Of managing the will; Of cripples;
+Of experience. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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 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 <i>differentia</i>, in the
+world of literature. Other literary men have been egotists&mdash;since. But
+Montaigne may be called the first, and he is the greatest.</p>
+
+<p>Montaigne was a Gascon, and Gasconisms adulterate the purity of his
+French. But his style&mdash;a little archaic now, and never finished to the
+nail&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 self-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
+answereth to face in the glass, so doth the heart of man to man,&mdash;from
+race to race, and from generation to generation. If Montaigne, in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+"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.</p>
+
+<p>Here is Montaigne's Preface to his "Essays;" "The Author to the Reader,"
+it is entitled:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset
+forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to
+myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no
+consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My
+powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to
+the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that,
+having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein
+recover some traits of my conditions and humors, and by that means
+preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of
+me. Had my intention been to seek the world's favor, I should
+surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties. I desire therein
+to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary
+manner, without study and artifice; for it is myself I paint. My
+defects are therein to be read to the life, and my imperfections
+and my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me.
+If I had lived among those nations which (they say) yet dwell under
+the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure thee I would
+most willingly have painted myself quite fully, and quite naked.
+Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book. There's no reason
+thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a
+subject. Therefore, farewell.</p>
+
+<p>From Montaigne, the 12th of June, 1580. </p></div>
+
+<p>Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, our author, as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> 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 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, Shakspeare borrowed from him,
+Dryden, Pope, Hume, Burke, Byron,&mdash;these, with many more, in England;
+and, in France, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire, Rousseau,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>We go at once to chapter twenty-five of the first book of the "Essays,"
+entitled, in the English translation, "Of 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> 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,&mdash;that he wrote for a generation in which women were not
+expected to be readers,&mdash;is thus seen to be curiously impertinent to the
+actual case that existed. Of a far worse fault in Montaigne than his
+coarseness,&mdash;we mean his outright immorality,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For a boy of quality, then, I say, I would also have his friends
+solicitous to find him out a tutor who has rather a well-made than
+a well-filled head, seeking, indeed, both the one and the other,
+but rather of the two to prefer manners and judgment to mere
+learning, and that this man should exercise his charge after a new
+method.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their
+pupil's ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the
+business of the pupil is only to repeat what the others have said:
+now, I would have a tutor to correct this error, and that, at the
+very first, he should, according to the capacity he has to deal
+with, put it to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste
+things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes
+opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving him to open it for
+himself; that is, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> would not have him alone to invent and speak,
+but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.... Let him
+make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and
+accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet
+rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own.... 'Tis a sign of
+crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
+condition it was swallowed: the stomach has not performed its
+office, unless it have altered the form and condition of what was
+committed to it to concoct....</p>
+
+<p>Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift every thing he reads,
+and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon
+trust. Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to
+him than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of
+opinions be propounded to, and laid before, him; he will himself
+choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt.</p>
+
+<p class="c">"Che, non men che saper, dubbiar m'aggrata."</p>
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Dante</span>, <i>Inferno</i>, xl. 93.</p>
+
+<p class="c">["That doubting pleases me, not less than knowing."</p>
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Longfellow's</span> <i>Translation</i>.]</p>
+
+<p>For, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own
+reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who
+follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is
+inquisitive after nothing. "Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se
+vindicet." ["We are under no king; let each look to
+himself."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Seneca</span>, <i>Ep.</i> 33.] Let him, at least, know that he
+knows. It will be necessary that he imbibe their knowledge, not
+that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no matter if he
+forget where he had his learning, provided he know how to apply it
+to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every one, and are
+no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after;
+'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both
+he and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> their several
+sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they
+find them; but themselves afterward make the honey, which is all
+and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the
+several fragments he borrows from others he will transform and
+shuffle together, to compile a work that shall be absolutely his
+own; that is to say, his judgment: his instruction, labor, and
+study tend to nothing else but to form that.... Conversation with
+men is of very great use, and travel into foreign countries;... to
+be able chiefly to give an account of the humors, manners, customs,
+and laws of those nations where he has been, and that we may whet
+and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against those of others....</p>
+
+<p>In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those
+who live only in the records of history: he shall, by reading those
+books, converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 read<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>ing the "Essays" of
+Montaigne] as if I had myself 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
+mould 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,&mdash;whatever is true of
+Emerson,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Montaigne tells us how he was himself trained under his father. The
+elder Montaigne, too, had his ideas on education,&mdash;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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In my infancy, and before I began to speak, he [my father]
+committed me to the care of a German,... totally ignorant of our
+language, but very fluent, and a great critic, in Latin. This man,
+whom he had fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained
+with a very great salary, for this only end, had me continually
+with him: to him there were also joined two others, of inferior
+learning, to attend me, and to relieve him, who all of them spoke
+to me in no other language but Latin. As to the rest of his family,
+it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself nor my mother, man
+nor maid, should speak any thing in my company, but such Latin
+words as every one had learned only to gabble with me. It is not to
+be imagined how great an advantage this proved to the whole family:
+my father and my mother by this means learned Latin enough to
+understand it perfectly well, and to speak it to such a degree as
+was sufficient for any necessary use, as also those of the servants
+did, who were most frequently with me. In short, we Latined it at
+such a rate, that it overflowed to all the neighboring villages,
+where there yet remain, that have established themselves by custom,
+several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools. As for what
+concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood
+either French or Perigordin ["Perigordin" is Montaigne's name for
+the dialect of his province, Perigord (Gascony)], any more than
+Arabic; and, without art, book, grammar, or precept, whipping, or
+the expense of a tear, I had, by that time, learned to speak as
+pure Latin as my master himself, for I had no means of mixing it up
+with any other. </p></div>
+
+<p>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
+&aelig;sthetic was the matin <i>reveill&eacute;</i> that broke the slumbers of this
+hopeful young heir of Montaigne:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of
+children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them
+violently and over-hastily from sleep, wherein they are much more
+profoundly involved than we, he [the father] caused me to be
+wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never
+unprovided of a musician for that purpose.... The good man, being
+extremely timorous of any way failing in a thing he had so wholly
+set his heart upon, suffered himself at last to be overruled by the
+common opinions:... he sent me, at six years of age, to the College
+of Guienne, at that time the best and most flourishing in France. </p></div>
+
+<p>In short, as in the case of Mr. Tulliver, the world was "too many" for
+Eyquem <i>p&egrave;re</i>; and, in the education of his son, the stout Gascon,
+having started out well as dissenter, fell into dull conformity at last.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A woman, fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread,
+cried and lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her
+throat, where she thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious
+fellow that was brought to her, seeing no outward tumor nor
+alteration, supposing it to be only a conceit taken at some crust
+of bread that had hurt her as it went down, caused her to vomit,
+and, unseen, threw a crooked pin into the basin, which the woman no
+sooner saw, but, believing she had cast it up, she presently found
+herself eased of her pain....</p>
+
+<p>Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field, have,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> I make
+no question, heard the story of the falconer, who, having earnestly
+fixed his eyes upon a kite in the air, laid a wager that he would
+bring her down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it
+was said; for <i>the tales I borrow, I charge upon the consciences of
+those from whom I have them</i>. </p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of
+Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to
+receive the enemy's charge, "by reason that" (I shall here steal
+Plutarch's own words, which are better than mine) "he by so doing
+deprived himself of the violent impression the motion of running
+adds to the first shock of arms, and hindered that clashing of the
+combatants against one another, which is wont to give them greater
+impetuosity and fury, especially when they come to rush in with
+their utmost vigor, their courages increasing by the shouts and the
+career; 'tis to render the soldiers' ardor, as a man may say, more
+reserved and cold." This is what he says. But, if C&aelig;sar had come by
+the worse, why might it not as well have been urged by another,
+that, on the contrary, the strongest and most steady posture of
+fighting is that wherein a man stands planted firm, without motion;
+and that they who are steady upon the march, closing up, and
+reserving their force within themselves for the push of the
+business, have a great advantage against those who are disordered,
+and who have already spent half their breath in running on
+precipitately to the charge? Besides that, an army is a body made
+up of so many individual members, it is impossible for it to move
+in this fury with so exact a motion as not to break the order of
+battle, and that the best of them are not engaged before their
+fellows can come on to help them. </p></div>
+
+<p>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. This 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>joined, you will have the
+sensation of coming suddenly upon a treasure-trove of coined proverbial
+wisdom:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Our minds are never at home, but ever beyond home.</p>
+
+<p>I will take care, if possible, that my death shall say nothing that
+my life has not said.</p>
+
+<p>Life in itself is neither good nor bad: it is the place of what is
+good or bad.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge should not be stuck on to the mind, but incorporated in
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>Age wrinkles the mind more than the face.</p>
+
+<p>Habit is a second nature.</p>
+
+<p>Hunger cures love.</p>
+
+<p>It is easier to get money than to keep it.</p>
+
+<p>Anger has often been the vehicle of courage.</p>
+
+<p>It is more difficult to command than to obey.</p>
+
+<p>A liar should have a good memory.</p>
+
+<p>Ambition is the daughter of presumption.</p>
+
+<p>To serve a prince, you must be discreet and a liar.</p>
+
+<p>We learn to live when life has passed.</p>
+
+<p>The mind is ill at ease when its companion has the colic.</p>
+
+<p>We are all richer than we think, but we are brought up to go
+a-begging.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest masterpiece of man is... to be born at the right time. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We append a saying of Montaigne's not found in Mr. St. John's
+collection:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There is no so good man who so squares all his thoughts and actions
+to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten
+times in his life. </p></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;is even historic. The name of La Bo&euml;tie is forever
+associated with the name of Montaigne. La Bo&euml;tie 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, 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 Bo&euml;tie
+died young; and his "Contr' Un" was published posthumously,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> Mr. Bayle St.
+John's translation, bracketing a hint or two of correction suggested by
+comparison of the original French. The treatise of La Bo&euml;tie is
+sometimes now printed with Montaigne's "Essays," in French editions of
+our author's works: La Bo&euml;tie says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>You sow your fruits [crops] that he [the king] may ravage them; you
+furnish and fill your houses that he may have something to steal;
+you bring up your daughters that he may slake his luxury; you bring
+up your sons that he may take them to be butchered in his wars, to
+be the ministers of his avarice, the executors of his vengeance;
+you disfigure your forms by labor [your own selves you inure to
+toil] that he may cocker himself in delight, and wallow in nasty
+and disgusting pleasure. </p></div>
+
+<p>Montaigne seems really to have loved this friend of his, whom he
+reckoned the greatest man in France. His account of La Bo&euml;tie's death is
+boldly, and not presumptuously, paralleled by Mr. St. John with the
+"Ph&aelig;don" of Plato. Noble writing, it certainly is, though its
+stateliness is a shade too self-conscious, perhaps.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> 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
+writings, we are necessarily forbidden to illustrate. In an essay
+written in his old age,&mdash;which we will not even name, its general tenor
+is so evil,&mdash;Montaigne holds the following language:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I gently turn aside, and avert my eyes from the stormy and cloudy
+sky I have before me, which, thanks be to God, I regard without
+fear, but not without meditation and study, and amuse myself in the
+remembrance of my better years:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">"Animus quod perdidit, optat,</span><br />
+Atque in pr&aelig;terita se totus imagine
+versat."</p>
+
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Petronius</span>, c. 128.</p>
+
+<p>["The mind desires what it has lost, and in fancy flings itself
+wholly into the past."]</p>
+
+<p>Let childhood look forward, and age backward: is not this the
+signification of Janus' double face? Let years haul me along if
+they will, but it shall be backward; as long as my eyes can discern
+the pleasant season expired, I shall now and then turn them that
+way; though it escape from my blood and veins, I shall not,
+however, root the image of it out of my memory:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span style="margin-left: 4em;">"Hoc est</span><br />
+Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui."</p>
+
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Martial</span>, x. 23, 7.</p>
+
+<p>["'Tis to live twice to be able to enjoy former life again."] </p></div>
+
+<p>Harmlessly, even engagingly, pensive seems the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> foregoing strain of
+sentiment. Who could suppose it a prelude to detailed reminiscence on
+the author's part of sensual pleasures&mdash;the basest&mdash;enjoyed in the past?
+The venerable voluptuary keeps himself in countenance for his lascivious
+vein, by writing as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I have enjoined myself to dare to say all that I dare to do; even
+thoughts that are not to be published, displease me; the worst of
+my actions and qualities do not appear to me so evil, as I find it
+evil and base not to dare to own them....</p>
+
+<p>...I am greedy of making myself known, and I care not to how many,
+provided it be truly.... Many things that I would not say to a
+particular individual, I say to the people; and, as to my most
+secret thoughts, send my most intimate friends to my book.... For
+my part, if any one should recommend me as a good pilot, as being
+very modest, or very chaste, I should owe him no thanks [because
+the recommendation would be false]. </p></div>
+
+<p>We must leave it&mdash;as, however, Montaigne himself is far enough from
+leaving it&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In farewells, we oftener than not heat our affections towards the
+things we take leave of: I take my last leave of the pleasures of
+this world; these are our last embraces. </p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Emerson, in his "Representative Men,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> makes Montaigne stand for The
+Sceptic. Sceptic 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. "<i>Que s&ccedil;ai-je?</i>" was his motto
+("What know I?"), a question as of hopeless ignorance,&mdash;nay, as of
+ignorance also void of desire to know. His life was one long
+interrogation, a balancing of opposites, to the end.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;if he ever
+had a conscience. But his intelligence survived. He became, at last,&mdash;if
+he was not such from the first,&mdash;almost pure sense, without soul.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+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,
+speaking as "moral philosopher," in his "Essays," he says, carelessly,
+that he had lost "two or three" "without repining." This, perhaps, is
+affectation. But what affectation!</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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, "<i>Que s&ccedil;ai-je?</i>" Votaries of Montaigne perform their
+pious pilgrimages to this shrine of their idolatry, year after year,
+century after century.</p>
+
+<p>For, remember, it is now three centuries since Montaigne wrote. He was
+before Bacon and Shakspeare. 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 "The Great Eastern" overlay 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 his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>toric 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 if he
+had 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. 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,&mdash;that means much. It means hardly
+less than to provide the world with a new Bible,&mdash;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,&mdash;and, to say truth, does,&mdash;in this
+volume, find all his needed texts. Here is <i>viaticum</i>&mdash;daily manna&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> historical significance that Rabelais and Montaigne, but
+especially Montaigne, should, to such an extent, for now three full
+centuries, have been furnishing the daily intellectual food of
+Frenchmen.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;these two authors Pascal acknowledged to be the
+ones most constantly in his hand,&mdash;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
+prepared, 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,&mdash;nay, greatly because of so
+much good in them,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="V" id="V"></a>V.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: 1613-1680 (La Bruy&egrave;re: 1646 (?)-1696; Vauvenargues:
+1715-1747).</p>
+
+
+<p>In La Rochefoucauld 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 the "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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The writer's qualifications for treating his theme were unsurpassed. 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,&mdash;which he was
+gifted, with eyes to do,&mdash;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 sceptical 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span> 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 Fran&ccedil;ois Duc de
+La Rochefoucauld."</p>
+
+<p>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 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."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 11. The passions often beget their contraries. Avarice
+sometimes produces prodigality, and prodigality avarice: we are
+often firm from weakness, and daring from timidity.</p>
+
+<p>No. 13. Our self-love bears more impatiently the condemnation of
+our tastes than of our opinions. </p></div>
+
+<p>How much just detraction from all mere natural human greatness is
+contained in the following penetrative maxim!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 18. Moderation is a fear of falling into the envy and contempt
+which those deserve who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it
+is a vain parade of the strength of our mind; and, in short, the
+moderation of men in their highest elevation is a desire to appear
+greater than their fortune. </p></div>
+
+<p>What effectively quiet satire in these few words!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 19. We have strength enough to bear the ills of others. </p></div>
+
+<p>This man had seen the end of all perfection in the apparently great of
+this world. He could not bear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> that such should flaunt a false plume
+before their fellows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 20. The steadfastness of sages is only the art of locking up
+their uneasiness in their hearts. </p></div>
+
+<p>Of course, had it lain in the author's chosen line to do so, he might,
+with as much apparent truth, have pointed out, that to lock up
+uneasiness in the heart requires steadfastness no less&mdash;nay, more&mdash;than
+not to feel uneasiness.</p>
+
+<p>The inflation of "philosophy" vaunting itself is thus softly eased of
+its painful distention:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 22. Philosophy triumphs easily over troubles passed and
+troubles to come, but present troubles triumph over it. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 34. If we had no pride, we should not complain of that of
+others. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 39. Interest [self-love] speaks all sorts of languages, and
+plays all sorts of parts, even that of disinterestedness.</p>
+
+<p>No. 49. We are never so happy, or so unhappy, as we imagine.</p>
+
+<p>No. 78. The love of justice is, in most men, only the fear of
+suffering injustice. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What a subtly unsoldering distrust the following maxim introduces into
+the sentiment of mutual friendship!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 83. What men have called friendship, is only a partnership, a
+mutual accommodation of interests, and an exchange of good offices:
+it is, in short, only a traffic, in which self-love always proposes
+to gain something.</p>
+
+<p>No. 89. Every one complains of his memory, and no one complains of
+his judgment. </p></div>
+
+<p>How striking, from its artful suppression of strikingness, is the first
+following, and what a wide, easy sweep of well-bred satire it
+contains!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 93. Old men like to give good advice, to console themselves for
+being no longer able to give bad examples.</p>
+
+<p>No. 119. We are so much accustomed to disguise ourselves to others,
+that, at last, we disguise ourselves to ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>No. 127. The true way to be deceived, is to think one's self
+sharper than others. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 132. It is easier to be wise for others, than to be so for
+one's self. </p></div>
+
+<p>How pitilessly this inquisitor pursues his prey, "the human soul, into
+all its useless hiding-places!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 138. We would rather speak ill of ourselves, than not talk of
+ourselves. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The following maxim, longer and less felicitously phrased than is usual
+with La Rochefoucauld, recalls that bitter definition of the bore,&mdash;"One
+who insists on talking about himself all the time that you are wishing
+to talk about yourself:"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 139. One of the causes why we find so few people who appear
+reasonable and agreeable in conversation, is, that there is
+scarcely any one who does not think more of what he wishes to say,
+than of replying exactly to what is said to him. The cleverest and
+the most compliant think it enough to show an attentive air; while
+we see in their eyes and in their mind a wandering from what is
+said to them, and a hurry to return to what they wish to say,
+instead of considering that it is a bad way to please or to
+persuade others, to try so hard to please one's self, and that to
+listen well is one of the greatest accomplishments we can have in
+conversation. </p></div>
+
+<p>If we are indignant at the maxims following, it is probably rather
+because they are partly true than, because they are wholly false:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 144. We are not fond of praising, and, without interest, we
+never praise any one. Praise is a cunning flattery, hidden and
+delicate, which, in different ways, pleases him who gives and him
+who receives it. The one takes it as a reward for his merit: the
+other gives it to show his equity and his discernment.</p>
+
+<p>No. 146. We praise generally only to be praised.</p>
+
+<p>No. 147. Few are wise enough to prefer wholesome blame to
+treacherous praise.</p>
+
+<p>No. 149. Disclaiming praise is a wish to be praised a second time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No. 152. If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others
+could not hurt us.</p>
+
+<p>No. 184. We acknowledge our faults in order to atone, by our
+sincerity, for the harm they do us in the minds of others.</p>
+
+<p>No. 199. The desire to appear able often prevents our becoming so.</p>
+
+<p>No. 201. Whoever thinks he can do without the world, deceives
+himself much; but whoever thinks the world cannot do without him,
+deceives himself much more. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 214. Valor, in private soldiers, is a perilous calling, which
+they have taken to in order to gain their living. </p></div>
+
+<p>Here is, perhaps, the most current of all La Rochefoucauld's maxims:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 218. Hypocrisy is a homage which vice renders to virtue. </p></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;an assumption which the whole tenor of the "Maxims," in
+general, contradicts.</p>
+
+<p>How incisive the following!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 226. Too great eagerness to requite an obligation is a kind of
+ingratitude.</p>
+
+<p>No. 298. The gratitude of most men is only a secret desire to
+receive greater favors.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>No. 304. We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive
+those whom we bore.</p>
+
+<p>No. 318. Why should we have memory enough to retain even the
+smallest particulars of what has happened to us, and yet not have
+enough to remember how often we have told them to the same
+individual? </p></div>
+
+<p>The first following maxim satirizes both princes and courtiers. It might
+be entitled, "How to insult a prince, and not suffer for your
+temerity":&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 320. To praise princes for virtues they have not, is to insult
+them with impunity.</p>
+
+<p>No. 347. We find few sensible people, except those who are of our
+way of thinking.</p>
+
+<p>No. 409. We should often be ashamed of our best actions, if the
+world saw the motives which cause them.</p>
+
+<p>No. 424. We boast of faults the reverse of those we have: when we
+are weak, we boast of being stubborn. </p></div>
+
+<p>Here, at length, is a maxim that does not depress,&mdash;that animates you:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 432. To praise noble actions heartily, is in some sort to take
+part in them. </p></div>
+
+<p>The following is much less exhilarating:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 454. There are few instances in which we should make a bad
+bargain, by giving up the good that is said of us, on condition
+that nothing bad be said. </p></div>
+
+<p>This, also:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 458. Our enemies come nearer to the truth, in the opinions they
+form of us, than we do ourselves. </p></div>
+
+<p>Here is a celebrated maxim, vainly "suppressed" by the author, after
+first publication:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No. 583. In the adversity of our best friends, we always find
+something which does not displease us. </p></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The wise of this world reject the dogma of human depravity, as taught in
+the Bible. They willingly accept it,&mdash;nay, accept it complacently,
+hugging themselves for their own penetration,&mdash;as taught in the "Maxims"
+of La Rochefoucauld.</p>
+
+
+<p class="top">Jean de La Bruy&egrave;re 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> 1693, and died in 1696. That, in short,
+is La Bruy&egrave;re's biography.</p>
+
+<p>His book is universally considered one of the most finished products of
+the human mind. It is not a great work,&mdash;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 Bruy&egrave;re
+begins:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Every thing has been said; and one comes too late, after more than
+seven thousand years that there have been men, and men who have
+thought. </p></div>
+
+<p>La Bruy&egrave;re has something to say, and that at length unusual for him, of
+pulpit eloquence. We select a few specimen sentences:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 amusement, one among many; it is a game
+in which there is rivalry, and in which there are those who lay
+wagers.</p>
+
+<p>Profane eloquence has been transferred, so to speak, from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> the
+bar,... where it is no longer employed, to the pulpit, where it
+ought not to be found.</p>
+
+<p>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
+pronounces against. The orator pleases some, displeases others, and
+has an understanding with all in one thing,&mdash;that as he does not
+seek to render them better, so they do not think of becoming
+better. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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. </p></div>
+
+<p>Here is a happy instance of La Bruy&egrave;re'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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>An honest man who says, Yes, or No, deserves to be believed; his
+character swears for him. </p></div>
+
+<p>Highly satiric in his quiet way, La Bruy&egrave;re knew how to be. Witness the
+following thrust at a con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>temporary author, not named by the satirist,
+but, no doubt, recognized by the public of the time:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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. </p></div>
+
+<p>How painstakingly, how self-consciously, La Bruy&egrave;re did his literary
+work, is evidenced by the following:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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. </p></div>
+
+<p>We feel that the quality of La Bruy&egrave;re 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&mdash;infinite labor of style to make commonplace thought seem
+valuable by dint of perfect expression. We dismiss La Bruy&egrave;re with a
+single additional extract,&mdash;his celebrated parallel between Corneille
+and Racine:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span> instructs; the other pleases, moves, touches, penetrates.
+Whatever there is most beautiful, most noble, most imperial, in the
+reason is made use of by the former; by the latter, whatever is
+most seductive and most delicate in passion. You find in the
+former, maxims, rules, and precepts; in the latter, taste and
+sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of Corneille; you are
+more shaken and more softened in those of Racine. Corneille is more
+moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make Sophocles his
+model; the other owes more to Euripides. </p></div>
+
+<p class="top">Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La Bruy&egrave;re 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.</p>
+
+<p>Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, though nobly born, was poor.
+His health was frail. He did not receive a good education in his youth.
+Indeed, he was still in his youth when he went to the wars. His culture
+always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know
+Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his
+accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the
+small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+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&mdash;this, whatever may be considered to be its
+aptness in point of literary appreciation:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them;
+Racine's inspire them without saying them. </p></div>
+
+<p>Here is a good saying:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There is worldly wisdom also here:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account,
+practises a large and noble economy. </p></div>
+
+<p>Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is
+recalled by this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater. </p></div>
+
+<p>So much for Vauvenargues.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">LA FONTAINE.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1621-1695.</p>
+
+
+<p>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,&mdash;this surely is an achievement entitling La<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> Fontaine to
+monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.</p>
+
+<p>Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at Ch&acirc;teau-Thierry in Champagne.
+His early education was sadly neglected. At twenty years of age he was
+still phenomenally ignorant. About this time, being now better situated,
+he developed a taste for the classics and for poetry. With La Fontaine
+the man, it is the sadly familiar French story of debauched manners in
+life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to
+condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation.
+As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking
+friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any
+sterling worth of character felt in him, as by an exhaustless,
+easy-going good-nature, that, despite his social insipidity, made La
+Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy
+to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La
+Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait
+in his character would he perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed
+not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude,
+no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man
+in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring
+personal regard. The mirror of <i>bonhomie</i> (easy-hearted
+good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost
+untranslatable, French word<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's
+case. On his amiable side&mdash;a full hemisphere or more of the man&mdash;it sums
+him up completely. Twenty years long, this mirror of <i>bonhomie</i> was
+domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the
+celebrated Madame de la Sabli&egrave;re. 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."</p>
+
+<p>But La Fontaine had that in him which kept the friendship of serious
+men. Moli&egrave;re, a grave, even melancholy spirit, however gay in his
+comedies; Boileau and Racine, decorous both of them, at least in
+manners,&mdash;constituted, together with La Fontaine, a kind of private
+"Academy," existing on a diminutive scale, which was not without its
+important influence on French letters. La Fontaine seems to have been a
+sort of Goldsmith in this club of wits, the butt of many pleasantries
+from his colleagues, called out by his habit of absent-mindedness. St.
+Augustine was one night the subject of an elaborate eulogy, which La
+Fontaine lost the benefit of, through a reverie of his own indulged
+meantime on a quite different character. Catching, however, at the name,
+La Fontaine, as he came to himself for a moment, betrayed the secret of
+his absent thoughts by asking, "Do you think St. Augustine had as much
+wit as Rabelais?"&mdash;"Take care, Monsieur La Fontaine: you have put one of
+your stockings on wrong side out,"&mdash;he had actually done so,&mdash;was the
+only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> 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,&mdash;a wife whom he never really loved, and whom he soon would finally
+abandon,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Sabli&egrave;re,
+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 dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>tance of time, to pronounce. When he died,
+at seventy-three, F&eacute;nelon 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!"</p>
+
+<p>La Fontaine's earliest works were <i>Contes</i>, 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,&mdash;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 &AElig;sop and Ph&aelig;drus. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span> 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,&mdash;a meritorious one, still master of the field
+which, near fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here
+expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to forty-four. The additions are
+not ungraceful, but they encumber somewhat the Attic neatness and
+simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly
+broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines&mdash;lines of
+six feet&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">The Oak one day said to the Reed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"Justly might you dame Nature blame:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">A wren's weight would bow down your frame;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">The lightest wind that chance may make</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Dimple the surface of the lake</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Your head bends low indeed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The while, like Caucasus, my front</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">To meet the branding sun is wont,</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 3em;">Nay, more, to take the tempest's brunt.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">A blast you feel, I feel a breeze.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Had you been born beneath my roof,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Wide-spread, of leafage weather-proof,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Less had you known your life to tease;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">I should have sheltered you from storm.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">But oftenest you rear your form</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">On the moist limits of the realm of wind.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">"Your pity," answers him the Heed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">I more than you may winds disdain.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">I bend, and break not. You, indeed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Against their dreadful strokes till now</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">But wait we for the end."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;">Scarce had he spoke,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">When fiercely from the far horizon broke</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The wildest of the children, fullest fraught</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">With terror, that till then the North had brought.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">The tree holds good; the reed it bends.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">The wind redoubled might expends,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And so well works that from his bed</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead.</span><br />
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In the fable of the "Rat retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies
+the monks. "With French <i>finesse</i>, 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!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">The sage Levantines have a tale</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">About a rat that weary grew</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Of all the cares which life assail,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">And to a Holland cheese withdrew.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">His solitude was there profound,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Extending through his world so round.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Our hermit lived on that within;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And soon his industry had been</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">With claws and teeth so good,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">That in his novel heritage,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">He had in store for wants of age,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Both house and livelihood.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">What more could any rat desire?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">He grew fat, fair, and round.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">God's blessings thus redound</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">To those who in his vows retire.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">One day this personage devout,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Whose kindness none might doubt,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Was asked, by certain delegates</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">That came from Rat United States,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">For some small aid, for they</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">To foreign parts were on their way,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">For succor in the great cat-war:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Ratopolis beleaguered sore,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Their whole republic drained and poor,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">No morsel in their scrips they bore.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Slight boon they craved, of succor sure</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">In days at utmost three or four.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"My friends," the hermit said,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">"To worldly things I'm dead.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">How can a poor recluse</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">To such a mission be of use?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">What can he do but pray</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">That God will aid it on its way?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And so, my friends, it is my prayer</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 3em;">That God will have you in his care."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">His well-fed saintship said no more,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">But in their faces shut the door.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">What think you, reader, is the service,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">For which I use this niggard rat?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">To paint a monk? No, but a dervise.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">A monk, I think, however fat,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Must be more bountiful than that.</span><br />
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">The sorest ill that Heaven hath</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Sent oil this lower world in wrath,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">The plague (to call it by its name),</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">One single day of which</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">Would Pluto's ferryman enrich,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Waged war on beasts, both wild and tame.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">They died not all, but all were sick:</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 6em;">No hunting now, by force or trick,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">To save what might so soon expire.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">No food excited their desire:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Nor wolf nor fox now watched to slay</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">The innocent and tender prey.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">The turtles fled,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">So love and therefore joy were dead.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">The lion council held, and said,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"My friends, I do believe</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">This awful scourge for which we grieve,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Is for our sins a punishment</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Most righteously by Heaven sent.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Let us our guiltiest beast resign,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">A sacrifice to wrath divine.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Perhaps this offering, truly small,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">May gain the life and health of all.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">By history we find it noted</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">That lives have been just so devoted.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Then let us all turn eyes within,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">And ferret out the hidden sin.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Himself, let no one spare nor flatter,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">But make clean conscience in the matter.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">For me, my appetite has played the glutton</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Too much and often upon mutton.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">What harm had e'er my victims done?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">I answer, truly, None.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Perhaps, sometimes, by hunger pressed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">I've eat the shepherd with the rest.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">I yield myself if need there be;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">And yet I think, in equity,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Each should confess his sins with me;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">For laws of right and justice cry,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">The guiltiest alone should die."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"Sire," said the fox, "your majesty</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Is humbler than a king should be,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">And over-squeamish in the case.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9em;">What! eating stupid sheep a crime?</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 9em;">No, never, sire, at any time.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">It rather was an act of grace,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">A mark of honor to their race.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">And as to shepherds, one may swear,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">The fate your majesty describes,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Is recompense less full than fair</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">For such usurpers o'er our tribes."</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">Thus Renard glibly spoke,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">And loud applause from listeners broke.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Of neither tiger, boar, nor bear,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Did any keen inquirer dare</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">To ask for crimes of high degree;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">The fighters, biters, scratchers, all</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">From every mortal sin were free;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">The very dogs, both great and small,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">Were saints, as far as dogs could be.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">The ass, confessing in his turn,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">"I happened through a mead to pass;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">The monks, its owners, were at mass:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">And, add to these the devil, too,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">All tempted me the deed to do.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">I browsed the bigness of my tongue:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Since truth must out, I own it wrong."</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">On this, a hue and cry arose,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">As if the beasts were all his foes.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">A wolf, haranguing lawyer-wise,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Denounced the ass for sacrifice,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">The bald-pate, scabby, ragged lout,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">By whom the plague had come, no doubt.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">His fault was judged a hanging crime.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">What! eat another's grass? Oh, shame!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">The noose of rope, and death sublime,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">For that offence were all too tame!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">And soon poor Grizzle felt the same.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">Thus human courts acquit the strong,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">And doom the weak, as therefore wrong.</span><br />
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It is suitable to add, in conclusion, that La Fontaine is a crucial
+author for disclosing the irreconcilable difference that exists, at
+bottom, between the Englishman's and the Frenchman's idea of poetry. No
+English-speaker, heir of Shakspeare and Milton, will ever be able to
+satisfy a Frenchman with admiration such as he can conscientiously
+profess for the poetry of La Fontaine.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">MOLI&Egrave;RE.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1623-1673.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Moli&egrave;re</span> 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? Moli&egrave;re's works survive, and his greatness may be measured.</p>
+
+<p>We have stinted our praise. Moli&egrave;re is not only; the foremost name in a
+certain department of literature; he is one of the foremost names in
+literature. The names are few on which critics are willing to bestow
+this distinction. But critics generally agree in bestowing this
+distinction on Moli&egrave;re.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Moli&egrave;re'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 Moli&egrave;re is rated one of the few greatest producers of
+literature. Moli&egrave;re's comedy constitutes to Moli&egrave;re 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,&mdash;lightning playful, indeed, but lightning that
+might have been deadly,&mdash;the "secrets of the nethermost abyss" of human
+nature. Not human manners merely, those of a time, or of a race, but
+human attributes, those of all times, and of all races, are the things
+with which, in his higher comedies, Moli&egrave;re 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 Moli&egrave;re the substance of
+his dramatic creations. Now and again, if you read Moli&egrave;re 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
+Moli&egrave;re.</p>
+
+<p>This character in Moli&egrave;re the writer, accords<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span> with the character of the
+man Moli&egrave;re. It might not have seemed natural to say of Moli&egrave;re, as was
+said of Dante, "There goes the man that has been in hell." But Moli&egrave;re
+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.'</p>
+
+<p>A poet as well as a dramatist, his own fellow-countrymen, at least, feel
+Moli&egrave;re 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 &AElig;schylus),
+one is a Roman (Lucretius), one an Italian (Dante), one an Englishman
+(Shakspeare),&mdash;seven. The eighth could hardly fail to be a Frenchman,
+and that Frenchman is Moli&egrave;re. Mr. Swinburne might perhaps make the list
+nine, but he would certainly include Victor Hugo himself.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously enough, Moli&egrave;re 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,&mdash;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 Th&eacute;&acirc;tre, it was, twenty years
+after, recognized by the national title of Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais. Moli&egrave;re's
+real name was Jean Baptiste Poquelin.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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. Moli&egrave;re'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&mdash;probably not
+innocent companion&mdash;of his wandering life as actor. A sister of this
+actress&mdash;a sister young enough to be daughter, instead of
+sister&mdash;Moli&egrave;re finally married. She led her jealous husband a wretched
+conjugal life. A peculiarly dark tradition of shame, connected with
+Moli&egrave;re'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. (Moli&egrave;re, to the very
+end of his life, acted in the comedies that he wrote.) When some play of
+his represented the torments 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 Moli&egrave;re and his wife,
+confronted with each other in performing the piece.</p>
+
+<p>Despite his faults, Moli&egrave;re was cast in a noble, generous mould, of
+character as well as of genius.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Moli&egrave;re produced in all some thirty dramatic pieces, from among which we
+select a few of the most celebrated for brief description and
+illustration.</p>
+
+<p>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 Moli&egrave;re
+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 Moli&egrave;re 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">M. Jourdain.</span> I have the greatest desire in the world to be learned;
+and it vexes me more than I can tell, that my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> father and mother
+did not make me learn thoroughly all the sciences when I was young.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Professor of Philosophy.</span> This is a praiseworthy feeling. <i>Nam sine
+doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago.</i> You understand this, and you
+have, no doubt, a knowledge of Latin?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> Yes; but act as if I had none. Explain to me the meaning
+of it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> The meaning of it is, that, without science, life is an
+image of death.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> That Latin is quite right.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Have you any principles, any rudiments, of science?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> Oh, yes! I can read and write.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prop. Phil.</span> With what would you like to begin? Shall I teach you
+logic?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> And what may this logic be?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> It is that which teaches us the three operations of the
+mind.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> What are they&mdash;these three operations of the mind?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> The first, the second, and the third. The first is to
+conceive well by means of universals; the second, to judge well by
+means of categories; and the third, to draw a conclusion aright by
+means of the figures Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio, Baralipton,
+etc.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> Pooh! what repulsive words! This logic does not by any
+means suit me. Teach me something more enlivening.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Will you learn moral philosophy?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> Moral philosophy?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Yes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> What does it say, this moral philosophy?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span>It treats of happiness, teaches men to moderate their
+passions, and&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> No, none of that. I am devilishly hot-tem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>pered, and
+morality, or no morality, I like to give full vent to my anger
+whenever I have a mind to it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Would you like to learn physics?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> And what have physics to say for themselves?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Physics are that science which explains the principles
+of natural things and the properties of bodies; which discourses of
+the nature of the elements, of metals, minerals, stones, plants,
+and animals; which teaches us the cause of all the meteors, the
+rainbow, the <i>ignis fatuus,</i> comets, lightning, thunder,
+thunderbolts, rain, snow, hail, and whirlwinds.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> There is too much hullaballoo in all that, too much riot
+and rumpus.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Very good.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> And now I want to intrust you with a great secret. I am in
+love with a lady of quality, and I should be glad if you would help
+me to write something to her in a short letter which I mean to drop
+at her feet.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Very well.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> That will be gallant, will it not?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Undoubtedly. Is it verse you wish to write to her?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> Oh, no! not verse.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> You only wish prose?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> No. I wish for neither verse nor prose.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> It must be one or the other.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span>Why?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Because, sir, there is nothing by which we can express
+ourselves except prose or verse.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> There is nothing but prose or verse?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> No, sir. Whatever is not prose, is verse; and whatever
+is not verse, is prose.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span>And when we speak, what is that, then?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Prose.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> What! when I say, "Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give
+me my nightcap," is that prose?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Yes, sir.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> Upon my word, I have been speaking prose these forty years
+without being aware of it; and I am under the greatest obligation
+to you for informing me of it. Well, then, I wish to write to her
+in a letter, "Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of
+love;" but I would have this worded in a genteel manner, and turned
+prettily.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Say that the fire of her eyes has reduced your heart to
+ashes; that you suffer day and night for her, tortures&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour. </span>No, no, no, I don't any of that. I simply wish for what I
+tell you,&mdash;"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of
+love."</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> Still, you might amplify the thing a little.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> No, I tell you, I will have nothing but these very words
+in the letter; but they must be put in a fashionable way, and
+arranged as they should be. Pray show me a little, so that I may
+see the different ways in which they can be put.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> They may be put first of all, as you have said, "Fair
+Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of love;" or else, "Of
+love die make me, fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes;" or, "Your
+beautiful eyes of love make me, fair Marchioness, die;" or, "Die of
+love your beautiful eyes, fair Marchioness, make me;" or else, "Me
+make your beautiful eyes die, fair Marchioness, of love."</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> But of all these ways, which is the best?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Prof. Phil.</span> The one you said,&mdash;"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful
+eyes make me die of love."</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. Jour.</span> Yet I have never studied, and I did all right off at the
+first shot. </p></div>
+
+<p>The "Bourgeois Gentilhomme" is a very amusing comedy throughout.</p>
+
+<p>From "Les Femmes Savantes" ("The Learned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span> Women")&mdash;"The Blue-Stockings,"
+we might perhaps freely render the title&mdash;we present one scene to
+indicate the nature of the 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 H&ocirc;tel de Rambouillet reduced to absurdity. That
+fashionable affectation Moli&egrave;re made the subject of his comedy, "The
+Learned Women."</p>
+
+<p>In the following extracts, Moli&egrave;re 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 <i>coterie</i> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot1"><p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Trissotin.</span> Sonnet to the Princess Urania on her Fever,<br />
+Your prudence sure is fast asleep,<br />That thus luxuriously you keep
+<br />And lodge magnificently so
+<br />Your very hardest-hearted foe.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;lise.</span> Ah! what a pretty beginning!</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Armande.</span> What a charming turn it has! <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Philaminte.</span> He alone possesses the talent of making easy verses.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> We must yield to <i>prudence fast asleep</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> <i>Lodge one's very hardest-hearted foe</i> is full of charms for
+me.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> I like <i>luxuriously</i> and <i>magnificently</i>: these two adverbs
+joined together sound admirably.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> Let us hear the rest.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span>
+Your prudence sure is fast asleep,<br />
+That thus luxuriously you keep<br />
+And lodge magnificently so<br />
+Your very hardest-hearted foe.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> <i>Prudence fast asleep.</i></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> <i>To lodge one's foe.</i></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> <i>Luxuriously</i> and <i>magnificently</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,<br />
+From out your
+chamber, decked so gay,
+<br />Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,<br />
+Bold she assails your lovely life.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> Ah! gently. Allow me to breathe, I beseech you.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span>Give us time to admire, I beg.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> One feels, at hearing these verses, an indescribable
+something which goes through one's inmost soul, and makes one feel
+quite faint.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say, From out your chamber,
+decked so gay&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="indneg">How prettily <i>chamber, decked so gay</i>, is said here! And with what
+wit the metaphor is introduced!</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> Drive forth that foe,
+whate'er men say.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg">Ah! in what an admirable taste that <i>whate'er men say </i>is!
+To my
+mind, the passage is invaluable.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> My heart is also in love with <i>whate'er men say</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> I am of your opinion: <i>whate'er men say</i> is a happy
+expression.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> I wish I had written it.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> It is worth a whole poem.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> But do you, like me, thoroughly understand the wit of it?</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> <i>and</i> <span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> Oh! Oh!</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say. Although another
+should take the fever's part, pay no attention; laugh at the
+gossips.</p>
+
+<p class="c">Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,<br />
+Whate'er men say, whate'er men say.<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>This <i>whate'er men say</i>, says a great deal more than it seems. I do not
+know if every one is like me, but I discover in it a hundred meanings.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot1"><p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> It is true that it says more than its size seems to imply.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> (<i>to</i> <span class="smcap">Trissotin</span>). But when you wrote this charming <i>whate'er
+men say</i>, did you yourself understand all its energy? Did you
+realize all that it tells us? And did you then think that you were
+writing something so witty?</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> Ah! ah!</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> I have likewise the <i>ingrate</i> in my head,&mdash;this ungrateful,
+unjust, uncivil fever that ill-treats people who entertain her.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> In short, both the stanzas are admirable. Let us come quickly
+to the triplets, I pray.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> Ah! once more, <i>whate'er men say</i>, I beg.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span>, <span class="smcap">Arm.</span>, <i>and</i> <span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> <i>Whate'er men say!</i></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> From out your chamber, decked so gay,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span>, <span class="smcap">Arm.</span>, <i>and</i> <span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> <i>Chamber decked so gay!</i></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span>, <span class="smcap">Arm.</span>, <i>and</i> <span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> That <i>ingrate</i> fever!</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> Bold she assails your lovely life.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> <i>Your lovely life!</i></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> <i>and</i> <span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> Ah!</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> What! reckless of your ladyhood,<br />
+Still fiercely seeks to
+shed your blood,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span>, <span class="smcap">Arm.</span>, <i>and</i> <span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> Ah!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> And day and night to work you harm.
+<br />When to the baths
+sometime you've brought her<br />No more ado, with your own arm
+<br />Whelm
+her and drown her in the water.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> Ah! It is quite overpowering.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> I faint.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> I die from pleasure.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> A thousand sweet thrills seize one.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> <i>When to the baths sometime you've brought her,</i></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> <i>No more ado, with your own arm</i></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> <i>Whelm her and drown her in the water.</i> With your own arm,
+drown her there in the baths.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> In your verses we meet at each step with charming beauty.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> One promenades through them with rapture.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> One treads on fine things only.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> They are little lanes all strewn with roses.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> Then, the sonnet seems to you&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> Admirable, new; and never did any one make any thing more
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> (<i>to</i> <span class="smcap">Henriette</span>). What! my niece, you listen to what has been
+read without emotion! You play there but a sorry part!</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Hen.</span> We each of us play the best part we can, my aunt; and to be a
+wit does not depend on our will.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> My verses, perhaps, are tedious to you.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Hen.</span> No. I do not listen.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> Ah! Let us hear the epigram. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 Moli&egrave;re's time a fashionable study rendered
+such by the con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>temporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents
+the limitations imposed upon her sex:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot1"><p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> It is insulting our sex too grossly to limit our intelligence
+to the power of judging of a skirt, of the make of a garment, of
+the beauties of lace, or of a new brocade.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> We must rise above this shameful condition, and bravely
+proclaim our emancipation.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> Every one knows my respect for the fairer sex, and that, if
+I render homage to the brightness of their eyes, I also honor the
+splendor of their intellect.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> And our sex does you justice in this respect: but we will
+show to certain minds who treat us with proud contempt, that women
+also have knowledge; that, like men, they can hold learned
+meetings&mdash;regulated, too, by better rules; that they wish to unite
+what elsewhere is kept apart, join noble language to deep learning,
+reveal nature's laws by a thousand experiments; and, on all
+questions proposed, admit every party, and ally themselves to none.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> For order, I prefer peripateticism.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> For abstractions, I love platonism.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> Epicurus pleases me, for his tenets are solid.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> I agree with the doctrine of atoms; but I find it difficult to
+understand a vacuum, and I much prefer subtile matter.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> I quite agree with Descartes about magnetism.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> I like his vortices.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> And I, his falling worlds.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> I long to see our assembly opened, and to distinguish
+ourselves by some great discovery.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Triss.</span> Much is expected from your enlightened knowledge, for nature
+has hidden few things from you.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> For my part, I have, without boasting, already made one
+discovery; I have plainly seen men in the moon.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">B&eacute;l.</span> I have not, I believe, as yet quite distinguished men, but I
+have seen steeples as plainly as I see you.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Arm.</span> In addition to natural philosophy, we will dive into grammar,
+history, verse, ethics, and politics.</p>
+
+<p class="indneg"><span class="smcap">Phil.</span> I find in ethics charms which delight my heart; it was
+formerly the admiration of great geniuses: but I give the
+preference to the Stoics, and I think nothing so grand as their
+founder. </p></div>
+
+<p>"Les Pr&eacute;cieuses 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 H&ocirc;tel de Rambouillet, conversation was cultivated
+as a fine art. There was, no doubt, something overstrained in the
+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 pr&eacute;cieuse." Hence at last the term <i>pr&eacute;cieuse</i> as a
+designation of ridicule. Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; was a <i>pr&eacute;cieuse</i>. But she,
+with many of her peers, was too rich in sarcastic common sense to be a
+<i>pr&eacute;cieuse ridicule</i>. Moli&egrave;re himself, thrifty master of policy that he
+was, took pains to explain that he did not satirize the real thing, but
+only the affectation.</p>
+
+<p>"Tartuffe, or the Impostor," is perhaps the most celebrated of all
+Moli&egrave;re's plays. Scarcely comedy, scarcely tragedy, it partakes of both
+characters.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The original "Tartuffe," like the most of Moli&egrave;re's comedies, is written
+in rhymed verse. We could not, with any effort, make the English-reading
+student of Moli&egrave;re 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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 Moli&egrave;re could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> 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
+Cl&eacute;ante, his brother, whom, in his eagerness, he begs to excuse his not
+answering a question just addressed to him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Orgon</span> (<i>to</i> <span class="smcap">Cl&eacute;ante</span>). Brother, pray excuse me: you will kindly
+allow me to allay my anxiety by asking news of the family. (<i>To</i>
+<span class="smcap">Dorine</span>, <i>a maid-servant</i>.) Has every thing gone on well these last
+two days? What has happened? How is everybody?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> The day before yesterday our mistress was very feverish from
+morning to night, and suffered from a most extraordinary headache.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> And Tartuffe?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> Tartuffe! He is wonderfully well, stout and fat, with blooming
+cheeks and ruddy lips.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> Poor man!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> In the evening she felt very faint, and the pain in her head
+was so great that she could not touch any thing at supper.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> And Tartuffe?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> He ate his supper by himself before her, and very devoutly
+devoured a brace of partridges, and half a leg of mutton hashed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> Poor man!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> She spent the whole of the night without getting one wink of
+sleep: she was very feverish, and we had to sit up with her until
+the morning.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> And Tartuffe?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> Overcome by a pleasant sleepiness, he passed from the table to
+his room, and got at once into his warmed bed, where he slept
+comfortably till the next morning.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> Poor man!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> At last yielding to our persuasions, she consented to be bled,
+and immediately felt relieved.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> And Tartuffe?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> He took heart right valiantly, and fortifying his soul against
+all evils, to make up for the blood which our lady had lost, drank
+at breakfast four large bumpers of wine.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> Poor man!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> Now, at last, they are both well; and I will go and tell our
+lady how glad you are to hear of her recovery. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Madame Pernelle.</span> I can never believe, my son, that he would commit
+so base an action.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> What?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> Good people are always subject to envy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> What do you mean, mother?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> That you live after a strange sort here, and that I am but too
+well aware of the ill will they all bear him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> What has this ill will to do with what I have just told you?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> I have told it you a hundred times when you were young, that
+in this world virtue is ever liable to persecution, and that,
+although the envious die, envy never dies.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> But what has this to do with what has happened to-day?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> They have concocted a hundred foolish stories against him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> I have already told you that I saw it all myself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> The malice of evil-disposed persons is very great.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> You would make me swear, mother! I tell you that I saw his
+audacious attempt with my own eyes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> Evil tongues have always some venom to pour forth; and here
+below, there is nothing proof against them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> You are maintaining a very senseless argument. I saw it, I
+tell you,&mdash;saw it with my own eyes! what you can call s-a-w, saw!
+Must I din it over and over into your ears, and shout as loud as
+half a dozen people?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> Gracious goodness! appearances often deceive us! We must not
+always judge by what we see.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> I shall go mad!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> We are by nature prone to judge wrongly, and good is often
+mistaken for evil.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> I ought to look upon his desire of seducing my wife as
+charitable?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> You ought to have good reasons before you accuse another, and
+you should have waited till you were quite sure of the fact.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> Heaven save the mark! how could I be more sure? I suppose,
+mother, I ought to have waited till&mdash;you will make me say something
+foolish.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> In short, his soul is possessed with too pure a zeal; and I
+cannot possibly conceive that he would think of attempting what you
+accuse him of.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> If you were not my mother, I really don't know what I might
+now say to you, you make me so savage. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 <span class="smcap">Loyal</span> is
+observed coming, whereupon the fourth scene of act fifth opens:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> (to <span class="smcap">Dorine</span> <i>at the farther part of the stage</i>). Good-day, my
+dear sister; pray let me speak to your master.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> He is with friends, and I do not think he can see any one just
+now.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> I would not be intrusive. I feel sure that he will find
+nothing unpleasant in my visit: in fact, I come for something which
+will be very gratifying to him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> What is your name?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> Only tell him that I come from Mr. Tartuffe, for his benefit.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> (to <span class="smcap">Orgon</span>). It is a man who comes in a civil way from Mr.
+Tartuffe, on some business which will make you glad, he says.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Cl&eacute;.</span> (to <span class="smcap">Orgon</span>). You must see who it is, and what the man wants.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> (to <span class="smcap">Cl&eacute;ante</span>). He is coming, perhaps, to settle matters between
+us in a friendly way. How, in this case, ought I to behave to him?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Cl&eacute;.</span> Don't show any resentment, and, if he speaks of an agreement,
+listen to him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> (to <span class="smcap">Orgon</span>). Your servant, sir! May heaven punish whoever
+wrongs you! and may it be as favorable to you, sir, as I wish!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> (<i>aside to</i> <span class="smcap">Cl&eacute;ante</span>). This pleasant beginning agrees with my
+conjectures, and argues some sort of reconciliation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> All your family was always dear to me, and I served your
+father.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> Sir, I am sorry and ashamed to say that I do not know who you
+are, neither do I remember your name.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> My name is Loyal; I was born in Normandy, and am a royal
+bailiff in spite of envy. For the last forty years I have had the
+good fortune to fill the office, thanks to Heaven, with great
+credit; and I come, sir, with your leave, to serve you the writ of
+a certain order.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> What! you are here&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> Gently, sir, I beg. It is merely a summons,&mdash;a notice for you
+to leave this place, you and yours; to take away all your goods and
+chattels, and make room for others, without delay or adjournment,
+as hereby decreed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> I! leave this place?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> Yes, sir; if you please. The house incontestably belongs, as
+you are well aware, to the good Mr. Tartuffe. He is now lord and
+master of your estates, according to a deed I have in my keeping.
+It is in due form, and cannot be challenged.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Damis</span> (<i>to</i> <span class="smcap">Mr. Loyal</span>). This great impudence is, indeed, worthy of
+all admiration.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> (<i>to</i> <span class="smcap">Damis</span>). Sir, I have nothing at all to do with you.
+(<i>Pointing to</i> <span class="smcap">Orgon.</span>) My business is with this gentleman. He is
+tractable and gentle, and knows too well the duty of a gentleman to
+try to oppose authority.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> But&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Loy.</span> Yes, sir: I know that you would not, for any thing, show
+contumacy; and that you will allow me, like a reasonable man, to
+execute the orders I have received.... </p></div>
+
+<p>The scene gives in conclusion some spirited by-play of asides and
+interruptions from indignant mem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>bers of the family. Then follows scene
+fifth, one exchange of conversation from which will sufficiently
+indicate the progress of the plot:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> Well, mother, you see whether I am right; and you can judge of
+the rest by the writ. Do you at last acknowledge his rascality?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> I am thunderstruck, and can scarcely believe my eyes and ears. </p></div>
+
+<p>The next scene introduces Val&egrave;re, the noble lover of that daughter whom
+the infatuated father was bent on sacrificing to Tartuffe. Val&egrave;re comes
+to announce that Tartuffe, the villain, has accused Orgon to the king.
+Orgon must fly. Val&egrave;re offers him his own carriage and money,&mdash;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&mdash;the following scene will show whom:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Tar.</span> (<i>stopping</i> <span class="smcap">Orgon</span>). Gently, sir, gently; not so fast, I beg.
+You have not far to go to find a lodging, and you are a prisoner in
+the king's name.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> Wretch! you had reserved this shaft for the last; by it you
+finish me, and crown all your perfidies.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tar.</span> Your abuse has no power to disturb me, and I know how to
+suffer every thing for the sake of Heaven.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Cl&eacute;.</span> Your moderation is really great, we must acknowledge.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Da.</span> How impudently the infamous wretch sports with Heaven!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tar.</span> Your anger cannot move me. I have no other wish but to fulfil
+my duty.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Marianne.</span> You may claim great glory from the performance of this
+duty: it is a very honorable employment for you.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tar.</span> The employment cannot be otherwise than glorious, when it
+comes from the power that sends me here.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> But do you remember that my charitable hand, ungrateful
+scoundrel, raised you from a state of misery?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tar.</span> Yes, I know what help I have received from you; but the
+interest of my king is my first duty. The just obligation of this
+sacred duty stifles in my heart all other claims; and I would
+sacrifice to it friend, wife, relations, and myself with them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Elmire.</span> The impostor!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> With what treacherous cunning he makes a cloak of all that men
+revere!...</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tar.</span> (<i>to the</i> <span class="smcap">Officer</span>). I beg of you, sir, to deliver me from all
+this noise, and to act according to the orders you have received.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Officer.</span> I have certainly put off too long the discharge of my
+duty, and you very rightly remind me of it. To execute my order,
+follow me immediately to the prison in which a place is assigned to
+you.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tar.</span> Who? I, sir?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Officer.</span> Yes, you.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Tar.</span> Why to prison?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Officer.</span> To you I have no account to render. (<i>To</i> <span class="smcap">Orgon</span>.) Pray,
+sir, recover from your great alarm. We live under a king [Louis
+XIV.] who is an enemy to fraud,&mdash;a king who can read the heart, and
+whom all the arts of impostors cannot deceive. His great mind,
+endowed with delicate discernment, at all times sees things in
+their true, light.... He annuls, by his sovereign will, the terms
+of the contract by which you gave him [Tartuffe] your property. He
+moreover forgives you this secret offence in which you were
+involved by the flight of your friend. This to reward the zeal
+which you once showed for him in maintaining his rights, and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
+prove that his heart, when it is least expected, knows how to
+recompense a good action. Merit with him is never lost, and he
+remembers good better than evil.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dor.</span> Heaven be thanked!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Per.</span> Ah! I breathe again.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">El.</span> What a favorable end to our troubles!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mar.</span> Who would have foretold it?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Org.</span> (to <span class="smcap">Tartuffe</span>, <i>as the</i> <span class="smcap">Officer</span> <i>leads him off</i>). Ah, wretch!
+now you  are&mdash;</p></div>
+
+<p>Tartuffe thus disposed of, the play promptly ends, with a vanishing
+glimpse afforded us of a happy marriage in prospect for Val&egrave;re with the
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p>Moli&egrave;re 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.</p>
+
+<p>Each succeeding generation of Frenchmen supplies its bright and
+ingenious wits who produce comedy. But as there is no second Shakspeare,
+so there is but one Moli&egrave;re.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">PASCAL.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1623-1662.</p>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Pascal, the boy, had a strong natural bent toward mathematics. The story
+is that his father, in order to turn his 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.</p>
+
+<p>Vivid religious convictions meantime deeply affected Pascal's mind. His
+health, never robust, began to give way. His physicians prescribed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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 quality to Pascal's style, and in
+losing this you seem to lose something of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is universally 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 earli<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>est 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.</p>
+
+<p>But let us be entirely frank. The "Provincial Letters" of Pascal are
+now, to the general reader, not so interesting as 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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>We select a passage at the commencement of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> 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 defence 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&mdash;anonymously. The success was instantaneous and brilliant. A
+second letter followed, and a third. Soon, from strict personal defence
+of Arnauld, the writer went on to take up a line of offence and
+aggression. He carried the war into Africa. He attacked the Jesuits as
+teachers of immoral doctrine.</p>
+
+<p>The plan of these later letters was, to have a Paris<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"You know," he said, "that the ruling passion of persons in that
+rank of life [the rank of gentleman] is 'the point of honor,' which
+is perpetually driving them into acts of violence apparently quite
+at variance with Christian piety; so that, in fact, they would be
+almost all of them excluded from our confessionals, had not our
+fathers relaxed a little from the strictness of religion, to
+accommodate themselves to the weakness of humanity. Anxious to keep
+on good terms, both with the gospel, by doing their duty to God,
+and with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> men of the world, by showing charity to their
+neighbor, they needed all the wisdom they possessed to devise
+expedients for so nicely adjusting matters as to permit these
+gentlemen to adopt the methods usually resorted to for vindicating
+their honor without wounding their consciences, and thus reconcile
+things apparently so opposite to each other as piety and the point
+of honor."...</p>
+
+<p>"I should certainly [so replies M. Montalte, with the most
+exquisite irony couched under a cover of admiring simplicity],&mdash;I
+should certainly have considered the thing perfectly impracticable,
+if I had not known, from what I have seen of your fathers, that
+they are capable of doing with ease what is impossible to other
+men. This led me to anticipate that they must have discovered some
+method for meeting the difficulty,&mdash;a method which I admire, even
+before knowing it, and which I pray you to explain to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Since that is your view of the matter," replied the monk, "I
+cannot refuse you. Know, then, that this marvellous principle is
+our grand method of <i>directing the intention</i>&mdash;the importance of
+which, in our moral system, is such, that I might almost venture to
+compare it with the doctrine of probability. You have had some
+glimpses of it in passing, from certain maxims which I mentioned to
+you. For example, when I was showing you how servants might execute
+certain troublesome jobs with a safe conscience, did you not remark
+that it was simply by diverting their intention from the evil to
+which they were accessory, to the profit which they might reap from
+the transaction? Now, that is what we call <i>directing the
+intention</i>. You saw, too, that, were it not for a similar
+divergence of <i>the mind</i>, those who give money for benefices might
+be downright simoniacs. But I will now show you this grand method
+in all its glory, as it applies to the subject of homicide,&mdash;a
+crime which it justifies in a thousand instances,&mdash;in order that,
+from this startling result, you may form an idea of all that it is
+calculated to effect."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I foresee already," said I, "that, according to this mode, every
+thing will be permitted: it will stick at nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"You always fly from the one extreme to the other," replied the
+monk; "prithee avoid that habit. For just to show you that we are
+far from permitting every thing, let me tell you that we never
+suffer such a thing as a formal intention to sin, with the sole
+design of sinning; and, if any person whatever should persist in
+having no other end but evil in the evil that he does, we break
+with him at once; such conduct is diabolical. This holds true,
+without exception of age, sex, or rank. But when the person is not
+of such a wretched disposition as this, we try to put in practice
+our method of <i>directing the intention</i>, which consists in his
+proposing to himself, as the end of his actions, some allowable
+object. Not that we do not endeavor, as far as we can, to dissuade
+men from doing things forbidden; but, when we cannot prevent the
+action, we at least purify the motive, and thus correct the
+viciousness of the mean by the goodness of the end. Such is the way
+in which our fathers have contrived to permit those acts of
+violence to which men usually resort in vindication of their honor.
+They have no more to do than to turn off their intention from the
+desire of vengeance, which is criminal, and direct it to a desire
+to defend their honor, which, according to us, is quite
+warrantable. And in this way our doctors discharge all their duty
+towards God and towards man. By permitting the action, they gratify
+the world; and by purifying the intention, they give satisfaction
+to the gospel. This is a secret, sir, which was entirely unknown to
+the ancients; the world is indebted for the discovery entirely to
+our doctors. You understand it now, I hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly," was my reply. "To men you grant the outward material
+effect of the action, and to God you give the inward and spiritual
+movement of the intention; and, by this equitable partition, you
+form an alliance between the laws of God and the laws of men. But,
+my dear sir, to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> frank with you, I can hardly trust your
+premises, and I suspect that your authors will tell another tale."</p>
+
+<p>"You do me injustice," rejoined the monk; "I advance nothing but
+what I am ready to prove, and that by such a rich array of
+passages, that altogether their number, their authority, and their
+reasonings, will fill you with admiration. To show you, for
+example, the alliance which our fathers have formed between the
+maxims of the gospel and those of the world, by thus regulating the
+intention, let me refer you to Reginald. (<i>In praxi.</i>, liv. xxi.,
+num. 62, p. 260.) [These, and all that follow, are verifiable
+citations from real and undisputed Jesuit authorities, not to this
+day repudiated by that order.] 'Private persons are forbidden to
+avenge themselves; for St. Paul says to the Romans (ch. 12th),
+"Recompense to no man evil for evil;" and Ecclesiasticus says (ch.
+28th), "He that taketh vengeance shall draw on himself the
+vengeance of God, and his sins will not be forgotten." Besides all
+that is said in the gospel about forgiving offences, as in the 6th
+and 18th chapters of St. Matthew.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, father, if after that, he [Reginald] says any thing contrary
+to the Scripture, it will, at least, not be from lack of scriptural
+knowledge. Pray, how does he conclude?"</p>
+
+<p>"You shall hear," he said. "From all this it appears that a
+military man may demand satisfaction on the spot from the person
+who has injured him&mdash;not, indeed, with the intention of rendering
+evil for evil, but with that of preserving his honor&mdash;<i>non ut malum
+pro malo reddat, sed ut conservat honorem</i>. See you how carefully,
+because the Scripture condemns it, they guard against the intention
+of rendering evil for evil? This is what they will tolerate on no
+account. Thus Lessius observes (De Just., liv. ii., c. 9, d. 12, n.
+79), that, 'If a man has received a blow on the face, he must on no
+account have an intention to avenge himself; but he may lawfully
+have an intention to avert infamy, and may, with that view, repel
+the insult immediately, even at the point of the sword&mdash;<i>etiam cum
+gladio</i>.' So far are we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> from permitting any one to cherish the
+design of taking vengeance on his enemies, that our fathers will
+not allow any even to <i>wish their death</i>&mdash;by a movement of hatred.
+'If your enemy is disposed to injure you,' says Escobar, 'you have
+no right to wish his death, by a movement of hatred; though you
+may, with a view to save yourself from harm.' So legitimate,
+indeed, is this wish, with such an intention, that our great
+Hurtado de Mendoza says that 'we may <i>pray God</i> to visit with
+speedy death those who are bent on persecuting us, if there is no
+other way of escaping from it.'" (In his book, De Spe, vol. ii., d.
+15, sec. 4, 48.)</p>
+
+<p>"May it please your reverence," said I, "the Church has forgotten
+to insert a petition to that effect among her prayers."</p>
+
+<p>"They have not put every thing into the prayers that one may
+lawfully ask of God," answered the monk. "Besides, in the present
+case, the thing was impossible, for this same opinion is of more
+recent standing than the Breviary. You are not a good chronologist,
+friend. But, not to wander from the point, let me request your
+attention to the following passage, cited by Diana from Gaspar
+Hurtado (De Sub. Pecc., diff. 9; Diana, p. 5; tr. 14, r. 99), one
+of Escobar's four-and-twenty fathers: 'An incumbent may, without
+any mortal sin, desire the decease of a life-renter on his
+benefice, and a son that of his father, and rejoice when it
+happens; provided always it is for the sake of the profit that is
+to accrue from the event, and not from personal aversion.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Good," cried I. "That is certainly a very happy hit, and I can
+easily see that the doctrine admits of a wide application. But yet
+there are certain cases, the solution of which, though of great
+importance for gentlemen, might present still greater
+difficulties."</p>
+
+<p>"Propose such, if you please, that we may see," said the monk.</p>
+
+<p>"Show me, with all your directing of the intention," returned I,
+"that it is allowable to fight a duel."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Our great Hurtado de Mendoza," said the father, "will satisfy you
+on that point in a twinkling. 'If a gentleman,' says he, in a
+passage cited by Diana, 'who is challenged to fight a duel, is well
+known to have no religion, and if the vices to which he is openly
+and unscrupulously addicted, are such as would lead people to
+conclude, in the event of his refusing to fight, that he is
+actuated, not by the fear of God, but by cowardice, and induce them
+to say of him that he was a <i>hen</i>, and not a man&mdash;<i>gallina, et non
+vir</i>; in that case he may, to save his honor, appear at the
+appointed spot&mdash;not, indeed, with the express intention of fighting
+a duel, but merely with that of defending himself, should the
+person who challenged him come there unjustly to attack him. His
+action in this case, viewed by itself, will be perfectly
+indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one's stepping into a
+field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a person, and
+defending one's self in the event of being attacked? And thus the
+gentleman is guilty of no sin whatever; for in fact, it cannot be
+called accepting a challenge at all, his intention being directed
+to other circumstances, and the acceptance of a challenge
+consisting in an express intention to fight, which we are supposing
+the gentleman never had.'" </p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I have been asked why I employed a pleasant, jocose, and diverting
+style. I reply... I thought it a duty to write so as to be
+comprehended by women and men of the world, that they might know
+the danger of their maxims and propositions which were then
+universally propagated.... I have been asked, lastly, if I myself
+read all the books which I quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so,
+I must have passed a great part of my life in reading very bad
+books; but I read Escobar twice through, and I employed some of my
+friends in reading the others. But I did not make use of a single
+passage without having myself read it in the book from which it is
+cited, without having examined the subject of which it treats, and
+without having read what went before and followed, so that I might
+run no risk of quoting an objection as an answer, which would have
+been blameworthy and unfair. </p></div>
+
+<p>Of the wit of the "Provincial Letters," their wit and their
+controversial effectiveness, the specimens given will have afforded
+readers some approximate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span> idea. We must deny 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: "Moli&egrave;re'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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;old wrapping, for example, or margin
+of letter,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span> 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 "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. Faug&egrave;re 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 Faug&egrave;re, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Our first extract is a passage in which the writer supposes a sceptic of
+the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This sceptic represents his
+own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is,
+nor what I am myself. I am in a frightful ignorance of all things.
+I do not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is,
+and that very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which
+reflects upon every thing and upon itself, and is no better
+acquainted with itself than with any thing else. I see these
+appalling spaces of the universe which enclose me, and I find
+myself tethered in one corner of this immense expansion without
+knowing why I am stationed in this place rather than in another, or
+why this moment of time which is given me to live is assigned me at
+this point rather than at another of the whole eternity that has
+preceded me, and of that which is to follow me.</p>
+
+<p>'I see nothing but infinities on every side, which enclose me like
+an atom, and like a shadow which endures but for an instant, and
+returns no more.</p>
+
+<p>'All that I know, is that I am soon to die; but what I am most
+ignorant of, is that very death which I am unable to avoid.</p>
+
+<p>'As I know not whence I came, so I know not whither I go; and I
+know only, that in leaving this world I fall forever either into
+nothingness or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing
+which of these two conditions is to be eternally my lot. Such is my
+state,&mdash;full of misery, of weakness, and of uncertainty.</p>
+
+<p>'And from all this I conclude, that I ought to pass all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> days
+of my life without a thought of trying to learn what is to befall
+me hereafter. Perhaps in my doubts I might find some enlightenment;
+but I am unwilling to take the trouble, or go a single step in
+search of it; and, treating with contempt those who perplex
+themselves with such solicitude, my purpose is to go forward
+without forethought and without fear to try the great event, and
+passively to approach death in uncertainty of the eternity of my
+future condition.'</p>
+
+<p>Who would desire to have for a friend a man who discourses in this
+manner? Who would select such a one for the confidant of his
+affairs? Who would have recourse to such a one in his afflictions?
+And, in fine, for what use of life could such a man be destined? </p></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking
+reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to
+crush him. An exhalation, a drop of water, suffices to kill him.
+But were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble
+than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and
+knows the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe
+knows nothing of it.</p>
+
+<p>Our whole dignity consists, then, in thought. </p></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>What a sudden, almost ludicrous, reduction in scale, the greatness of
+C&aelig;sar, 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 C&aelig;sar, when he began fighting for universal empire, was fifty-one
+years of age:)&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>C&aelig;sar was too old, it seems to me, to amuse himself with conquering
+the world. This amusement was well enough for Augustus or
+Alexander; they were young people, whom it is difficult to stop;
+but C&aelig;sar ought to have been more mature. </p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The following sentence might be a Maxim of La Rochefoucauld. Pascal was,
+no doubt, a debtor to him as well as to Montaigne:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I lay it down as a fact, that, if all men knew what others say of
+them, there would not be four friends in the world. </p></div>
+
+<p>Here is one of the most current of Pascal's sayings:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go. </p></div>
+
+<p>The following "Thought" condenses the substance of the book proposed,
+into three short sentences:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The knowledge of God without that of our misery produces pride. The
+knowledge of our misery without that of God gives despair. The
+knowledge of Jesus Christ is intermediate, because therein we find
+God and our misery. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Console thyself; thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found
+me.</p>
+
+<p>I thought on thee in my agony; such drops of blood I shed for thee. </p></div>
+
+<p>It is austerity again, but not unjust austerity, that speaks as
+follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Religion is a thing so great that those who would not take the
+pains to seek it if it is obscure, should be deprived of it. What
+do they complain of, then, if it is such that they could find it by
+seeking it? </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;unnecessary
+sorrows, sorrows, too, that bore a double edge, hurting not only him,
+but also his kindred,&mdash;in practising, 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.</p>
+
+<p>In French history,&mdash;we may say, in the history of the world,&mdash;if there
+are few brighter, there also are few purer, fames than the fame of
+Pascal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">MADAME DE S&Eacute;VIGN&Eacute;.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1626-1696.</p>
+
+
+<p>Of Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;, 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&mdash;letters. For Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;'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.</p>
+
+<p>Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;'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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> de S&eacute;vign&eacute; became, without her ever aiming at such a result, or
+probably ever thinking of it, one of the classics of the French
+language.</p>
+
+<p>Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; 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&mdash;her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but
+twenty-five years old, and she lived to be seventy&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Beautiful, and, if not brilliantly beautiful, at least brilliantly
+witty, Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; was virtuous&mdash;in that chief sense of feminine
+virtue&mdash;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&mdash;her own junior by a dozen years&mdash;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,&mdash;we mean Count Bussy,&mdash;says, in a scurrilous work of his, that
+Ma<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>dame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; remarked, on returning to her seat after her
+dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and
+would certainly obscure the lustre 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 S&eacute;vign&eacute; 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 and 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.</p>
+
+<p>We owe it to our readers (and to Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; 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,&mdash;a daughter who, by the way, seems very
+languidly to have responded to such demonstrations:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">The Rocks</span>, Sunday, June 28, 1671.</p>
+
+<p>You have amply made up to me my late losses; I have received two
+letters from you which have filled me with transports of joy. The
+pleasure I take in reading them is beyond all imagination. If I
+have in any way contributed to the improvement of your style I did
+it in the thought that I was laboring for the pleasure of others,
+not for my own. But Providence, who has seen fit to separate us so
+often, and to place us at such immense distances from each other,
+has repaid me a little for the privation in the charms of your
+correspondence, and still more in the satisfaction you express in
+your situation, and the beauty of your castle; you represent it to
+me with an air of grandeur and magnificence that enchants me. I
+once saw a similar account of it by the first Madame de Grignan;
+but I little thought at that time, that all these beauties were one
+day to be at your command. I am very much obliged to you for having
+given me so particular an account of it. If I could be tired in
+reading your letters, it would not only betray a very bad taste in
+me, but would likewise show that I could have very little love or
+friendship for you. Divest yourself of the dislike you have taken
+to circumstantial details. I have often told you, and you ought
+yourself to feel the truth of this remark, that they are as dear to
+us from those we love, as they are tedious and disagreeable from
+others. If they are displeasing to us, it is only from the
+indifference we feel for those who write them. Admitting this
+observation to be true, I leave you to judge what pleasure yours
+afford me. It is a fine thing, truly, to play the great lady, as
+you do at present. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 S&eacute;vign&eacute; makes of her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> 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 S&eacute;vign&eacute; idealized her absent daughter, and literally
+"loved but only her." We need not wholly admire such maternal affection.
+But we should not criticise it too severely.</p>
+
+<p>We choose next a marvellously vivid "instantaneous view," in words, of a
+court afternoon and evening at Versailles. This letter, too, is
+addressed to the daughter&mdash;Madame de Grignan, by her married name. It
+bears date, "Paris, Wednesday, 29th July." The year is 1676, and the
+writer is just fifty:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I was at Versailles last Saturday with the Villarses.... At three
+the king, the queen, Monsieur [eldest brother to the king], Madame
+[that brother's wife], Mademoiselle [that brother's eldest
+unmarried daughter], and every thing else which is royal, together
+with Madame de Montespan [the celebrated mistress of the king] and
+train, and all the courtiers, and all the ladies,&mdash;all, in short,
+which constitutes the court of France, is assembled in the
+beautiful apartment of the king's, which you remember. All is
+furnished divinely, all is magnificent. Such a thing as heat is
+unknown; you pass from one place to another without the slightest
+pressure. A game at <i>reversis</i> [the description is of a gambling
+scene, in which Dangeau figures as a cool and skilful gamester]
+gives the company a form and a settlement. The king and Madame de
+Montespan keep a bank together; different tables are occupied by
+Monsieur, the queen, and Madame de Soubise, Dangeau and party,
+Langl&eacute;e and party. Everywhere you see heaps of louis d'ors; they
+have no other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> counters. I saw Dangeau play, and thought what fools
+we all were beside him. He dreams of nothing but what concerns the
+game; he wins where others lose; he neglects nothing, profits by
+every thing, never has his attention diverted; in short, his
+science bids defiance to chance. Two hundred thousand francs in ten
+days, a hundred thousand crowns in a month, these are the pretty
+memorandums he puts down in his pocket-book. He was kind enough to
+say that I was partners with him, so that I got an excellent seat.
+I made my obeisance to the king, as you told me; and he returned it
+as if I had been young and handsome.... The duke said a thousand
+kind things without minding a word he uttered. Marshal de Lorges
+attacked me in the name of the Chevalier de Grignan; in short,
+<i>tutti quanti</i> [the whole company]. You know what it is to get a
+word from everybody you meet. Madame de Montespan talked to me of
+Bourbon, and asked me how I liked Vichi, and whether the place did
+me good. She said that Bourbon, instead of curing a pain in one of
+her knees, injured both.... Her size is reduced by a good half, and
+yet her complexion, her eyes, and her lips, are as fine as ever.
+She was dressed all in French point, her hair in a thousand
+ringlets, the two side ones hanging low on her cheeks, black
+ribbons on her head, pearls (the same that belonged to Madame de
+l'H&ocirc;pital), the loveliest diamond earrings, three or four
+bodkins&mdash;nothing else on the head; in short, a triumphant beauty,
+worthy the admiration of all the foreign ambassadors. She was
+accused of preventing the whole French nation from seeing the king;
+she has restored him, you see, to their eyes; and you cannot
+conceive the joy it has given all the world, and the splendor it
+has thrown upon the court. This charming confusion, without
+confusion, of all which is the most select, continues from three
+till six. If couriers arrive, the king retires a moment to read the
+despatches, and returns. There is always some music going on, to
+which he listens, and which has an excellent effect. He talks with
+such of the ladies as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> are accustomed to enjoy that honor.... At
+six the carriages are at the door. The king is in one of them with
+Madame de Montespan, Monsieur and Madame de Thianges, and honest
+d'Heudicourt in a fool's paradise on the stool. You know how these
+open carriages are made; they do not sit face to face, but all
+looking the same way. The queen occupies another with the princess;
+and the rest come flocking after, as it may happen. There are then
+gondolas on the canal, and music; and at ten they come back, and
+then there is a play; and twelve strikes, and they go to supper;
+and thus rolls round the Saturday. If I were to tell you how often
+you were asked after, how many questions were put to me without
+waiting for answers, how often I neglected to answer, how little
+they cared, and how much less I did, you would see the <i>iniqua
+corte</i> [wicked court] before you in all its perfection. However, it
+never was so pleasant before, and everybody wishes it may last. </p></div>
+
+<p>There is your picture. Picture, pure and simple, it is&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Friday</span>, 1st Oct. (1677).</p>
+
+<p>Yesterday evening at Cone, we descended into a veritable hell, the
+true forges of Vulcan. Eight or ten Cyclops were at work, forging,
+not arms for &AElig;neas, but anchors for ships. You never saw strokes
+redoubled so justly, nor with so admirable a cadence. We stood in
+the middle of four furnaces; and the demons came passing about us,
+all melting in sweat, with pale faces, wild-staring eyes, savage
+mustaches, and hair long and black,&mdash;a sight enough to frighten
+less well-bred folks than ourselves. As for me, I could not
+comprehend the possibility of refusing any thing which these
+gentlemen, in their hell, might have chosen to exact. We got out at
+last, by the help of a shower of silver, with which we took care to
+refresh their souls, and facilitate our exit. </p></div>
+
+<p>Once more:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Paris</span>, 29th November (1679).</p>
+
+<p>I have been to the wedding of Madame de Louvois. How shall I
+describe it? Magnificence, illuminations, all France, dresses all
+gold and brocade, jewels, braziers full of fire, and stands full of
+flowers, confusions of carriages, cries out of doors, lighted
+torches, pushings back, people run over; in short, a whirlwind, a
+distraction; questions without answers, compliments without knowing
+what is said, civilities without knowing who is spoken to, feet
+entangled in trains. From the midst of all this, issue inquiries
+after your health, which not being answered as quick as lightning,
+the inquirers pass on, contented to remain in the state of
+ignorance and indifference in which they [the inquiries] were made.
+O vanity of vanities! Pretty little De Mouchy has had the
+small-pox. O vanity, et c&aelig;tera! </p></div>
+
+<p>Yet again. The gay writer has been sobered, perhaps hurt, by a friend's
+frankly writing to her, "You are old." To her daughter:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>So you were struck with the expression of Madame de la Fayette,
+blended with so much friendship. 'Twas a truth, I own, which I
+ought to have borne in mind; and yet I must confess it astonished
+me, for I do not yet perceive in myself any such decay.
+Nevertheless, I cannot help making many reflections and
+calculations, and I find the conditions of life hard enough. It
+seems to me that I have been dragged, against my will, to the fatal
+period when old age must be endured; I see it; I have come to it;
+and I would fain, if I could help it, not go any farther; not
+advance a step more in the road of infirmities, of pains, of losses
+of memory, of <i>disfigurements</i> ready to do me outrage; and I hear a
+voice which says, "You must go on in spite of yourself; or, if you
+will not go on, you must die;" and this is another extremity from
+which nature revolts. Such is the lot, however, of all who advance
+beyond middle life. What is their resource? To think of the will of
+God and of universal law, and so restore reason to its place, and
+be patient. Be you, then, patient accordingly, my dear child, and
+let not your affection soften into such tears as reason must
+condemn. </p></div>
+
+<p>She dates a letter, and recalls that the day was the anniversary of an
+event in her life:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Paris</span>, Friday, Feb. 5, 1672.</p>
+
+<p>This day thousand years I was married. </p></div>
+
+<p>Here is a passage with power in it. The great war minister of Louis has
+died. Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; was now sixty-five years old. The letter is to
+her cousin Coulanges:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I am so astonished at the news of the sudden death of M. de
+Louvois, that I am at a loss how to speak of it. Dead, however, he
+is, this great minister, this potent being, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span> occupied so great
+a place; whose me (<i>le moi</i>), as M. Nicole says, had so wide a
+dominion; who was the centre of so many orbs. What affairs had he
+not to manage! what designs, what projects, what secrets! what
+interests to unravel, what wars to undertake, what intrigues, what
+noble games at chess to play and to direct! Ah! my God, grant me a
+little time; I want to give check to the Duke of Savoy&mdash;checkmate
+to the Prince of Orange. No, no, you shall not have a moment, not a
+single moment. Are events like these to be talked of? Not they. We
+must reflect upon them in our closets. </p></div>
+
+<p>A glimpse of Bourdaloue:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Ah, that Bourdaloue! his sermon on the Passion was, they say, the
+most perfect thing of the kind that can be imagined; it was the
+same he preached last year, but revised and altered with the
+assistance of some of his friends, that it might be wholly
+inimitable. How can one love God, if one never hears him properly
+spoken of? You must really possess a greater portion of grace than
+others. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Paris</span>, Sunday, April 26, 1671.</p>
+
+<p>I have just learned from Moreuil, of what passed at Chantilly with
+regard to poor Vatel. I wrote to you last Friday that he had
+stabbed himself&mdash;these are the particulars of the affair: The king
+arrived there on Thursday night; the walk, and the collation, which
+was served in a place set apart for the purpose, and strewed with
+jonquils, were just as they should be. Supper was served; but there
+was no roast meat at one or two of the tables, on account of
+Vatel's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span> having been obliged to provide several dinners more than
+were expected. This affected his spirits; and he was heard to say
+several times, "I have lost my honor! I cannot bear this disgrace!"
+"My head is quite bewildered," said he to Gourville. "I have not
+had a wink of sleep these twelve nights; I wish you would assist me
+in giving orders." Gourville did all he could to comfort and assist
+him, but the failure of the roast meat (which, however, did not
+happen at the king's table, but at some of the other twenty-five)
+was always uppermost with him. Gourville mentioned it to the prince
+[Cond&eacute;, the great Cond&eacute;, the king's host], who went directly to
+Vatel's apartment, and said to him, "Every thing is extremely well
+conducted, Vatel; nothing could be more admirable than his
+Majesty's supper." "Your highness's goodness," replied he,
+"overwhelms me; I am sensible that there was a deficiency of roast
+meat at two tables." "Not at all," said the prince; "do not perplex
+yourself, and all will go well." Midnight came; the fireworks did
+not succeed; they were covered with a thick cloud; they cost
+sixteen thousand francs. At four o'clock in the morning Vatel went
+round and found everybody asleep; he met one of the
+under-purveyors, who was just come in with only two loads of fish.
+"What!" said he, "is this all?" "Yes, sir," said the man, not
+knowing that Vatel had despatched other people to all the seaports
+around. Vatel waited for some time; the other purveyors did not
+arrive; his head grew distracted; he thought there was no more fish
+to be had. He flew to Gourville: "Sir," said he, "I cannot outlive
+this disgrace." Gourville laughed at him. Vatel, however, went to
+his apartment, and setting the hilt of his sword against the door,
+after two ineffectual attempts, succeeded, in the third, in forcing
+his sword through his heart. At that instant the couriers arrived
+with the fish; Vatel was inquired after to distribute it. They ran
+to his apartment, knocked at the door, but received no answer; upon
+which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> they broke it open, and found him weltering in his blood. A
+messenger was immediately despatched to acquaint the prince with
+what had happened, who was like a man in despair. The Duke wept,
+<i>for his Burgundy journey depended upon Vatel</i>. </p></div>
+
+<p>The italics here are our own. We felt that we must use them.</p>
+
+<p>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 S&eacute;vign&eacute;
+allows herself to go in sympathy. Her heart never bleeds very
+freely&mdash;for anybody except her daughter. Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;'s heart,
+indeed, we grieve to fear, was somewhat hard.</p>
+
+<p>In another letter, after a long strain as worldly as any one could wish
+to see, this lively woman thus touches, with a sincerity as
+unquestionable as the levity is, on the point of personal religion:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But, my dear child, the greatest inclination I have at present is
+to be a little religious. I plague La Mousse about it every day. I
+belong neither to God nor to the devil. I am quite weary of such a
+situation; though, between you and me, I look upon it as the most
+natural one in the world. I am not the devil's, because I fear God,
+and have at the bottom a principle of religion; then, on the other
+hand, I am not properly God's, because his law appears hard and
+irksome to me, and I cannot bring myself to acts of self-denial; so
+that altogether I am one of those called lukewarm Christians, the
+great number of which does not in the least surprise me, for I
+perfectly understand their sentiments, and the reasons that
+influence them. However,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> we are told that this is a state highly
+displeasing to God; if so, we must get out of it. Alas! this is the
+difficulty. Was ever any thing so mad as I am, to be thus eternally
+pestering you with my rhapsodies? </p></div>
+
+<p>Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; involuntarily becomes a maxim-maker:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The other day I made a maxim off-hand, without once thinking of it;
+and I liked it so well that I fancied I had taken it out of M. de
+la Rochefoucauld's. Pray tell me whether it is so or not, for in
+that case my memory is more to be praised than my judgment. I said,
+with all the ease in the world, that "ingratitude begets reproach,
+as acknowledgment begets new favors." Pray, where did this come
+from? Have I read it? Did I dream it? Is it my own idea? Nothing
+can be truer than the thing itself, nor than that I am totally
+ignorant how I came by it. I found it properly arranged in my
+brain, and at the end of my tongue. </p></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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 &aelig;sthetic stomach of her
+time. It is queer to have Rabelais rubbing cheek and jowl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> 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 S&eacute;vign&eacute;. By the way, she and her friends, first and
+last, "die" a thousand jolly deaths "with laughing."</p>
+
+<p>A contemporary allusion to "Tartuffe," with more French manners
+implied:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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,&mdash;"Yes, brother, I am a wretch, a vessel of
+iniquity." </p></div>
+
+<p>M. de La Rochefoucauld appears often by name in the letters. Here he
+appears anonymously by his effect:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Warm affections are never tranquil"; a <i>maxim</i>. </p></div>
+
+<p>Not a very sapid bit of gnomic wisdom, certainly. We must immediately
+make up to our readers, on Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;'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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way
+of being delivered from it but by ingratitude.</p>
+
+<p>Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would
+appear to be. The world is not unjust long. </p></div>
+
+<p>Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; makes a confession, which will comfort readers who may
+have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I send you M. de Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," revised and corrected,
+with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I
+can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others that,
+to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. God knows how
+it will be with you. </p></div>
+
+<p>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,"&mdash;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,&mdash;the date of
+her letter is March 16, 1672, and during the Lent of that year
+Bourdaloue preached at Versailles,&mdash;when she wrote sombrely as
+follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>out my own consent, and know I must leave
+it again; this distracts me, for how shall I leave it? In what
+manner? By what door? At what time? In what disposition? Am I to
+suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a
+state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some
+sudden accident? How shall I stand with God? What shall I have to
+offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall
+I have no other sentiment but that of fear? What have I to hope? Am
+I worthy of heaven? Or have I deserved the torments of hell?
+Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater
+madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet
+what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the
+foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently
+buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so
+dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it, than I
+do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me,
+then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it; but, if I had
+been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse's arms;
+it would have spared me many vexations, and would have insured
+heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something
+else. </p></div>
+
+<p>A memorable sarcasm saved for us by Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;, at the very close
+of one of her letters:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Guillenagues said yesterday that Pelisson abused the privilege men
+have of being ugly. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Archbishop of Rheims, as he returned yesterday from St.
+Germain, met with a curious adventure. He drove at his usual rate,
+like a whirlwind. If he thinks himself a great man, his servants
+think him still greater. They passed through Nanterre, when they
+met a man on horseback, and in an insolent tone bid him clear the
+way. The poor man used his utmost endeavors to avoid the danger
+that threatened him, but his horse proved unmanageable. To make
+short of it, the coach-and-six turned them both topsy-turvy; but at
+the same time the coach, too, was completely overturned. In an
+instant the horse and the man, instead of amusing themselves with
+having their limbs broken, rose almost miraculously; the man
+remounted, and galloped away, and is galloping still, for aught I
+know; while the servants, the archbishop's coachman, and the
+archbishop himself at the head of them, cried out, "Stop that
+villain, stop him! thrash him soundly!" The rage of the archbishop
+was so great, that afterward, in relating the adventure, he said,
+if he could have caught the rascal, he would have broke all his
+bones, and cut off both his ears. </p></div>
+
+<p>If such things were done by the aristocracy&mdash;and the spiritual
+aristocracy at that!&mdash;in the green tree, what might not be expected in
+the dry? The writer makes no comment&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 S&eacute;vign&eacute; is. They have only not seen fully all that she
+is. And that they would not see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> short of reading her letters entire.
+Horace Walpole aspired to do in English for his own time something like
+what Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Mary Wortley Montagu must, of course, also be named, as, by her
+sex, her social position, her talent, and the devotion of her talent, an
+English analogue to Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;. 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="X" id="X"></a>X.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">CORNEILLE.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1606-1684.</p>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Drama is everywhere and always, and this from the nature of things, a
+highly conventional literary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+&AElig;schylus;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span> 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 &AElig;schylus 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 Bruy&egrave;re's celebrated comparison of the two
+Frenchmen&mdash;made, of course, before Voltaire&mdash;yoked them, Corneille with
+Sophocles, Racine with Euripides.</p>
+
+<p>It was perhaps not without its influence on the style of Corneille, that
+a youthful labor of his in authorship was to translate, wholly or
+partially, the "Pharsalia" of Lucan. Corneille always retained his
+fondness for Lucan. This taste on his part, and the rhymed Alexandrines
+in which he wrote tragedy, may together help account for the
+hyper-heroic style which is Corneille's great fault. A lady criticised
+his tragedy, "The Death of Pompey," by saying: "Very fine, but too many
+heroes in it." Corneille's tragedies generally have, if not too many
+heroes, at least too much hero, in them. Concerning the historian
+Gibbon's habitual pomp of expression, it was once wittily said that
+nobody could possibly tell the truth in such a style as that. It would
+be equally near the mark if we should say of Corneille's chosen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span> mould
+of verse, that nobody could possibly be simple and natural in that.
+Moli&egrave;re's comedy, however, would almost confute us.</p>
+
+<p>Pierre Corneille was born in Rouen. He studied law, and he was admitted
+to practice as an advocate, like Moli&egrave;re; but, like Moli&egrave;re, he heard
+and he heeded an inward voice summoning him away from the bar to the
+stage. Corneille did not, however, like Moli&egrave;re, 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.</p>
+
+<p>But this serious genius began dramatic composition with writing comedy.
+He made several experiments in this kind with no commanding success; but
+at thirty he wrote the tragedy of "The Cid," and instantly became
+famous. His subsequent plays were chiefly on classical subjects. The
+subject of "The Cid" was drawn from Spanish literature. This was
+emphatically what has been called an "epoch-making" production.
+Richelieu's "Academy," at the instigation, indeed almost under the
+dictation, of Richelieu, who was jealous of Corneille, tried to write it
+down. They succeeded about as Balaam succeeded in prophesying against
+Israel. "The Cid" triumphed over them, and over the great minister.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"The great Corneille"&mdash;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&mdash;was an illustrious figure
+at the H&ocirc;tel de Rambouillet, that focus of the best literary criticism
+in France. Corneille reading a play of his to the <i>coterie</i> 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 H&ocirc;tel de Rambouillet, and
+that awful court<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span> decided against the play. Corneille, like Michel
+Angelo, had to a good degree the courage of his own productions; but, in
+the face of adverse decision so august on his work, he needed
+encouragement, which happily he did not fail to receive, before he would
+allow his "Polyeuctes" to be represented. The theatre crowned it with
+the laurels of victory. It thus fell to Corneille to triumph
+successively, single-handed, over two great adversary courts of critical
+appreciation,&mdash;the Academy of Richelieu and the not less formidable
+H&ocirc;tel de Rambouillet.</p>
+
+<p>The objection raised by the H&ocirc;tel 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,&mdash;on that
+point we need not judge the poet,&mdash;Corneille used, before putting them
+on the stage, to take his plays to the "Church,"&mdash;that is, to the
+priestly hierarchy who constituted the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> "Church,"&mdash;that they might be
+authoritatively judged as to their possible influence on the cause of
+Christian truth.</p>
+
+<p>In the "Polyeuctes," the motive is religion. Polyeuctes is an historic
+or traditional saint of the Roman-Catholic church. His conversion from
+paganism is the theme of the play. Polyeuctes has a friend Nearchus who
+is already a Christian convert, and who labors earnestly to make
+Polyeuctes a proselyte to the faith. Polyeuctes has previously married a
+noble Roman lady, daughter of Felix, governor of Armenia, in which
+province the action of the story occurs. (The persecuting Emperor Decius
+is on the throne of the Roman world.) Paulina is the daughter's name.
+Paulina married Polyeuctes against her own choice, for she loved Roman
+Severus better. Her father had put his will upon her, and Paulina had
+filially obeyed in marrying Polyeuctes. Such are the relations of the
+different persons of the drama. It will be seen that there is ample room
+for the play of elevated and tragic passions. Paulina, in fact, is the
+lofty, the impossible, ideal of wifely and daughterly truth and
+devotion. Pagan though she is, she is pathetically constant, both to the
+husband that was forced upon her, and to the father that did the
+forcing; while still she loves, and cannot but love, the man whom, in
+spite of her love for him, she, with an act like prolonged suicide,
+stoically separates from her torn and bleeding heart.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;though of this Felix will not hear till later.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>'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.'</p>
+
+<p>Polyeuctes in prison hears that his Paulina is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 gods; sooner would I have been reduced
+to dust, sooner would I have been reduced to ashes,  than&mdash;</p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a French critic would be likely to
+say, the very noblest in tragedy. She says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 sturdy
+independence that animated Johnson in annotating Shakspeare, 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. The Greeks were frigid declaimers in
+comparison with this passage of Corneille."] Severus, learn to know
+Paulina all in all.</p>
+
+<p>My Polyeuctes touches on his last hour; he has but a moment to
+live; you are the cause of this, though innocently so. I know not
+if your heart, yielding to your desires, may have dared build any
+hope on his destruction; but know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> that there is no death so cruel
+that to it with firm brow I would not bend my steps, that there are
+in hell no horrors that I would not endure, rather than soil a
+glory so pure, rather than espouse, after his sad fate, a man that
+was in any wise the cause of his death; and if you suppose me of a
+heart so little sound, the love which I had for you would all turn
+to hate. You are generous; be so even to the end. My father is in a
+state to yield every thing to you; he fears you; and I further
+hazard this saying, that, if he destroys my husband, it is to you
+that he sacrifices him. Save this unhappy man, use your influence
+in his favor, exert yourself to become his support. I know that
+this is much that I ask; but the greater the effort, the greater
+the glory from it. To preserve a rival of whom you are jealous,
+that is a trait of virtue which appertains only to you. And if your
+renown is not motive sufficient, it is much that a woman once so
+well beloved, and the love of whom perhaps is still capable of
+touching you, will owe to your great heart the dearest possession
+that she owns; remember, in short, that you are Severus. Adieu.
+Decide with yourself alone what you ought to do; if you are not
+such as I dare hope that you are, then, in order that I may
+continue to esteem you, I wish not to know it. </p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span> rather than tragedy,"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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):&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>That advice might be good for some common soul. Though he [the
+Emperor Decius] holds in his hands my life and my fortune, I am yet
+Severus; and all that mighty power is powerless over my glory, and
+powerless over my duty. Here honor compels me, and I will satisfy
+it; whether fate afterward show itself propitious or adverse,
+perishing glorious I shall perish content.</p>
+
+<p>I will tell thee further, but under confidence, the sect of
+Christians is not what it is thought to be. They are hated, why I
+know not; and I see Decius unjust only in this regard. From
+curiosity I have sought to become acquainted with them. They are
+regarded as sorcerers taught from hell; and, in this supposition,
+the punishment of death is visited on secret mysteries which we do
+not understand. But Eleusinian Ceres and the Good Goddess have
+their secrets, like those at Rome and in Greece; still we freely
+tolerate everywhere, their god alone excepted, every kind of god;
+all the monsters of Egypt have their temples in Rome;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span> our fathers,
+at their will, made a god of a man; and, their blood in our veins
+preserving their errors, we fill heaven with all our emperors; but,
+to speak without disguise of deifications so numerous, the effect
+is very doubtful of such metamorphoses.</p>
+
+<p>Christians have but one God, absolute master of all, whose mere
+will does whatever he resolves; but, if I may venture to say what
+seems to me true, our gods very often agree ill together; and,
+though their wrath crush me before your eyes, we have a good many
+of them for them to be true gods. Finally, among the Christians,
+morals are pure, vices are hated, virtues flourish; they offer
+prayers on behalf of us who persecute them; and, during all the
+time since we have tormented them, have they ever been seen
+mutinous? Have they ever been seen rebellious? Have our princes
+ever had more faithful soldiers? Fierce in war, they submit
+themselves to our executioners; and, lions in combat, they die like
+lambs. I pity them too much not to defend them. Come, let us find
+Felix; let us commune with his son-in-law; and let us thus, with
+one single action, gratify at once Paulina, and my glory, and my
+compassion. </p></div>
+
+<p>Such is the high heroic style in which pagan Severus resolves and
+speaks. And thus the fourth act ends.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Felix summons Polyeuctes to an interview, and adjures him to be a
+prudent man. Felix at length says, "Adore the 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: "<i>Renounce life</i> does not advance upon the meaning of <i>die</i>;
+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,&mdash;justly, we are
+bound to say,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>The tragedy thus comes near ending happily enough to be called a comedy.</p>
+
+<p>Such as the foregoing exhibits him, is Corneille, the father of French
+tragedy, 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. Moli&egrave;re is reported to have said that
+Corneille had a familiar, or a fairy, that came to him at times, and
+enabled him to write sublimely; but that, when the poet was left to
+himself, he could write as poorly as another man.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Besides his plays, there is a translation in verse by him of the
+"Imitation of Christ;" there are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> metrical versions of a considerable
+number of the Psalms; there are odes, madrigals, sonnets, stanzas,
+addresses to the king. Then there are discourses in prose on dramatic
+poetry, on tragedy, and on the three unities. Add to these, elaborate
+appreciations by himself of a considerable number of his own plays,
+prefaces, epistles, arguments to his pieces, and you have, what with the
+notes, the introductions, the eulogies, and other such things that the
+faithful French editor knows so well how to accumulate, matter enough of
+Corneille to swell out eleven, or, in one edition,&mdash;that issued under
+Napoleon as First Consul,&mdash;even twelve, handsome volumes of his works.</p>
+
+<p>Corneille and Bossuet together constitute a kind of rank by themselves
+among the <i>Dii Majores</i> of the French literary Olympus.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">RACINE.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1639-1699.</p>
+
+
+<p>Jean Racine was Pierre Corneille reduced to rule. The younger was to the
+elder somewhat as Sophocles or Euripides was to &AElig;schylus, as Virgil was
+to Lucretius, as Pope was to Dryden. Nature was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span> more in Corneille, art
+was more in Racine. Corneille was a pathfinder in literature. He led the
+way, even for Moli&egrave;re, 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,&mdash;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
+friend 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.</p>
+
+<p>It will always be a matter of individual taste, and of 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> the place of ascendency once accorded to him over all. His
+case repeated the fortune of &AElig;schylus 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 theatre, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The "Theba&iuml;d" was Racine's first tragedy,&mdash;at least his first that
+attained to the honor of being represented. Moli&egrave;re brought it out in
+his theatre, the Palais Royal. His second tragedy, the "Alexander the
+Great," was also put into the hands of Moli&egrave;re.</p>
+
+<p>This latter play the author took to 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 French tragedy. "You have undoubted
+talent for poetry&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The "Andromache" followed the "Alexander," and then Racine did try his
+hand in another poetical line; for he wrote a comedy, his only one, "The
+Suitors," as is loosely translated "Les Plaideurs," a title which has a
+legal, and not an amorous, meaning. This play, after it had at first
+failed, Louis XIV. laughed into court favor. It became thenceforward a
+great success. It still keeps its place on the stage. It is, however, a
+farce, rather than a comedy.</p>
+
+<p>We pass over now one or two of the subsequent productions of Racine, to
+mention next a play of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span> his which had a singular history. It was a 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,&mdash;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 in "The Suitors," hurt the old
+man's pride. That pride suffered a worse hurt still. The chief Parisian
+theatre, completely occupied with the works of his victorious rival,
+rejected tragedies offered by Corneille.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; was of them&mdash;stood by their "old
+admiration," and were true to Corneille.</p>
+
+<p>A memorable mortification and chagrin for our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span> poet was now prepared by
+his enemies&mdash;he seems never to have lacked enemies&mdash;with lavish and
+elaborate malice. Racine had produced a play from Euripides, the
+"Ph&aelig;dra," 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 theatre
+were all bought by his enemies, and left solidly vacant. The best seats
+at Pradon's theatre 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 theatre, take a less charitable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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,&mdash;but not quite. Young Joash escaped, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> 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 Athaliah,
+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 "Athaliah," as in the "Esther," Racine
+introduced the feature of the chorus, a restoration which had all the
+effect of an innovation. The chorus in "Athaliah" 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 "Athaliah" is almost proof against
+technical criticism. It is acknowledged to be, after its kind, a nearly
+ideal product of art.</p>
+
+<p>There is a curious story about the fortune of this piece with the
+public, that will interest our readers. The first success of "Athaliah"
+was not great. In fact, it was almost a flat failure. But a company of
+wits, playing at forfeits somewhere in the country, severely sentenced
+one of their number to go by himself, and read the first act of
+"Athaliah." The victim went, and did not return. Sought at length, he
+was found just commencing a second perusal of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span> the play entire. He
+reported of it so enthusiastically, that he was asked to read it before
+the company, which he did, to their delight. This started a reaction in
+favor of the condemned play, which soon came to be counted the
+masterpiece of its author.</p>
+
+<p>First, in specimen of the choral feature of the drama, we content
+ourselves with giving a single chorus from the "Athaliah." 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 a 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, is the state of feeling represented in the
+present chorus. Salomith is the leading singer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="salomith" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3">
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Salomith.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Lord hath deigned to speak,<br />
+But what he to his prophet now hath shown&mdash;<br />
+Who unto us will make it clearly known?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Arms he himself to save us, poor and weak?<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Arms he himself to have us overthrown?</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">The whole Chorus.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>O promises! O threats! O mystery profound!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;What woe, what weal, are each in turn foretold?<br />
+How can so much of wrath be found<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;So much of love to enfold?</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">A Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Zion shall be no more; a cruel flame<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Will all her ornaments devour.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">A Second Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;God shelters Zion; she has shield and tower<br />
+In His eternal name.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">First Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>I see her splendor all from vision disappear.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Second Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>I see on every side her glory shine more clear.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">First Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Into a deep abyss is Zion sunk from sight.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Second Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Zion lifts up her brow amid celestial light.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">First Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>What dire despair!</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Second Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">What praise from every tongue!</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">First Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>What cries of grief!</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">Second Voice.</span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 8em;">What songs of triumph sung!</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">A Third Voice.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cease we to vex ourselves; our God, one day,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Will this great mystery make clear.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">All Three Voices.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Let us his wrath revere,<br />
+While on his love, no less, our hopes we stay.</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> asked his foster-mother,
+observed by him to be in tears:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>What pity touches you? Is it that in a holocaust to be this day
+offered, I, like Jephtha's daughter in other times, must pacify by
+my death the anger of the Lord? Alas, a son has nothing that does
+not belong to his father! </p></div>
+
+<p>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, 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Joash.</span> I feel myself ready, if he wishes it, to give to him my
+life.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Jehoiada.</span> You have often heard read the history of our kings. Do
+you remember, my son, what strict laws a king worthy of the crown
+ought to impose upon himself?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Joash.</span> A wise and good king, so hath God himself declared, puts not
+his reliance upon riches and gold; he fears the Lord his God, has
+ever before him his precepts, his laws, his judgments severe, and
+does not with unjust burdens overwhelm his brethren. </p></div>
+
+<p>F&eacute;nelon 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> been instilled into the heart of his
+royal pupil, the great king's grandson, by such a preceptor as F&eacute;nelon.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 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,&mdash;"O Galilean,
+thou hast conquered!" as follows:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">God of the Jews, 'tis thou that dost prevail!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Ay, it is Joash; all without avail</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Seek I to cheat myself with other thought:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">I know the wound my weapon on him wrought;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">I see his father Ahaziah's face;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Naught but brings back to me that hated race.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">David doth triumph, Ahab only fall,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Unpitying God, thou only hast done all!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">'Tis thou that flattering me to hope in vain</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">For easy vengeance, o'er and o'er again</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Hast with myself myself embroiled anew,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Now pangs of conscience rousing, not a few,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Now dazzling me with thy rich treasures rare,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Which I to burn or pillage did not dare.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Let him, then, reign, this son, thy care, thy toil,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And, so to signalize his new-got spoil,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Let him into my bosom plunge the knife,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">And take with filial hand his mother's life.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Hearken what wish for him she dying breathes&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Wish? nay, what hope, assured hope, bequeaths,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">That, disobedient, proud, rebellious, he,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Faithful to Ahab's blood received from me,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">To his grandfather, to his father, like,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Abhorrent heir of David, down may strike</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Thy worship and thy fane, avenger fell</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Of Athaliah, Ahab, Jezebel!</span><br />
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The interest of the piece, to the modern reader, is by no means equal to
+its fame. One reproaches<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span> 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 ourselves responsible for admiring, or, at any rate,
+for enjoying, according to the judgment of other races and of former
+generations. It is&mdash;so, with grave concurrence, we say&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span> an exile from the
+royal presence. The immediate occasion was one honorable rather than
+otherwise to the poet.</p>
+
+<p>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 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 F&eacute;nelon, will presently be
+shown to have had at about the same time a partly similar experience.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">BOSSUET: 1627-1704; BOURDALOUE: 1632-1704; MASSILLON: 1663-1742.</p>
+
+
+<p>We group three names in one title, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon, to
+represent the pulpit orators of France. There are other great names,&mdash;as
+Fl&eacute;chier, with Claude and Saurin, the last two, Protestants both,&mdash;but
+the names we choose are the greatest.</p>
+
+<p>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 pure and classic style, became at once, and permanently became, a
+part of French literature.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span> 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 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.</p>
+
+<p>Jacques B&eacute;nigne Bossuet was of good <i>bourgeois</i>, 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 H&ocirc;tel 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 Bruy&egrave;re 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bossuet and Louis XIV. were exactly suited to each other, in the mutual
+relation of subject and sovereign. Bossuet preached sincerely&mdash;as
+everybody knows Louis sincerely practised&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>In proceeding now to give, from the three 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span> bright color for the fancy, and, it must be added, not a
+great deal of melting warmth for the heart.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This princess was the last one left of the children of King Charles I.
+of England. Her mother's death&mdash;her mother was of the French house of
+Bourbon&mdash;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
+Bourdaloue, we succeeded in obtaining a printed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span> translation which we
+could modify to suit our purpose.) Bossuet:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was then reserved for my lot to pay this funereal tribute to the
+high and potent princess, Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans.
+She whom I had seen so attentive while I was discharging a like
+office for the queen her mother, was so soon after to be the
+subject of a similar discourse, and my sad voice was predestined to
+this melancholy service. O vanity! O nothingness! O mortals!
+ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago, would she have believed
+it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was
+shedding so many tears in this place, that she was so soon to
+assemble you here to deplore her own loss? O princess! the worthy
+object of the admiration of two great kingdoms, was it not enough
+that England should deplore your absence, without being yet further
+compelled to deplore your death? France, who with so much joy
+beheld you again, surrounded with a new brilliancy, had she not in
+reserve other pomps and other triumphs for you, returned from that
+famous voyage whence you had brought hither so much glory, and
+hopes so fair? "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Nothing is left
+for me to say but that; that is the only sentiment which, in
+presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well-grounded and so
+poignant, permits me to indulge. Nor have I explored the Holy
+Scriptures in order to find therein some text which I might apply
+to this princess; I have taken, without premeditation and without
+choice, the first expression presented to me by the Preacher, with
+whom vanity, although it has been so often named, is yet, to my
+mind, not named often enough to suit the purpose that I have in
+view. I wish, in a single misfortune, to lament all the calamities
+of the human race, and in a single death to exhibit the death and
+the nothingness of all human greatness. This text, which suits all
+the circumstances and all the occurrences of our life, becomes, by
+a special adapted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>ness, appropriate to my mournful theme; since
+never were the vanities of the earth either so clearly disclosed or
+so openly confounded. No, after what we have just seen, health is
+but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and
+pleasures are but a dangerous diversion. Every thing is vain within
+us, except the sincere acknowledgment made before God of our
+vanity, and the fixed judgment of the mind, leading us to despise
+all that we are.</p>
+
+<p>But did I speak the truth? Man, whom God made in his own image, is
+he but a shadow? That which Jesus Christ came from heaven to earth
+to seek, that which he deemed that he could, without degrading
+himself, ransom with his own blood, is that a mere nothing? Let us
+acknowledge our mistake; surely this sad spectacle of the vanity of
+things human was leading us astray, and public hope, baffled
+suddenly by the death of this princess, was urging us too far. It
+must not be permitted to man to despise himself entirely, lest he,
+supposing, in common with the wicked, that our life is but a game
+in which chance reigns, take his way without rule and without
+self-control, at the pleasure of his own blind wishes. It is for
+this reason that the Preacher, after having commenced his inspired
+production by the expressions which I have cited, after having
+filled all its pages with contempt for things human, is pleased at
+last to show man something more substantial, by saying to him,
+"Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of
+man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every
+secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil." Thus
+every thing is vain in man, if we regard what he gives to the
+world; but, on the contrary, every thing is important, if we
+consider what he owes to God. Once again, every thing is vain in
+man, if we regard the course of his mortal life; but every thing is
+of value, every thing is important, if we contemplate the goal
+where it ends, and the account of it which he must render. Let us,
+therefore, meditate to-day, in presence of this altar and of this
+tomb, the first and the last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span> utterance of the Preacher; of which
+the one shows the nothingness of man, the other establishes his
+greatness. Let this tomb convince us of our nothingness, provided
+that this altar, where is daily offered for us a Victim of price so
+great, teach us at the same time our dignity. The princess whom we
+weep shall be a faithful witness, both of the one and of the other.
+Let us survey that which a sudden death has taken away from her;
+let us survey that which a holy death has bestowed upon her. Thus
+shall we learn to despise that which she quitted without regret, in
+order to attach all our regard to that which she embraced with so
+much ardor,&mdash;when her soul, purified from all earthly sentiments,
+full of the heaven on whose border she touched, saw the light
+completely revealed. Such are the truths which I have to treat, and
+which I have deemed worthy to be proposed to so great a prince, and
+to the most illustrious assembly in the world. </p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;as, of our Webster, it has well been said that he always
+was&mdash;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
+orator against "the most illustrious assembly in the world."</p>
+
+<p>The ordinary sermons of Bossuet are less read, and they less deserve
+perhaps to be read, than those of Bourdaloue and Massillon.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="top"><span class="smcap">Bourdaloue</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>No scandal of any sort attaches to the reputation of Louis Bourdaloue.
+He was a man of spotless fame,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Sainte-Beuve, in a remarkably sympathetic appreciation of
+Bourdaloue,&mdash;free, contrary to the critic's wont, from hostile
+insinuation even,&mdash;regards it as part of the merit of this preacher that
+there is, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span> 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. 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 levelled 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.</p>
+
+<p>We begin our citations from Bourdaloue with an extract from a sermon of
+his on "A Perverted Conscience." The whole discourse is one well<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span> 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 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I have said more particularly that in the world in which you
+live,&mdash;I mean the court,&mdash;the disease of a perverted con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>science is
+far more common, and far more difficult to be avoided; and I am
+sure that in this you will agree with me. For it is at the court
+that the passions bear sway, that desires are more ardent, that
+self-interest is keener, and that, by infallible consequence,
+self-blinding is more easy, and consciences, even the most
+enlightened and the most upright, become gradually perverted. It is
+at the court that the goddess of the world, I mean fortune,
+exercises over the minds of men, and in consequence over their
+consciences, a more absolute dominion. It is at the court that the
+aim to maintain one's self, the impatience to raise one's self, the
+frenzy to push one's self, the fear of displeasing, the desire of
+making one's self agreeable, produce consciences, which anywhere
+else would pass for monstrous, but which, finding themselves there
+authorized by custom, seem to have acquired a right of possession
+and of prescription. People, from living at court, and from no
+other cause than having lived there, are filled with these errors.
+Whatever uprightness of conscience they may have brought thither,
+by breathing its air and by hearing its language, they are
+habituated to iniquity, they come to have less horror of vice, and,
+after having long blamed it, a thousand times condemned it, they at
+last behold it with a more favorable eye, tolerate it, excuse it;
+that is to say, without observing what is happening, they make over
+their consciences, and, by insensible steps, from Christian, which
+they were, by little and little become quite worldly, and not far
+from pagan. </p></div>
+
+<p>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?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>You would say, and it really seems, that for the court, there are
+other principles of religion than for the rest of the world, and
+that the courtier has a right to make for himself a conscience
+different in kind and in quality from that of other men; for such
+is the prevailing idea of the matter,&mdash;an idea well sustained, or
+rather unfortunately justified, by experience.... Nevertheless, my
+dear hearers, St. Paul assures us, that there is but one God and
+one faith; and woe to the man who dividing Him, this one God, shall
+represent Him as at court less an enemy to human transgressions
+than He is outside of the court; or, severing this one faith, shall
+suppose it in the case of one class more indulgent than in the case
+of another. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Behold one of the abuses of our time. Means have been found to
+consecrate slander, to change it into a virtue, and even into one
+of the holiest virtues&mdash;that means is, zeal for the glory of
+God.... We must humble those people, is the cry; and it is for the
+good of the Church to tarnish their reputation and to diminish
+their credit. That idea becomes, as it were, a principle; the
+conscience is fashioned accordingly, and there is nothing that is
+not permissible to a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> motive so noble. You fabricate, you
+exaggerate, you give things a poisonous taint, you tell but half
+the truth; you make your prejudices stand for indisputable facts;
+you spread abroad a hundred falsehoods; you confound what is
+individual with what is general; what one man has said that is bad,
+you pretend that all have said; and what many have said that is
+good, you pretend that nobody has said; and all that, once again,
+for the glory of God. For such direction of the intention justifies
+all that. Such direction of the intention will not suffice to
+justify a prevarication, but it is more than sufficient to justify
+calumny, provided only you are convinced that you are serving God
+thereby. </p></div>
+
+<p>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. 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There are some just, fervent, perfect souls, who, like children in
+the house of the Heavenly Father, strive to please and possess him,
+in order only to possess and to love him; and who, incessantly
+animated by this unselfish motive,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span> inviolably adhere to his divine
+precepts, and lay it down as a rigorous and unalterable rule, to
+obey the least intimation of his will. They serve him with an
+affection entirely filial. But there are also dastards, worldlings,
+sinners, terrestrial and sensual men, who are scarcely susceptible
+of any other impressions than those of the judgments and vengeance
+of God. Talk to them of his greatness, of his perfections, of his
+benefits, or even of his rewards, and they will hardly listen to
+you; and, if they are prevailed upon to pay some attention and
+respect to your words, they will sound in their ears, but not reach
+their hearts.... Therefore, to move them, to stir them up, to
+awaken them from the lethargic sleep with which they are
+overwhelmed, the thunder of divine wrath and the decree that
+condemns them to eternal flames must be dinned into their ears:
+"Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire" (Matt. <span class="smcap">xxv</span>.).
+Make them consider attentively, and represent to them with all the
+force of grace, the consequences and horror of this word
+"eternal."... </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>...Struck with horror at so doleful a destiny, I apply to this
+eternity all the powers of my mind; I examine and scrutinize it in
+all its parts; and I survey, as it were, its whole dimensions.
+Moreover, to express it in more lively colors, and to represent it
+in my mind more conformably to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span> the senses and the human
+understanding, I borrow comparisons from the Fathers of the Church,
+and I make, if I may so speak, the same computations. I figure to
+myself all the stars of the firmament; to this innumerable
+multitude I add all the drops of water in the bosom of the ocean;
+and if this be not enough, I reckon, or at least endeavor to
+reckon, all the grains of sand on its shore. Then I interrogate
+myself, I reason with myself, and I put to myself the question&mdash;If
+I had for as many ages, and a thousand times as many, undergone
+torments in that glowing fire which is kindled by the breath of the
+Lord in his anger to take eternal vengeance, would eternity be at
+an end? No; and why? Because it is eternity, and eternity is
+endless. To number up the stars that shine in the heavens, to count
+the drops of water that compose the sea, to tell the grains of sand
+that lie upon the shore, is not absolutely impossible; but to
+measure in eternity the number of days, of years, of ages, is what
+cannot be compassed, because the days, the years, and the ages are
+without number; or, to speak more properly, because in eternity
+there are neither days, nor years, nor ages, but a single, endless,
+infinite duration.</p>
+
+<p>To this thought I devote my mind. I imagine I see and rove through
+this same eternity, and discover no end, but find it to be always a
+boundless tract. I imagine the wide prospect lies open on all
+sides, and encompasseth me around; that if I rise up, or if I sink
+down, or what way soever I turn my eyes, this eternity meets them;
+and that after a thousand efforts to get forward, I have made no
+progress, but find it still eternity. I imagine that after long
+revolutions of time, I behold in the midst of this eternity a
+damned soul, in the same state, in the same affliction, in the same
+misery still; and putting myself mentally in the place of this
+soul, I imagine that in this eternal punishment I feel myself
+continually devoured by that fire which nothing extinguishes; that
+I continually shed those floods of tears which nothing can dry up;
+that I am continually gnawed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> by the worm of conscience, which
+never dies; that I continually express my despair and anguish by
+that gnashing of teeth, and those lamentable cries, which never can
+move the compassion of God. This idea of myself, this
+representation, amazes and terrifies me. My whole body shudders, I
+tremble with fear, I am filled with horror, I have the same
+feelings as the royal prophet, when he cried, "Pierce thou my flesh
+with thy fear, for I am afraid of thy judgments." </p></div>
+
+<p>That was a touching tribute from the elder to the younger&mdash;tribute
+touching, whether wrung, perforce, from a proudly humble, or freely
+offered by a simply magnanimous, heart&mdash;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 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,&mdash;"The king of preachers, and the preacher of kings."</p>
+
+<p class="top"><span class="smcap">Jean Baptiste Massillon</span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>thee</i> to have
+<i>her</i>;" 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 deep 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+one or two only that Massillon preached at court before Louis.</p>
+
+<p>The work of Massillon generally judged, though according to Sainte-Beuve
+not wisely judged, to be his choicest, is contained in that volume of
+his which goes by the name of "Le Petit Car&ecirc;me,"&mdash;literally, "The Little
+Lent,"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Still, from the text of his printed discourses,&mdash;admirable, exquisite,
+ideal compositions in point of form as these are,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span> 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 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.</p>
+
+<p>There is an admirable anecdote of the pulpit, which&mdash;though since often
+otherwise applied&mdash;had, perhaps, its first application to Massillon.
+Some one congratulating the orator, as he came down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span> 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
+marvellous 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;downcast, as with the inward oppression of the same
+solemnity that he, in speaking, cast like a spell on the
+audience&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
+Bourdaloue, too, with his incomparable dialectic, could have
+accomplished. But there immediately follows a culmination in power, such
+as was distinctly beyond the height of Bourdaloue. Genius must be
+superadded to talent if you would have the supreme, either in poetry or
+in eloquence. There was an extreme point in Massillon's discourse 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I confine myself to you, my brethren, who are gathered here. I
+speak no longer of the rest of mankind. I look at you as if you
+were the only ones on the earth; and here is the thought that
+seizes me, and that terrifies me. I make the supposition that this
+is your last hour, and the end of the world; that the heavens are
+about to open above your heads, that Jesus Christ is to appear in
+his glory in the midst of this sanctuary, and that you are gathered
+here only to wait for him, and as trembling criminals on whom is to
+be pronounced either a sentence of grace or a decree of eternal
+death. For, vainly do you flatter yourselves; you will die such in
+character as you are to-day. All those impulses toward change with
+which you amuse yourselves, you will amuse yourselves with them
+down to the bed of death. Such is the experience of all
+generations. The only thing new you will then find in yourselves
+will be, perhaps, a reckoning a trifle larger than that which you
+would to-day have to render; and according to what you would be if
+you were this moment to be judged, you may almost determine what
+will befall you at the termination of your life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now I ask you, and I ask it smitten with terror, not separating in
+this matter my lot from yours, and putting myself into the same
+frame of mind into which I desire you to come,&mdash;I ask you, then, If
+Jesus Christ were to appear in this sanctuary, in the midst of this
+assembly, the most illustrious in the world, to pass judgment on
+us, to draw the dread line of distinction between the goats and the
+sheep, do you believe that the majority of all of us who are here
+would be set on his right hand? Do you believe that things would
+even be equal? Nay, do you believe there would be found so many as
+the ten righteous men whom anciently the Lord could not find in
+five whole cities? I put the question to you, but you know not; I
+know not myself. Thou only, O my God, knowest those that belong to
+thee! But if we know not those who belong to him, at least we know
+that sinners do not belong to him. Now, of what classes of persons
+do the professing Christians in this assembly consist? Titles and
+dignities must be counted for naught; of these you shall be
+stripped before Jesus Christ. Who make up this assembly? Sinners,
+in great number, who do not wish to be converted; in still greater
+number, sinners who would like it, but who put off their
+conversion; many others who would be converted, only to relapse
+into sin; finally, a multitude who think they have no need of
+conversion. You have thus made up the company of the reprobate. Cut
+off these four classes of sinners from this sacred assembly, for
+they will be cut off from it at the great day! Stand forth now, ye
+righteous! where are you? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right
+hand! True wheat of Jesus Christ, disengage yourselves from this
+chaff, doomed to the fire! O God! where are thine elect? and what
+remains there for thy portion?</p>
+
+<p>Brethren, our perdition is well-nigh assured, and we do not give it
+a thought. Even if in that dread separation which one day shall be
+made, there were to be but a single sinner out of this assembly
+found on the side of the reprobate, and if a voice from heaven
+should come to give us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span> assurance of the fact in this sanctuary,
+without pointing out the person intended, who among us would not
+fear that he might himself be the wretch? Who among us would not at
+once recoil upon his conscience, to inquire whether his sins had
+not deserved that penalty? Who among us would not, seized with
+dismay, ask of Jesus Christ, as did once the apostles, "Lord, is it
+I?" </p></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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
+consecrate a scandalously unfit candidate as archbishop of Cambray.
+Massillon's, however, is a fair, if not an absolutely spotless, fame.
+Hierarch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span> 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
+F&eacute;nelon, 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">F&Eacute;NELON.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1651-1715.</p>
+
+
+<p>If Bossuet is to Frenchmen a synonym for sublimity, no less to them is
+F&eacute;nelon a synonym for saintliness. From the French point of view, one
+might say, "the sublime Bossuet," "the saintly F&eacute;nelon," somewhat as one
+says, "the learned Selden," "the judicious Hooker." It is as much a
+French delight to idealize F&eacute;nelon an archangel Raphael, affable and
+mild, as it is to glorify Bossuet a Michael in majesty and power.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But saintliness of character was in F&eacute;nelon 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 F&eacute;nelon, both
+the exterior and the interior man:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">In every gesture dignity and love.</span><br />
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The consent is general among those who saw F&eacute;nelon, and have left behind
+them their testimony, that alike in person, in character, and in genius,
+he was such as we thus describe him.</p>
+
+<p>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 F&eacute;nelon's friend Bossuet was destined later to prove a
+bitter antagonist, almost a personal foe.</p>
+
+<p>Until he was forty-two years old, Fran&ccedil;ois F&eacute;nelon lived 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> writing what, in ceasing to be
+verse, did not cease to be poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The great world will presently involve F&eacute;nelon in the currents of
+history. Louis XIV., grown old, and become as selfishly greedy now of
+personal salvation as all his life he has 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. F&eacute;nelon 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 F&eacute;nelon 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.</p>
+
+<p>The lustre of F&eacute;nelon'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 F&eacute;nelon to be trained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span> 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 F&eacute;nelon 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 the
+portrait in words, drawn by him from the life, of F&eacute;nelon's princely
+pupil, we transfer here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon
+says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In the first place, it must be said that Monseigneur the Duke of
+Burgundy had by nature a most formidable disposition. He was
+passionate to the extent of wishing to dash to pieces his clocks
+when they struck the hour which called him to what he did not like,
+and of flying into the utmost rage against the rain if it
+interfered with what he wanted to do. Resistance threw him into
+paroxysms of fury. I speak of what I have often witnessed in his
+early youth. Moreover, an ungovernable impulse drove him into
+whatever indulgence, bodily or mental, was forbidden him. His
+sarcasm was so much the more cruel as it was witty and piquant, and
+as it seized with precision upon every point open to ridicule. All
+this was sharpened by a vivacity of body and of mind that proceeded
+to the degree of impetuosity, and that during his early days never
+permitted him to learn any thing except by doing two things at
+once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a violent avidity, and
+all this with a pride and a haughtiness impossible to describe;
+dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men and things, and to
+detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and to reason
+himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers. But at
+the same time, as soon as his passion was spent,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> reason resumed
+her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes
+with such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively,
+alert, penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling
+literally in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time
+piety and grace made of him a different being, and transformed
+faults so numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite. </p></div>
+
+<p>St. Simon attributes to F&eacute;nelon "every virtue under heaven;" but his way
+was to give to God rather than to man the praise of the remarkable
+change which, during F&eacute;nelon's charge of the Duke of Burgundy, came over
+the character of the prince.</p>
+
+<p>The grandfather survived the grandson; and it was never put to the stern
+proof of historical experiment, whether F&eacute;nelon had indeed turned out
+one Bourbon entirely different from all the other members, earlier or
+later, of that royal line.</p>
+
+<p>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 what, to the archbishop's susceptible and
+suffering spirit, was worse than death,&mdash;by "disgrace." The disgrace was
+such as has ever since engaged for its subject the interest, the
+sympathy, and the admiration, of mankind. F&eacute;nelon lost the royal favor.
+That was all,&mdash;for the present,&mdash;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 F&eacute;nelon's name from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span> the
+list of the household of his grandson and heir. The archbishop&mdash;for
+F&eacute;nelon had previously been made archbishop of Cambray&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The occasion was a woman, a woman with the charm of genius and of
+exalted character, a Christian, a saint, but a mystic&mdash;it was Madame
+Guyon. Madame Guyon taught that it was possible to love God for himself
+alone, purely and disinterestedly. F&eacute;nelon 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 F&eacute;nelon must condemn Madame Guyon. But
+F&eacute;nelon 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 F&eacute;nelon, meek, docile, suasive. The
+world wondered, and watched the duel. F&eacute;nelon finally did what king
+James's translators misleadingly make Job wish that his adversary had
+done,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> 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 the heresy of
+F&eacute;nelon. At this moment of crisis for F&eacute;nelon, 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 F&eacute;nelon only said:
+"It is better so than if it had been the cottage of a poor
+laboring-man."</p>
+
+<p>Madame de Maintenon, till now his friend, with perfectly frigid facility
+separated herself from the side of the accused. The controversy was
+carried to Rome, where at length F&eacute;nelon's book was
+condemned,&mdash;condemned mildly, but condemned. The pope is said to have
+made the remark that F&eacute;nelon erred by loving God too much, and F&eacute;nelon's
+antagonists by loving their fellow-man too little. F&eacute;nelon 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.
+F&eacute;nelon seems to have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard to tell what might now have befallen F&eacute;nelon, in the way of
+good fortune,&mdash;he might even have been recalled to court, and
+re-installed in his office of tutor to the prince,&mdash;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 Europe. This composition of F&eacute;nelon'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,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+France, and England multiplied copies, as fast as they could; still,
+Europe could not get copies as fast as it wanted them.</p>
+
+<p>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
+F&eacute;nelon'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, till 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span> privilege of sanctuary. It was an
+instructive example of the serene and beautiful ascendency sometimes
+divinely accorded to illustrious personal goodness.</p>
+
+<p>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 F&eacute;nelon was assured, and was near. The
+father of the Duke of Burgundy died, and nothing then seemed to stand
+between F&eacute;nelon's late pupil and the throne,&mdash;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 F&eacute;nelon. Sternly forbidden, by the jealous and
+watchful king, his grandfather, to communicate with his old teacher, he
+yet had found means to send to F&eacute;nelon, from time to time, reassuring
+signals of his trust and his love. F&eacute;nelon 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,
+F&eacute;nelon 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"All my ties are broken," mourned F&eacute;nelon; "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 F&eacute;nelon:
+"Here was a man who could have served us well under the disasters by
+which my kingdom is about to be assailed!"</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;nelon's literary productions are various; but they all 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 F&eacute;nelon. His argument on the "Being of a
+God" was prepared as a duty of his preceptorship to the prince. But the
+one book of F&eacute;nelon 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.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing to be said is, that those are mistaken who suppose
+themselves to have obtained a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span> 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
+F&eacute;nelon 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,&mdash;instruction made delightful to a prince,&mdash;to inculcate the
+duties incumbent on a sovereign.</p>
+
+<p>Telemachus, our readers will remember, was the son of Ulysses. F&eacute;nelon'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 F&eacute;nelon 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 F&eacute;nelon hoped his royal pupil would finally turn out to be. Nothing
+can exceed the urbanity and grace with which the delicate business is
+conducted by F&eacute;nelon, of teaching a bad prince, with a very bad example
+set him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span> 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 to Louis XIV., and the state of France, in mind, which,
+when the book was first printed, gave it such an exciting interest in
+the eyes of Europe. Telemachus, after the manner of &AElig;neas 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The king's authority over the subject is absolute, but the
+authority of the law is absolute over him. His power to do good is
+unlimited, but he is restrained from doing evil. The laws have put
+the people into his hands, as the most valuable deposit, upon
+condition that he shall treat them as his children. It is the
+intent of the law that the wisdom and equity of one man shall be
+the happiness of many, and not that the wretchedness and slavery of
+many should gratify the pride<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> and luxury of one. The king ought to
+possess nothing more than the subject, except what is necessary to
+alleviate the fatigue of his station, and impress upon the minds of
+the people a reverence of that authority by which the laws are
+executed. Moreover, the king should indulge himself less, as well
+in ease as in pleasure, and should be less disposed to the pomp and
+the pride of life than any other man. He ought not to be
+distinguished from the rest of mankind by the greatness of his
+wealth, or the vanity of his enjoyments, but by superior wisdom,
+more heroic virtue, and more splendid glory. Abroad he ought to be
+the defender of his country, by commanding her armies; and at home
+the judge of his people, distributing justice among them, improving
+their morals, and increasing their felicity. It is not for himself
+that the gods have intrusted him with royalty. He is exalted above
+individuals, only that he may be the servant of the people. To the
+public he owes all his time, all his attention, and all his love;
+he deserves dignity only in proportion as he gives up private
+enjoyments for the public good. </p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;an oppression seldom, if ever, in human history
+exceeded&mdash;which was enforced under the unmitigated absolutism of Louis
+XIV. The literature that, with Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the
+Encyclop&aelig;dists, prepared the Revolution, had already begun virtually to
+be written when F&eacute;nelon wrote his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span> "Telemachus." It is easy to see why
+the fame of F&eacute;nelon 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 free-thinkers, 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&mdash;a character taken, and not unplausibly taken, to have been
+suggested to F&eacute;nelon by the example of Louis XIV.&mdash;to this imaginary
+counterpart of the reigning monarch of France, Mentor holds the
+following language. How could the sequel of Bourbon despotism in
+France&mdash;a sequel suspended now for a time, but two or three generations
+later to be dreadfully visited on the heirs of Louis XIV.&mdash;have been
+more truly foreshadowed? The "Telemachus:"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Remember, that the sovereign who is most absolute is always least
+powerful; he seizes upon all, and his grasp is ruin. He is, indeed,
+the sole proprietor of whatever his state contains; but, for that
+reason, his state contains nothing of value: the fields are
+uncultivated, and almost a desert; the towns lose some of their few
+inhabitants every day; and trade every day declines. The king, who
+must cease to be a king when he ceases to have subjects, and who is
+great only in virtue of his people, is himself insensibly losing
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span> character and his power, as the number of his people, from
+whom alone both are derived, insensibly diminishes. His dominions
+are at length exhausted of money and of men: the loss of men is the
+greatest and the most irreparable he can sustain. Absolute power
+degrades every subject to a slave. The tyrant is flattered, even to
+an appearance of adoration, and every one trembles at the glance of
+his eye; but, at the least revolt, this enormous power perishes by
+its own excess. It derived no strength from the love of the people;
+it wearied and provoked all that it could reach, and rendered every
+individual of the state impatient of its continuance. At the first
+stroke of opposition, the idol is overturned, broken to pieces, and
+trodden under foot. Contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust,
+and every other passion of the soul, unite against so hateful a
+despotism. The king who, in his vain prosperity, found no man bold
+enough to tell him the truth, in his adversity finds no man kind
+enough to excuse his faults, or to defend him against his enemies. </p></div>
+
+<p>So much is perhaps enough to indicate the political drift of the
+"Telemachus." That drift is, indeed, observable everywhere throughout
+the book.</p>
+
+<p>We conclude our exhibition of this fine classic, by letting F&eacute;nelon
+appear more purely now in his character as dreamer and poet. Young
+Prince Telemachus has, Ulysses-like, and &AElig;neas-like, his descent into
+Hades. This incident affords F&eacute;nelon 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span> results.
+First, one glimpse of Tartarus as conceived by F&eacute;nelon. It is the
+spectacle of kings who on earth abused their power, that Telemachus is
+beholding:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Telemachus observed the countenance of these criminals to be pale
+and ghastly, strongly expressive of the torment they suffered at
+the heart. They looked inward with a self-abhorrence, now
+inseparable from their existence. Their crimes themselves had
+become their punishment, and it was not necessary that greater
+should be inflicted. They haunted them like hideous spectres, and
+continually started up before them in all their enormity. They
+wished for a second death, that might separate them from these
+ministers of vengeance, as the first had separated their spirits
+from the body,&mdash;a death that might at once extinguish all
+consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the depths of hell
+to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in impenetrable
+darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance, which,
+though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth,
+from which they fled, has overtaken them, an invincible and
+unrelenting enemy. The ray which once might have illuminated them,
+like the mild radiance of the day, now pierces them like
+lightning,&mdash;a fierce and fatal fire, that, without injury to the
+external parts, infixes a burning torment at the heart. By truth,
+now an avenging flame, the very soul is melted like metal in a
+furnace; it dissolves all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the
+first elements of life, yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as
+it were, divided against himself, without rest and without comfort;
+animated by no vital principle, but the rage that kindles at his
+own misconduct, and the dreadful madness that results from despair. </p></div>
+
+<p>If the "perpetual feast of nectared sweets" that the "Telemachus"
+affords, is felt at times to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span> 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:"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In this place resided all the good kings who had wisely governed
+mankind from the beginning of time. They were separated from the
+rest of the just; for, as wicked princes suffer more dreadful
+punishment than other offenders in Tartarus, so good kings enjoy
+infinitely greater felicity than other lovers of virtue, in the
+fields of Elysium.</p>
+
+<p>Telemachus advanced towards these kings, whom he found in groves of
+delightful fragrance, reclining upon the downy turf, where the
+flowers and herbage were perpetually renewed. A thousand rills
+wandered through these scenes of delight, and refreshed the soil
+with a gentle and unpolluted wave; the song of innumerable birds
+echoed in the groves. Spring strewed the ground with her flowers,
+while at the same time autumn loaded the trees with her fruit. In
+this place the burning heat of the dog-star was never felt, and the
+stormy north was forbidden to scatter over it the frosts of winter.
+Neither War that thirsts for blood, nor Envy that bites with an
+envenomed tooth, like the vipers that are wreathed around her arms,
+and fostered in her bosom, nor Jealousy, nor Distrust, nor Fears,
+nor vain Desires, invade these sacred domains of peace. The day is
+here without end, and the shades of night are unknown. Here the
+bodies of the blessed are clothed with a pure and lambent light,
+as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span> with a garment. This light does not resemble that vouchsafed to
+mortals upon earth, which is rather darkness visible; it is rather
+a celestial glory than a light&mdash;an emanation that penetrates the
+grossest body with more subtilety than the rays of the sun
+penetrate the purest crystal, which rather strengthens than dazzles
+the sight, and diffuses through the soul a serenity which no
+language can express. By this ethereal essence the blessed are
+sustained in everlasting life; it pervades them; it is incorporated
+with them, as food with the mortal body; they see it, they feel it,
+they breathe it, and it produces in them an inexhaustible source of
+serenity and joy. It is a fountain of delight, in which they are
+absorbed as fishes are absorbed in the sea; they wish for nothing,
+and, having nothing, they possess all things. This celestial light
+satiates the hunger of the soul; every desire is precluded; and
+they have a fulness of joy which sets them above all that mortals
+seek with such restless ardor, to fill the vacuity that aches
+forever in their breast. All the delightful objects that surround
+them are disregarded; for their felicity springs up within, and,
+being perfect, can derive nothing from without. So the gods,
+satiated with nectar and ambrosia, disdain, as gross and impure,
+all the dainties of the most luxurious table upon earth. From these
+seats of tranquillity all evils fly far away; death, disease,
+poverty, pain, regret, remorse, fear, even hope,&mdash;which is
+sometimes not less painful than fear itself,&mdash;animosity, disgust,
+and resentment can never enter there. </p></div>
+
+<p>The leaden good sense of Louis XIV. pronounced F&eacute;nelon 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 F&eacute;nelon's
+"Telemachus," said it was a book hardly serious enough for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span> clergyman
+to write. A more serious book, whether its purpose be regarded, or its
+undoubted actual influence in moulding the character of a prospective
+ruler of France, was not written by any clergyman of F&eacute;nelon's or
+Bossuet's time.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;nelon 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 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."</p>
+
+<p>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. F&eacute;nelon alone is, in quantity as in quality,
+enough, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the
+perverse inclination of the balance.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">MONTESQUIEU.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1689-1755.</p>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Three books, still living, are associated with the name of
+Montesquieu,&mdash;"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 World; or, Letters of a Chinese Philosopher." We shall have here
+no room for illustrative citations from Montesquieu's "Persian
+Letters."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;as if a derivation from that
+last and noblest of the Gauls, Vercingetorix&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This body [the Roman Senate] erected itself into a tribunal for the
+judgment of all peoples, and at the end of every war it decided
+upon the punishments and the recompenses which it conceived each to
+be entitled to. It took away parts of the lands of the conquered
+states, in order to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span> bestow them upon the allies of Rome, thus
+accomplishing two objects at once,&mdash;attaching to Rome those kings
+of whom she had little to fear and much to hope, and weakening
+those of whom she had little to hope and all to fear.</p>
+
+<p>Allies were employed to make war upon an enemy, but the destroyers
+were at once destroyed in their turn. Philip was beaten with the
+half of the &AElig;tolians, who were immediately afterwards annihilated
+for having joined themselves to Antiochus. Antiochus was beaten
+with the help of the Rhodians, who, after having received signal
+rewards, were humiliated forever, under the pretext that they had
+requested that peace might be made with Perseus.</p>
+
+<p>When they had many enemies on hand at the same time, they accorded
+a truce to the weakest, which considered itself happy in obtaining
+such a respite, counting it for much to be able to secure a
+postponement of its ruin.</p>
+
+<p>When they were engaged in a great war, the senate affected to
+ignore all sorts of injuries, and silently awaited the arrival of
+the proper time for punishment; when, if it saw that only some
+individuals were culpable, it refused to punish them, choosing
+rather to hold the entire nation as criminal, and thus reserve to
+itself a useful vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>As they inflicted inconceivable evils upon their enemies, there
+were not many leagues formed against them; for those who were most
+distant from danger were not willing to draw nearer to it. The
+consequence of this was, that they were rarely attacked; whilst, on
+the other hand, they constantly made war at such time, in such
+manner, and against such peoples, as suited their convenience; and,
+among the many nations which they assailed, there were very few
+that would not have submitted to every species of injury at their
+hands if they had been willing to leave them in peace.</p>
+
+<p>It being their custom to speak always as masters, the ambassadors
+whom they sent to nations which had not yet felt their power were
+certain to be insulted; and this was an infallible pretext for a
+new war.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As they never made peace in good faith, and as, with the design of
+universal conquest, their treaties were, properly speaking, only
+suspensions of war, they always put conditions in them which began
+the ruin of the states which accepted them. They either provided
+that the garrisons of strong places should be withdrawn, or that
+the number of troops should be limited, or that the horses or the
+elephants of the vanquished party should be delivered over to
+themselves; and if the defeated people was powerful on sea, they
+compelled it to burn its vessels, and sometimes to remove, and
+occupy a place of habitation farther inland.</p>
+
+<p>After having destroyed the armies of a prince, they ruined his
+finances by excessive taxes, or by the imposition of a tribute
+under pretext of requiring him to pay the expenses of the war,&mdash;a
+new species of tyranny, which forced the vanquished sovereign to
+oppress his own subjects, and thus to alienate their affection.</p>
+
+<p>When they granted peace to a king, they took some of his brothers
+or children as hostages. This gave them the means of troubling his
+kingdom at their pleasure. If they held the nearest heir, they
+intimidated the possessor; if only a prince of a remote degree,
+they used him to stir up revolts against the legitimate ruler.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever any people or prince withdrew their obedience from their
+sovereign, they immediately accorded to them the title of allies of
+the Roman people, and thus rendered them sacred and inviolable; so
+that there was no king, however great he might be, who could for a
+moment be sure of his subjects, or even of his family.</p>
+
+<p>Although the title of Roman ally was a species of servitude, it
+was, nevertheless, very much sought after; for the possession of
+this title made it certain that the recipients of it would receive
+injuries from the Romans only, and there was ground for the hope
+that this class of injuries would be rendered less grievous than
+they would otherwise be.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, there was no service which nations and kings were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span> not ready
+to perform, nor any humiliation which they did not submit to, in
+order to obtain this distinction....</p>
+
+<p>These customs were not merely some particular facts which happened
+at hazard. They were permanently established principles, as may be
+readily seen; for the maxims which the Romans acted upon against
+the greatest powers were precisely those which they had employed in
+the beginning of their career against the small cities which
+surrounded them....</p>
+
+<p>But nothing served Rome more effectually than the respect which she
+inspired among all nations. She immediately reduced kings to
+silence, and rendered them as dumb. With the latter, it was not a
+mere question of the degree of their power: their very persons were
+attacked. To risk a war with Rome was to expose themselves to
+captivity, to death, and to the infamy of a triumph. Thus it was
+that kings, who lived in pomp and luxury, did not dare to look with
+steady eyes upon the Roman people, and, losing courage, they hoped,
+by their patience and their obsequiousness, to obtain some
+postponement of the calamities with which they were menaced. </p></div>
+
+<p>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. It acquired great contemporary
+fame, both at home and abroad. It was promptly translated into English,
+the translator earning the merited compli<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>ment of the author's own
+hearty approval of his work. Horace Walpole, who was something of a
+Gallomaniac, makes repeated allusion to Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws,"
+in letters of his written at about the time of the appearance of the
+book. But Walpole's admiring allusions themselves contain evidence that
+admiration equal to his own of the work that he praised, was by no means
+universal in England.</p>
+
+<p>The general aspect of the book is that of a composition meant to be
+luminously analyzed and arranged. Divisions and titles abound. There are
+thirty-one "books"; and each book contains, on the average, perhaps
+about the same number of chapters. The library edition, in English,
+consists of two volumes, comprising together some eight hundred open
+pages, in good-sized type. The books and chapters are therefore not
+formidably long. The look of the work is as if it were readable; and its
+character, on the whole, corresponds. It would hardly be French, if such
+were not the case. Except that Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws" is, as we
+have indicated, a highly organized, even an over-organized, book, which,
+by emphasis, Montaigne's "Essays" is not, these two works may be said,
+in their contents, somewhat to resemble each other. Montesquieu is
+nearly as discursive as Montaigne. He wishes to be philosophical, but he
+is not above supplying his reader with interesting historical instances.</p>
+
+<p>We shall not do better, in giving our readers a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span> comprehensive idea of
+Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," than to begin by showing them the titles
+of a number of the books:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Book I. Of Laws in General. Book II. Of Laws Directly Derived from
+the Nature of Government. Book III. Of the Principles of the Three
+Kinds of Government. Book IV. That the Laws of Education ought to
+be Relative to the Principles of Government. Book V. That the Laws
+given by the Legislator ought to be Relative to the Principle of
+Government. Book VI. Consequences of the Principles of Different
+Governments with Respect to the Simplicity of Civil and Criminal
+Laws, the Form of Judgments, and the Inflicting of Punishments.
+Book VII. Consequences of the Different Principles of the Three
+Governments with Respect to Sumptuary Laws, Luxury, and the
+Condition of Women. Book VIII. Of the Corruption of the Principles
+of the Three Governments. Book XIV. Of Laws as Relative to the
+Nature of the Climate. </p></div>
+
+<p>The philosophical aim and ambition of the author at once appear in the
+inquiry which he institutes for the three several animating <i>principles</i>
+of the three 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 <i>virtue</i> is necessary in a republic, and in monarchy, <i>honor</i>, so
+<i>fear</i> is necessary in a despotic government." The 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate the freely discursive character of the work, we give the
+whole of chapter sixteen&mdash;there are chapters still shorter&mdash;in Book
+VII.:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="c">AN EXCELLENT CUSTOM OF THE SAMNITES.</p>
+
+<p>The Samnites had a custom which in so small a republic, and
+especially in their situation, must have been productive of
+admirable effects. The young people were all convened in one place,
+and their conduct was examined. He that was declared the best of
+the whole assembly, had leave given him to take which girl he
+pleased for his wife; the second best chose after him, and so on.
+Admirable institution! The only recommendation that young men could
+have on this occasion, was their virtue, and the service done their
+country. He who had the greatest share of these endowments, chose
+which girl he liked out of the whole nation. Love, beauty,
+chastity, virtue, birth, and even wealth itself, were all, in some
+measure, the dowry of virtue. A nobler and grander recompense, less
+chargeable to a petty state, and more capable of influencing both
+sexes, could scarce be imagined.</p>
+
+<p>The Samnites were descended from the Laced&aelig;monians; and Plato,
+whose institutes are only an improvement of those of Lycurgus,
+enacted nearly the same law. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 Samnite custom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span> described tends to produce
+that popular virtue by which republics flourish. But the information, at
+all events, is curious and interesting.</p>
+
+<p>The following paragraphs, taken from the second chapter of Book XIV.,
+contain in germ nearly the whole of the philosophy underlying M. Taine's
+essays on the history of literature:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="c">OF THE DIFFERENCE OF MEN IN DIFFERENT CLIMATES.</p>
+
+<p>A cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibres of
+the body; this increases their elasticity, and favors the return of
+the blood from the extreme parts to the heart. It contracts those
+very fibres; consequently it increases also their force. On the
+contrary, a warm air relaxes and lengthens the extremes of the
+fibres; of course it diminishes their force and elasticity.</p>
+
+<p>People are therefore more vigorous in cold climates. Here the
+action of the heart and the reaction of the extremities of the
+fibres are better performed, the temperature of the humors is
+greater, the blood moves freer towards the heart, and reciprocally
+the heart has more power. This superiority of strength must produce
+various effects; for instance, a greater boldness,&mdash;that is, more
+courage; a greater sense of superiority,&mdash;that is, less desire of
+revenge; a greater opinion of security,&mdash;that is, more frankness,
+less suspicion, policy and cunning. In short, this must be
+productive of very different tempers. Put a man into a close, warm
+place, and, for the reasons above given, he will feel a great
+faintness. If under this circumstance you propose a bold enterprise
+to him, I believe you will find him very little disposed towards
+it; his present weakness will throw him into a despondency; he will
+be afraid of every thing, being in a state of total incapacity. The
+inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the
+people in cold countries are, like young men, brave. </p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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:"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When the Christian religion, two centuries ago, became unhappily
+divided into Catholic and Protestant, the people of the north
+embraced the Protestant, and those south adhered still to the
+Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>The reason is plain: the people of the north have, and will forever
+have, a spirit of liberty and independence, which the people of the
+south have not; and therefore, a religion which has no visible
+head, is more agreeable to the independency of the climate, than
+that which has one. </p></div>
+
+<p>Climate is a "great matter" with Montesquieu. In treating of the subject
+of a state changing its religion, he says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The ancient religion is connected with the constitution of the
+kingdom, and the new one is not; the former <i>agrees with the
+climate</i>, and very often the new one is opposite to it. </p></div>
+
+<p>For the Christian religion, Montesquieu professes profound
+respect,&mdash;rather as a pagan political philosopher might do, than as one
+intimately acquainted with it by a personal experience 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span> of the importance to
+himself of not offending the dominant hierarchy.</p>
+
+<p>The latter part of "The Spirit of Laws" contains discussions exhibiting
+no little research on the part of the author. There is, for one example,
+a discussion of the course of commerce in different ages of the world,
+and of the influences that have wrought from time to time to bring about
+the changes occurring. For another example, there is a discussion of the
+feudal system.</p>
+
+<p>Montesquieu was an admirer of the English constitution. His work,
+perhaps, contains no extended chapters more likely to instruct the
+general reader and to furnish a good idea of the writer's genius and
+method, than the two chapters&mdash;chapter six, Book XI., and chapter
+twenty-seven, Book XIX.&mdash;in which the English nation and the English
+form of government are sympathetically described. We simply indicate,
+for we have no room to exhibit, these chapters. Voltaire, too, expressed
+Montesquieu's admiration of English liberty and English law.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;at last.
+Witness the contrast of these two different sets of expressions from his
+pen. In earlier manhood he says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Study has been for me the sovereign remedy for all the
+dissatisfactions of life, having never had a sense of chagrin that
+an hour's reading would not dissipate. I wake in the morning with a
+secret joy to behold the light. I behold the light with a kind of
+ravishment, and all the rest of the day I am happy. </p></div>
+
+<p>Within a few years of his death, the brave, cheerful tone had declined
+to this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I am broken down with fatigue; I must repose for the rest of my
+life. </p></div>
+
+<p>Then further to this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I have expected to kill myself for the last three months, finishing
+an addition to my work on the origin and changes of the French
+civil law. It will take only three hours to read it; but, I assure
+you, it has been such a labor to me, that my hair has turned white
+under it all. </p></div>
+
+<p>Finally it touches nadir:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It [his work] has almost cost me my life; I must rest; I can work
+no more.</p>
+
+<p>My candles are all burned out; I have set off all my cartridges. </p></div>
+
+<p>When Montesquieu died, only Diderot, among Parisian men of letters,
+followed him to his tomb.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">VOLTAIRE.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1694-1778.</p>
+
+
+<p>By the volume and the variety, joined to the unfailing brilliancy, of
+his production; by his prodigious effectiveness; and by his universal
+fame,&mdash;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,&mdash;he produced no single great
+work,&mdash;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 works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven
+volumes (equivalent, probably, in the aggregate, to three hundred
+volumes like the present) which, in one leading edition, collect his
+productions,&mdash;you may often find him superficial, you may often find him
+untrustworthy, you will certainly often find him flippant, but not less
+certainly you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span> 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&mdash;to be classed with the "Iliad" and
+the "&AElig;neid"&mdash;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 to extinguish a
+venerable form of Christianity, simply with pricks, innumerably
+repeated, of his tormenting pen.</p>
+
+<p>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
+con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>fessedly ambitious, literary essays of his, were poems in every
+kind,&mdash;heroic, mock-heroic, lyric, elegiac, comic, tragic,
+satiric,&mdash;historical and biographical monographs, and tales or novels of
+a peculiar class.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire's poetry does not count for very much now. 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 Shakspeare's or Moli&egrave;re'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 either the merit 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 coming shortly and easily at a
+knowledge of Voltaire.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 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,&mdash;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 compen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>sating 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I have heard great talk of the Senator Pococurant&eacute;, who lives in
+that fine house at the Brenta, where they say he entertains
+foreigners in the most polite manner. They pretend this man is a
+perfect stranger to uneasiness."&mdash;"I should be glad to see so
+extraordinary a being," said Martin.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span> Candide thereupon sent a
+messenger to Signor Pococurant&eacute;, desiring permission to wait on him
+the next day.</p>
+
+<p>Candide and his friend Martin went into a gondola on the Brenta,
+and arrived at the palace of the noble Pococurant&eacute;: the gardens
+were laid out in elegant taste, and adorned with fine marble
+statues; his palace was built after the most approved rules of
+architecture. The master of the house, who was a man of sixty, and
+very rich, received our two travellers with great politeness, but
+without much ceremony, which somewhat disconcerted Candide, but was
+not at all displeasing to Martin.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as they were seated, two very pretty girls, neatly dressed,
+brought in chocolate, which was extremely well frothed. Candide
+could not help making encomiums upon their beauty and graceful
+carriage. "The creatures are well enough," said the senator. "I
+make them my companions, for I am heartily tired of the ladies of
+the town, their coquetry, their jealousy, their quarrels, their
+humors, their meannesses, their pride, and their folly. I am weary
+of making sonnets, or of paying for sonnets to be made, on them;
+but, after all, these two girls begin to grow very indifferent to
+me."</p>
+
+<p>After having refreshed himself, Candide walked into a large
+gallery, where he was struck with the sight of a fine collection of
+paintings. "Pray," said Candide, "by what master are the two first
+of these?"&mdash;"They are Raphael's," answered the senator. "I gave a
+great deal of money for them seven years ago, purely out of
+curiosity, as they were said to be the finest pieces in Italy: but
+I cannot say they please me; the coloring is dark and heavy; the
+figures do not swell nor come out enough; and the drapery is very
+bad. In short, notwithstanding the encomiums lavished upon them,
+they are not, in my opinion, a true representation of nature. I
+approve of no paintings but where I think I behold Nature herself;
+and there are very few, if any, of that kind to be met with. I have
+what is called a fine collection, but I take no manner of delight
+in them."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>While dinner was getting ready, Pococurant&eacute; ordered a concert.
+Candide praised the music to the skies. "This noise," said the
+noble Venetian, "may amuse one for a little time; but if it was to
+last above half an hour, it would grow tiresome to everybody,
+though perhaps no one would care to own it. Music is become the art
+of executing what is difficult; now, whatever is difficult cannot
+be long pleasing.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe I might take more pleasure in an opera, if they had not
+made such a monster of that species of dramatic entertainment as
+perfectly shocks me; and I am amazed how people can bear to see
+wretched tragedies set to music, where the scenes are contrived for
+no other purpose than to lug in, as it were by the ears, three or
+four ridiculous songs, to give a favorite actress an opportunity of
+exhibiting her pipe. Let who will or can die away in raptures at
+the trills of a eunuch quavering the majestic part of C&aelig;sar or
+Cato, and strutting in a foolish manner upon the stage. For my
+part, I have long ago renounced these paltry entertainments, which
+constitute the glory of modern Italy, and are so dearly purchased
+by crowned heads." Candide opposed these sentiments, but he did it
+in a discreet manner. As for Martin, he was entirely of the old
+senator's opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Dinner being served up, they sat down to table, and after a very
+hearty repast, returned to the library. Candide, observing Homer
+richly bound, commended the noble Venetian's taste. "This," said
+he, "is a book that was once the delight of the great Pangloss, the
+best philosopher in Germany."&mdash;"Homer is no favorite of mine,"
+answered Pococurant&eacute; very coolly. "I was made to believe once that
+I took a pleasure in reading him; but his continual repetitions of
+battles must have all such a resemblance with each other; his gods
+that are forever in a hurry and bustle, without ever doing any
+thing; his Helen, that is the cause of the war, and yet hardly acts
+in the whole performance; his Troy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span> that holds out so long without
+being taken; in short, all these things together make the poem very
+insipid to me. I have asked some learned men whether they are not
+in reality as much tired as myself with reading this poet. Those
+who spoke ingenuously assured me that he had made them fall asleep,
+and yet that they could not well avoid giving him a place in their
+libraries; but that it was merely as they would do an antique, or
+those rusty medals which are kept only for curiosity, and are of no
+manner of use in commerce."</p>
+
+<p>"But your excellency does not surely form the same opinion of
+Virgil?" said Candide. "Why, I grant," replied Pococurant&eacute;, "that
+the second, third, fourth, and sixth books of his '&AElig;neid' are
+excellent; but as for his pious &AElig;neas, his strong Cloanthus, his
+friendly Achates, his boy Ascanius, his silly King Latinus, his
+ill-bred Amata, his insipid Lavinia, and some other characters much
+in the same strain, I think there cannot in nature be any thing
+more flat and disagreeable. I must confess I prefer Tasso far
+beyond him; nay, even that sleepy tale-teller Ariosto."</p>
+
+<p>"May I take the liberty to ask if you do not receive great pleasure
+from reading Horace?" said Candide. "There are maxims in this
+writer," replied Pococurant&eacute;, "from whence a man of the world may
+reap some benefit; and the short measure of the verse makes them
+more easily to be retained in the memory. But I see nothing
+extraordinary in his journey to Brundusium, and his account of his
+bad dinner; nor in his dirty, low quarrel between one Rupilius,
+whose words, as he expresses it, were full of poisonous filth; and
+another, whose language was dipped in vinegar. His indelicate
+verses against old women and witches have frequently given me great
+offence; nor can I discover the great merit of his telling his
+friend M&aelig;cenas, that, if he will but rank him in the class of lyric
+poets, his lofty head shall touch the stars. Ignorant readers are
+apt to advance every thing by the lump in a writer of reputation.
+For my part, I read only to please myself. I like nothing but what
+makes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span> for my purpose." Candide, who had been brought up with a
+notion of never making use of his own judgment, was astonished at
+what he heard; but Martin found there was a good deal of reason in
+the senator's remarks.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, here is a Tully!" said Candide; "this great man, I fancy, you
+are never tired of reading."&mdash;"Indeed, I never read him at all,"
+replied Pococurant&eacute;. "What a deuce is it to me whether he pleads
+for Rabirius or Cluentius? I try causes enough myself. I had once
+some liking to his philosophical works; but when I found he doubted
+of every thing, I thought I knew as much as himself, and had no
+need of a guide to learn ignorance."</p>
+
+<p>"Ha!" cried Martin, "here are fourscore volumes of the 'Memoirs of
+the Academy of Sciences;' perhaps there may be something curious
+and valuable in this collection."&mdash;"Yes," answered Pococurant&eacute;; "so
+there might, if any one of these compilers of this rubbish had only
+invented the art of pin-making. But all these volumes are filled
+with mere chimerical systems, without one single article conducive
+to real utility."</p>
+
+<p>"I see a prodigious number of plays," said Candide, "in Italian,
+Spanish, and French."&mdash;"Yes," replied the Venetian; "there are, I
+think, three thousand, and not three dozen of them good for any
+thing. As to those huge volumes of divinity, and those enormous
+collections of sermons, they are not all together worth one single
+page of Seneca; and I fancy you will readily believe that neither
+myself nor any one else ever looks into them."</p>
+
+<p>Martin, perceiving some shelves filled with English books, said to
+the senator, "I fancy that a republican must be highly delighted
+with those books, which are most of them written with a noble
+spirit of freedom."&mdash;"It is noble to write as we think," said
+Pococurant&eacute;; "it is the privilege of humanity. Throughout Italy we
+write only what we do not think; and the present inhabitants of the
+country of the C&aelig;sars and Antoninuses dare not acquire a single
+idea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span> without the permission of a father Dominican. I should be
+enamoured of the spirit of the English nation did it not utterly
+frustrate the good effects it would produce by passion and the
+spirit of party."</p>
+
+<p>Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think
+that author a great man. "Who!" said Pococurant&eacute; sharply. "That
+barbarian, who writes a tedious commentary, in ten books of
+rambling verse, on the first chapter of Genesis! That slovenly
+imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation by making the
+Messiah take a pair of compasses from heaven's armory to plan the
+world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole
+universe by his fiat! Can I think you have any esteem for a writer
+who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer,
+sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him
+say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses
+him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation
+of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils
+and angels cannonading each other in heaven! Neither I, nor any
+other Italian, can possibly take pleasure in such melancholy
+reveries. But the marriage of Sin and Death, and snakes issuing
+from the womb of the former, are enough to make any person sick
+that is not lost to all sense of delicacy. This obscene, whimsical,
+and disagreeable poem met with the neglect that it deserved at its
+first publication; and I only treat the author now as he was
+treated in his own country by his contemporaries."</p>
+
+<p>Candide was sensibly grieved at this speech, as he had a great
+respect for Homer, and was very fond of Milton. "Alas!" said he
+softly to Martin, "I am afraid this man holds our German poets in
+great contempt."&mdash;"There would be no such great harm in that," said
+Martin.&mdash;"Oh, what a surprising man!" said Candide to himself.
+"What a prodigious genius is this Pococurant&eacute;! Nothing can please
+him."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After finishing their survey of the library they went down into the
+garden, when Candide commended the several beauties that offered
+themselves to his view. "I know nothing upon earth laid out in such
+bad taste," said Pococurant&eacute;; "every thing about it is childish and
+trifling; but I shall have another laid out to-morrow upon a nobler
+plan."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as our two travellers had taken leave of his excellency,
+"Well," said Candide to Martin, "I hope you will own that this man
+is the happiest of all mortals, for he is above every thing he
+possesses."&mdash;"But do you not see," answered Martin, "that he
+likewise dislikes every thing he possesses? It was an observation
+of Plato long since, that those are not the best stomachs that
+reject, without distinction, all sorts of aliments."&mdash;"True," said
+Candide; "but still, there must certainly be a pleasure in
+criticising every thing, and in perceiving faults where others
+think they see beauties."&mdash;"That is," replied Martin, "there is a
+pleasure in having no pleasure."&mdash;"Well, well," said Candide, "I
+find that I shall be the only happy man at last, when I am blessed
+with the sight of my dear Cunegund."&mdash;"It is good to hope," said
+Martin. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 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 in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>teresting 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 Pococurant&eacute; is the immortal type of men that
+have worn out their capacity of fresh sensation and enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>It was a happy editorial thought of Mr. Henry Morley, in his cheap
+library, now issuing, of standard books for the people, to bind up
+Johnson's "Rasselas" in one volume with Voltaire's "Candide." The two
+stories, nearly contemporaneous in their production, offer a stimulating
+contrast in treatment, at the hands of two sharply contrasted writers,
+of much the same subject,&mdash;the unsatisfactoriness of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. John Morley, a very different writer and a very different man from
+his namesake just mentioned, has an elaborate monograph on Voltaire in a
+volume perhaps twice as large as the present. This work claims the
+attention of all students desirous of exhaustive acquaintance with its
+subject. Mr. John Morley 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. It is only in his
+two volumes on "Diderot and the Encyclop&aelig;dists," that Mr. Morley finds
+himself able to write without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span> reserve in full moral accord with the men
+whom he describes. Of course, in all these books the biographer and
+critic feels, as Englishman, obliged to concede much to his English
+audience, in the way of condemning impurities in his authors. The
+concession thus made is made with great adroitness of manner, the
+writer's aim evidently being to imply that his infidels and atheists, if
+they are somewhat vicious in taste, had the countenance of good
+Christian example or parallel for all the lapses they show. Mr. Morley
+wishes to be fair, but his atheist zeal overcomes him. This is
+especially evident in his work on "Diderot and the Encyclop&aelig;dists,"
+where his propagandist desire to clear the character of his hero bribes
+him once and again to unconscious false dealing. In his "Voltaire," and
+in his "Rousseau," Mr. Morley is so lofty in tone, expressing himself
+against the moral obliquities of the men with whom he is dealing, that
+often you feel the ethic atmosphere of the books to be pure and bracing,
+almost beyond the standard of biblical and Christian. But in his
+"Diderot and the Encyclop&aelig;dists," such fine severity is conspicuously
+absent. Mr. Morley is so deeply convinced that atheism is what we all
+most need just now, that when he has&mdash;not halting mere infidels, like
+Voltaire and Rousseau&mdash;but good thorough-going atheists, like Diderot
+and his fellows, to exhibit, he can hardly bring himself to injure their
+exemplary influence with his readers, by allowing to exist any damaging
+flaws in their character.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And we, we who are neither atheists nor deists&mdash;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, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span> to be remembered in
+his favor, when his memorable motto, "<i>&Eacute;crasez l'Inf&acirc;me</i>," is
+interpreted and applied. He did not mean Jesus Christ by <i>l'Inf&acirc;me</i>; 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, "<i>&Eacute;crasez l'Inf&acirc;me</i>," "<i>&Eacute;crasons l'Inf&acirc;me</i>,"&mdash;"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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> in fundamental
+spirit, to the evils in church and in state against which he conducted
+so gallantly his life-long campaign.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. "<i>Trajan, est-il content?</i>" ("Is
+Trajan satisfied?")&mdash;this, asked, in nauseous adulation, and nauseous
+self-abasement, by Voltaire of Louis XV., so little like Trajan in
+character&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>coup de th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>, a felicity of finish to such a life, quite beyond the
+reach of art. He came back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span> 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 theatre. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Let Carlyle's sentence be our epigraph on Voltaire:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"No great Man.... Found always at the top, less by power in
+swimming than by lightness in floating." </p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">ROUSSEAU.</p>
+
+<p class="c">1712-1778.</p>
+
+
+<p>There are two Rousseaus in French literature. At least, there was a
+first, until the second effaced him, and became the only.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The "Confessions" begin as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I purpose an undertaking that never had an example, and whose
+execution never will have an imitator. I would exhibit to my
+fellows a man in all the truth of nature, and that man&mdash;myself.</p>
+
+<p>Myself alone. I know my own heart, and I am acquainted with men. I
+am made unlike any one I have ever seen,&mdash;I dare believe unlike any
+living being. If no better than, I am at least different from,
+others. Whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mould
+wherein I was cast, can be determined only after having read me.</p>
+
+<p>Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I will come, with this
+book in my hand, and present myself before the Sover<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span>eign Judge. I
+will boldly proclaim: Thus have I acted, thus have I thought, such
+was I. With equal frankness have I disclosed the good and the evil.
+I have omitted nothing bad, added nothing good; and if I have
+happened to make use of some unimportant ornament, it has, in every
+case, been simply for the purpose of filling up a void occasioned
+by my lack of memory. I may have taken for granted as true what I
+knew to be possible, never what I knew to be false. Such as I was,
+I have exhibited myself,&mdash;despicable and vile, when so; virtuous,
+generous, sublime, when so. I have unveiled my interior being, such
+as Thou, Eternal Existence, hast beheld it. Assemble around me the
+numberless throng of my fellow-mortals; let them listen to my
+confessions, let them blush at my depravities, let them shrink
+appalled at my miseries. Let each of them, in his turn, with equal
+sincerity, lay bare his heart at the foot of thy throne, and then
+let a single one tell thee, if he dare, <i>I was better than that
+man</i>. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 pretence of telling his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The "Confessions" proceed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I was born at Geneva, in 1712, of Isaac Rousseau and Susannah
+Bernard, citizens.... I came into the world weak and sickly. I cost
+my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes.</p>
+
+<p>I never learned how my father supported his loss, but I know that
+he remained ever after inconsolable.... When he used to say to me,
+"Jean Jacques, let us speak of your mother," my usual reply was,
+"Well, father, we'll cry, then," a reply which would instantly
+bring the tears to his eyes. "Ah!" he would exclaim with agitation,
+"give me her back, console me for her loss, fill up the void she
+has left in my soul. Could I love thee thus wert thou but <i>my</i>
+son?" Forty years after having lost her he expired in the arms of a
+second wife, but with the name of the first on his lips, and her
+image engraven on his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the authors of my being. Of all the gifts Heaven had
+allotted them, a feeling heart was the only one I had inherited.
+While, however, this had been the source of their happiness, it
+became the spring of all my misfortunes. </p></div>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span> write with his heart; but heart's blood was the ink in
+which almost every word of Rousseau's was written. This was the spring
+of his marvellous power. Rousseau:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>My mother had left a number of romances. These father and I betook
+us to reading during the evenings. At first the sole object was, by
+means of entertaining books, to improve me in reading; but, ere
+long, the charm became so potent, that we read turn about without
+intermission, and passed whole nights in this employment. Never
+could we break up till the end of the volume. At times my father,
+hearing the swallows of a morning, would exclaim, quite ashamed of
+himself, "Come, let's to bed; I'm more of a child than you are!" </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I soon acquired, by this dangerous course, not only an extreme
+facility in reading and understanding, but, for my age, a quite
+unprecedented acquaintance with the passions. I had not the
+slightest conception of things themselves, at a time when the whole
+round of sentiments was already perfectly familiar to me. I had
+apprehended nothing&mdash;I had felt all. </p></div>
+
+<p>Some hint now of other books read by the boy:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>With the summer of 1719 the romance-reading terminated.... "The
+History of the Church and Empire" by Lesueur, Bossuet's
+"Dissertation on Universal History," Plutarch's "Lives," Nani's
+"History of Venice," Ovid's "Metamorphoses," "La Bruy&egrave;re,"
+Fontenelle's "Worlds," his "Dialogues of the Dead," and a few
+volumes of Moli&egrave;re, were transported into my father's shop; and I
+read them to him every day during his work. For this employment I
+acquired a rare, and, for my age, perhaps unprecedented, taste.
+Plutarch especially became my favorite reading. The pleasure which
+I found in incessantly reperusing him, cured me in some measure of
+the romance madness; and I soon came to prefer Agesilaus, Brutus,
+and Aristides, to Orondates, Artemenes, and Juba. From these
+interesting studies, joined to the conversations to which they gave
+rise with my father, resulted that free, republican spirit, that
+haughty and untamable character, fretful of restraint or
+subjection, which has tormented me my life long, and that in
+situations the least suitable for giving it play. Incessantly
+occupied with Rome and Athens, living, so to speak, with their
+great men, born myself the citizen of a republic [Geneva], the son
+of a father with whom patriotism was the ruling passion, I caught
+the flame from him&mdash;I imagined myself a Greek or a Roman, and
+became the personage whose life I was reading. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 thus in part was formed the dreamer of
+the "&Eacute;mile" and of "The Social Contract." Another glimpse of the
+home-life&mdash;if home-life such experience can be called&mdash;of this
+half-orphan, homeless Genevan boy:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I had a brother, my elder by seven years.... He fell into the ways
+of debauchery, even before he was old enough to be really a
+libertine.... I remember once when my father was chastising him
+severely and in anger, that I impetuously threw myself between
+them, clasping him tightly. I thus covered him with my body,
+receiving the blows that were aimed at him; and I held out so
+persistently in this position, that whether softened by my cries
+and tears, or fearing that I should get the worst of it, my father
+was forced to forgive him. In the end my brother turned out so bad
+that he ran away and disappeared altogether. </p></div>
+
+<p>It is pathetic&mdash;Rousseau's attempted contrast following, between the
+paternal neglect of his older brother and the paternal indulgence of
+himself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If this poor lad was carelessly brought up, it was quite otherwise
+with his brother.... My desires were so little excited, and so
+little crossed, that it never came into my head to have any. I can
+solemnly aver, that, till the time when I was bound to a master, I
+never knew what it was to have a whim. </p></div>
+
+<p>Poor lad! "Never knew what it was to have a whim!" It well might be,
+however&mdash;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!
+The "Confessions" truly say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Thus commenced the formation or the manifestation in me of that
+heart at once so haughty and so tender, of that effeminate and yet
+unconquerable character which, ever vacillating between courage and
+weakness, between virtue<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span> and yielding to temptation, has all along
+set me in contradiction to myself, and has resulted in my failing
+both of abstinence and enjoyment, both of prudence and pleasure. </p></div>
+
+<p>The half-orphan becomes orphan entire, not by the death, but by the
+withdrawing, of the father. That father, having been accused of a
+misdemeanor, "preferred," Rousseau somewhat vaguely says, "to quit
+Geneva for the remainder of his life, rather than give up a point
+wherein honor and liberty appeared to him compromised." Jean Jacques was
+sent to board with a parson, who taught him Latin, and, along with
+Latin, supplied, Rousseau scornfully says, "all the accompanying mass of
+paltry rubbish styled education." He adds:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The country was so entirely new to me, that I could never grow
+weary in my enjoyment of it; and I acquired so strong a liking for
+it, that it has never become extinguished. </p></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I learned to covet in silence, to dissemble, to dissimulate, to
+lie, and at last to steal,&mdash;a propensity for which I had never
+hitherto had the slightest inclination, and of which I have never
+since been able quite to cure myself....</p>
+
+<p>My first theft was the result of complaisance, but it opened the
+door to others which had not so laudable a motive.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My master had a journeyman named M. Verrat.... [He] took it into
+his head to rob his mother of some of her early asparagus and sell
+it, converting the proceeds into some extra good breakfasts. As he
+did not wish to expose himself, and not being very nimble, he
+selected me for this expedition.... Long did I stickle, but he
+persisted. I never could resist kindness, so I consented. I went
+every morning to the garden, gathered the best of the asparagus,
+and took it to "the Molard," where some good creature, perceiving
+that I had just been stealing it, would insinuate that little fact,
+so as to get it the cheaper. In my terror I took whatever she chose
+to give me, and carried it to M. Verrat.</p>
+
+<p>This little domestic arrangement continued for several days before
+it came into my head to rob the robber, and tithe M. Verrat for the
+proceeds of the asparagus.... I thus learned that to steal was,
+after all, not so very terrible a thing as I had conceived; and ere
+long I turned this discovery to so good an account, that nothing I
+had an inclination for could safely be left within my reach....</p>
+
+<p>And now, before giving myself over to the fatality of my destiny,
+let me, for a moment, contemplate what would naturally have been my
+lot had I fallen into the hands of a better master. Nothing was
+more agreeable to my tastes, nor better calculated to render me
+happy, than the calm and obscure condition of a good artisan, more
+especially in certain lines, such as that of an engraver at
+Geneva.... In my native country, in the bosom of my religion, of my
+family, and my friends, I should have led a life gentle and
+uncheckered as became my character, in the uniformity of a pleasing
+occupation and among connections dear to my heart. I should have
+been a good Christian, a good citizen, a good father, a good
+friend, a good artisan, and a good man in every respect. I should
+have loved my station; it may be I should have been an honor to it:
+and after having passed an obscure and simple, though even and
+happy, life,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span> I should peacefully have departed in the bosom of my
+kindred. Soon, it may be, forgotten, I should at least have been
+regretted as long as the remembrance of me survived.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of this... what a picture am I about to draw! </p></div>
+
+<p>Thus ends the first book of the "Confessions."</p>
+
+<p>The picture Rousseau is "about to draw" has in it a certain Madame de
+Warens for a principal figure. (Apprentice Jean Jacques has left his
+master, and entered on a vagabond life.) This lady is a character very
+difficult for us Protestant Americans in our contrasted society to
+conceive as real or as possible. She kept a house of, what shall we call
+it? detention, for souls doubtfully in the way of being reclaimed from
+Protestant error into the bosom of the Roman-Catholic Church. She was
+herself a Roman-Catholic convert from Protestantism. She 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 loathness
+of self-respect to prevent his detailing the absurd adventures with
+which he diverted himself on the way. For example:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Not a country-seat could I see, either to the right or left,
+without going after the adventure which I was certain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span> awaited me.
+I could not muster courage to enter the mansion, nor even to knock,
+for I was excessively timid; but I sang beneath the most inviting
+window, very much astonished to find, after wasting my breath, that
+neither lady nor miss made her appearance, attracted by the beauty
+of my voice, or the spice of my songs,&mdash;seeing that I knew some
+capital ones that my comrades had taught me, and which I sang in
+the most admirable manner. </p></div>
+
+<p>Rousseau describes the emotions he experienced in his first meeting with
+Madame de Warens:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I had pictured to myself a grim old devotee&mdash;M. de Pontverre's
+"worthy lady" could, in my opinion, be none other. But lo, a
+countenance beaming with charms, beautiful, mild blue eyes, a
+complexion of dazzling fairness, the outline of an enchanting neck!
+Nothing escaped the rapid glance of the young proselyte; for that
+instant I was hers, sure that a religion preached by such
+missionaries could not fail to lead to paradise! </p></div>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span> 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>My father was not only an honorable man, but a person of the most
+reliable probity, and endowed with one of those powerful minds that
+perform deeds of loftiest heroism. I may add, he was a good father,
+especially to me. Tenderly did he love me, but he loved his
+pleasures also; and, since our living apart, other ties had, in a
+measure, weakened his paternal affection. He had married again, at
+Nyon; and though his wife was no longer of an age to present me
+with brothers, yet she had connections; another family-circle was
+thus formed, other objects engrossed his attention, and the new
+domestic relations no longer so frequently brought back the
+remembrance of me. My father was growing old, and had nothing on
+which to rely for the support of his declining years. My brother
+and I had something coming to us from my mother's fortune; the
+interest of this my father was to receive during our absence. This
+consideration did not present itself to him directly, nor did it
+stand in the way of his doing his duty; it had, however, a silent,
+and to himself imperceptible, influence, and at times slackened his
+zeal, which, unacted upon by this, would have been carried much
+farther. This, I think, was the reason, that, having traced me as
+far as Annecy, he did not follow me to Chamberi, where he was
+morally certain of overtaking me. This will also explain why, in
+visiting him many times after my flight, I received from him on
+every occasion a father's kindness, though unaccompanied by any
+very pressing efforts to retain me. </p></div>
+
+<p>Rousseau's filial regard for his father was peculiar. It did not lead
+him to hide, it only led him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span> 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,&mdash;a maxim, which, as he thought, had
+done him great good. He says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This conduct on the part of a father of whose affection and virtue
+I have had so many proofs, has given rise within me to reflections
+on my own character which have not a little contributed to maintain
+my heart uncorrupted. I have derived therefrom this great maxim of
+morality, perhaps the only one of any use in practice; namely, to
+avoid such situations as put our duty in antagonism with our
+interest, or disclose our own advantage in the misfortunes of
+another, certain that in such circumstances, however sincere the
+love of virtue we bring with us, it will sooner or later, and
+whether we perceive it or not, become weakened, and we shall come
+to be unjust and culpable in our acts without having ceased to be
+upright and blameless in our intentions. </p></div>
+
+<p>The fruitful maxim thus deduced by Rousseau, he thinks he tried
+faithfully to put in practice. With apparent perfect assurance
+concerning himself, he says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I have sincerely desired to do what was right. I have, with all the
+energy of my character, shunned situations which set my interest in
+opposition to the interest of another, thus inspiring me with a
+secret though involuntary desire prejudicial to that man. </p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+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 this 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.</p>
+
+<p>The end of several vicissitudes is, that young Rousseau gets back to
+Madame de Warens. She welcomes him kindly. He says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>From the first day, the most affectionate familiarity sprang up
+between us, and that to the same degree in which it continued
+during all the rest of her life. <i>Petit</i>&mdash;Child&mdash;was my name,
+<i>Maman</i>&mdash;Mamma&mdash;hers; and <i>Petit</i> and <i>Maman</i> we remained, even
+when the course of time had all but effaced the difference of our
+ages. These two names seem to me marvellously well to express our
+tone towards each other, the simplicity of our manners, and, more
+than all, the relation of our hearts. She was to me the tenderest
+of mothers, never seeking her own pleasure, but ever my welfare;
+and if the senses had any thing to do with my attach<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span>ment for her,
+it was not to change its nature, but only to render it more
+exquisite, and intoxicate me with the charm of having a young and
+pretty mamma whom it was delightful for me to caress. I say quite
+literally, to caress; for it never entered into her head to deny me
+the tenderest maternal kisses and endearments, nor into my heart to
+abuse them. Some may say that, in the end, quite other relations
+subsisted between us. I grant it; but have patience,&mdash;I cannot tell
+every thing at once. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 he forsook her.
+Rousseau's whole life was a series of self-indulgences, grovelling,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span> make one willing to play tramp one's
+self, if one by so doing might have such an experience:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I remember, particularly, having passed a delicious night without
+the city on a road that skirted the Rhone or the Sa&ocirc;ne, for I
+cannot remember which. On the other side were terraced gardens. It
+had been a very warm day; the evening was charming; the dew
+moistened the faded grass; a calm night, without a breeze; the air
+was cool without being cold; the sun in setting had left crimson
+vapors in the sky, which tinged the water with its roseate hue,
+while the trees along the terrace were filled with nightingales
+gushing out melodious answers to each other's song. I walked along
+in a species of ecstasy, giving up heart and senses to the
+enjoyment of the scene, only slightly sighing with regret at
+enjoying it alone. Absorbed in my sweet reverie, I prolonged my
+walk far into the night, without perceiving that I was wearied out.
+At length I discovered it. I lay voluptuously down on the tablet of
+a sort of niche or false door sunk in the terrace wall. The canopy
+of my couch was formed by the over-arching boughs of the trees; a
+nightingale sat exactly above me; its song lulled me to sleep; my
+slumber was sweet, and my awaking still more so. It was broad day;
+my eyes, on opening, fell on the water, the verdure, and the
+admirable landscape spread out before me. I arose and shook off
+dull sleep; and, growing hungry, I gayly directed my steps towards
+the city, bent on transforming two <i>pi&egrave;ces de six blancs</i> that I
+had left, into a good breakfast. I was so cheerful that I went
+singing along the whole way. </p></div>
+
+<p>This happy-go-lucky, vagabond, grown-up child, this sentimentalist of
+genius, had now and then different experiences,&mdash;experiences to which
+the reflection of the man grown old attributes important influence on
+the formation of his most controlling beliefs:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>One day, among others, having purposely turned aside to get a
+closer view of a spot that appeared worthy of all admiration, I
+grew so delighted with it, and wandered round it so often, that I
+at length lost myself completely. After several hours of useless
+walking, weary and faint with hunger and thirst, I entered a
+peasant's hut which did not present a very promising appearance,
+but it was the only one I saw around. I conceived it to be here as
+at Geneva and throughout Switzerland, where all the inhabitants in
+easy circumstances are in the situation to exercise hospitality. I
+entreated the man to get me some dinner, offering to pay for it. He
+presented me with some skimmed milk and coarse barley bread,
+observing that that was all he had. I drank the milk with delight,
+and ate the bread, chaff and all; but this was not very restorative
+to a man exhausted with fatigue. The peasant, who was watching me
+narrowly, judged of the truth of my story by the sincerity of my
+appetite. All of a sudden, after having said that he saw perfectly
+well that I was a good and true young fellow that did not come to
+betray him, he opened a little trap-door by the side of his
+kitchen, went down and returned a moment afterwards with a good
+brown loaf of pure wheat, the remains of a toothsome ham, and a
+bottle of wine, the sight of which rejoiced my heart more than all
+the rest. To these he added a good thick omelette, and I made such
+a dinner as none but a walker ever enjoyed. When it came to pay,
+lo! his disquietude and fears again seized him; he would none of my
+money, and rejected it with extraordinary manifestations of
+disquiet. The funniest part of the matter was, that I could not
+conceive what he was afraid of. At length, with fear and trembling,
+he pronounced those terrible words, <i>Commissioners</i> and
+<i>Cellar-rats</i>. He gave me to understand that he concealed his wine
+because of the excise, and his bread on account of the tax, and
+that he was a lost man if they got the slightest inkling that he
+was not dying of hunger. Every thing he said to me touching this
+matter, whereof,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span> indeed, I had not the slightest idea, produced an
+impression on me that can never be effaced. It became the germ of
+that inextinguishable hatred that afterwards sprang up in my heart
+against the vexations to which these poor people are subject, and
+against their oppressors. This man, though in easy circumstances,
+dared not eat the bread he had gained by the sweat of his brow, and
+could escape ruin only by presenting the appearance of the same
+misery that reigned around him. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 we
+emphatically call character was sadly wanting in Rousseau&mdash;how sadly,
+witness such an acted piece of mad folly as the following:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I, without knowing aught of the matter,... gave myself out for a
+[musical] composer. Nor was this all: having been presented to M.
+de Freytorens, law-professor, who loved music, and gave concerts at
+his house, nothing would do but I must give him a sample of my
+talent; so I set about composing a piece for his concert quite as
+boldly as though I had really been an adept in the science. I had
+the constancy to work for fifteen days on this fine affair, to copy
+it fair, write out the different parts, and distribute them with as
+much assurance as though it had been a masterpiece of harmony.
+Then, what will scarcely be believed, but which yet is gospel
+truth, worthily to crown this sublime production, I tacked to the
+end thereof a pretty minuet which was then having a run on the
+streets.... I gave it as my own<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span> just as resolutely as though I had
+been speaking to inhabitants of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>They assembled to perform my piece. I explain to each the nature of
+the movement, the style of execution, and the relations of the
+parts&mdash;I was very full of business. For five or six minutes they
+were tuning; to me each minute seemed an age. At length, all being
+ready, I rap with a handsome paper <i>b&acirc;ton</i> on the leader's desk the
+five or six beats of the "<i>Make ready</i>." Silence is made&mdash;I gravely
+set to beating time&mdash;they commence! No, never since French operas
+began, was there such a <i>charivari</i> heard. Whatever they might have
+thought of my pretended talent, the effect was worse than they
+could possibly have imagined. The musicians choked with laughter;
+the auditors opened their eyes, and would fain have closed their
+ears. But that was an impossibility. My tormenting set of
+symphonists, who seemed rather to enjoy the fun, scraped away with
+a din sufficient to crack the tympanum of one born deaf. I had the
+firmness to go right ahead, however, sweating, it is true, at every
+pore, but held back by shame; not daring to retreat, and glued to
+the spot. For my consolation I heard the company whispering to each
+other, quite loud enough for it to reach my ear: "It is not
+bearable!" said one. "What music gone mad!" cried another. "What a
+devilish din!" added a third. Poor Jean Jacques, little dreamed
+you, in that cruel moment, that one day before the King of France
+and all the court, thy sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and
+applause, and that in all the boxes around thee the loveliest
+ladies would burst forth with, "What charming sounds! what
+enchanting music! every strain reaches the heart!"</p>
+
+<p>But what restored every one to good humor was the minuet. Scarcely
+had they played a few measures than I heard bursts of laughter
+break out on all hands. Every one congratulated me on my fine
+musical taste; they assured me that this minuet would make me
+spoken about, and that I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span> merited the loudest praises. I need not
+attempt depicting my agony, nor own that I well deserved it. </p></div>
+
+<p>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 a later 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):&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my
+genius, and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in
+my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of
+thinking.... It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for a
+livelihood. </p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span> on a lofty
+plane. The trouble with him was, not that he thus thought with his
+heart, rather than with his head,&mdash;which, however, he did,&mdash;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&mdash;for we have used too positive a
+form of expression&mdash;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 "&Eacute;mile"), to change the habit of a nation in
+the matter of 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span> he intermingles with self-justifications, nearly as
+many,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 that had lately set all Europe in ferment with
+the "&Eacute;mile" and "The Social Contract."</p>
+
+<p>From Rousseau's "Confessions," we have not room to purvey further. It is
+a melancholy book,&mdash;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
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 sombre, in
+spirit, but "beautiful exceedingly," in form of expression. Such works
+as the "R&eacute;n&eacute;" of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French
+literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau's "Walks." We
+introduce two specimen extracts. The shadow of Rousseau's monomania will
+be felt thick upon them:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is now fifteen years since I have been in this strange
+situation, which yet appears to me like a dream; ever imagining
+that, disturbed by indigestion, I sleep uneasily, but shall soon
+awake, freed from my troubles, but surrounded by my friends....</p>
+
+<p>How could I possibly foresee the destiny that awaited me?... Could
+I, if in my right senses, suppose that one day, the man I was, and
+yet remain, should be taken, without any kind of doubt, for a
+monster, a poisoner, an assassin, the horror of the human race, the
+sport of the rabble, my only salutation to be spit upon, and that a
+whole genera<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>tion would unanimously amuse themselves in burying me
+alive? When this strange revolution first happened, taken by
+unawares, I was overwhelmed with astonishment; my agitation, my
+indignation, plunged me into a delirium, which ten years have
+scarcely been able to calm: during this interval, falling from
+error to error, from fault to fault, and folly to folly, I have, by
+my imprudence, furnished the contrivers of my fate with
+instruments, which they have artfully employed to fix it without
+resource....</p>
+
+<p class="top">Every future occurrence will be immaterial to me; I have in the
+world neither relative, friend, nor brother; I am on the earth as
+if I had fallen into some unknown planet; if I contemplate any
+thing around me, it is only distressing, heart-rending objects;
+every thing I cast my eyes on conveys some new subject either of
+indignation or affliction; I will endeavor henceforward to banish
+from my mind all painful ideas which unavailingly distress me.
+Alone for the rest of my life, I must only look for consolation,
+hope, or peace in my own breast; and neither ought nor will,
+henceforward, think of any thing but myself. It is in this state
+that I return to the continuation of that severe and just
+examination which formerly I called my Confessions; I consecrate my
+latter days to the study of myself, and to the preparation of that
+account which I must shortly render up of my actions. I resign my
+thoughts entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my own soul;
+that being the only consolation that man cannot deprive me of. If
+by dint of reflection on my internal propensities, I can attain to
+putting them in better order, and correcting the evil that remains
+in me, these meditations will not be utterly useless; and though I
+am accounted worthless on earth, shall not cast away my latter
+days. The leisure of my daily walks has frequently been filled with
+charming contemplations, which I regret having forgot; but I will
+write down those that occur in future; then, every time I read them
+over, I shall forget my misfor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>tunes, disgraces, and persecutors,
+in recollecting and contemplating the integrity of my own heart. </p></div>
+
+<p>Rousseau'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
+"&Eacute;mile." 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures
+strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its
+influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with
+all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they,
+compared with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so
+simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible
+that the Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be
+himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an
+enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in
+his manners! What an affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What
+sublimity in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses!
+What presence of mind, what subtilety, what truth, in his replies!
+How great the command over his passions! Where is the man, where
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span> philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness and
+without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man
+loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest reward
+of virtue, he described exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the
+resemblance was so striking that all the Fathers perceived it.</p>
+
+<p>What prepossession, what blindness, must it be to compare the son
+of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion
+there is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy,
+easily supported his character to the last; and if his death,
+however easy, had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted
+whether Socrates, with all his wisdom, was any thing more than a
+vain sophist. He invented, it is said, the theory of morals.
+Others, however, had before put them in practice; he had only to
+say what they had done, and reduce their examples to precepts.
+Aristides had been <i>just</i> before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas
+gave up his life for his country before Socrates declared
+patriotism to be a duty; the Spartans were a sober people before
+Socrates recommended sobriety; before he had even defined virtue,
+Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where could Jesus learn, among
+his compatriots, that pure and sublime morality of which he only
+has given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made
+known amidst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the
+most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on the earth.
+The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing with his friends,
+appears the most agreeable that could be wished for; that of Jesus,
+expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed
+by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared.
+Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the
+weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of
+excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if
+the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and
+death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span> suppose the evangelic
+history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks
+of fiction; on the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody
+presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ.
+Such a supposition, in fact, only shifts the difficulty without
+removing it; it is more inconceivable that a number of persons
+should agree to write such a history, than that one only should
+furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the
+diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the gospel, the
+marks of whose truth are so striking and inimitable that the
+inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero. </p></div>
+
+<p>So far in eloquent ascription of incomparable excellence to the Bible
+and to the Founder of Christianity. But then immediately Rousseau's
+Curate proceeds:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>And yet, with all this, the same gospel abounds with incredible
+relations, with circumstances repugnant to reason, and which it is
+impossible for a man of sense either to conceive or admit. </p></div>
+
+<p>The compliment to Christianity almost convinces you,&mdash;until suddenly you
+are apprised that the author of the compliment was not convinced
+himself!</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">THE ENCYCLOP&AElig;DISTS.</p>
+
+
+<p>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 Encyclop&aelig;dists. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody has heard of the Encyclop&aelig;dists 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,&mdash;in one word, of an encyclop&aelig;dia. The
+project was a laudable one; and the motive to it was laudable&mdash;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 encyclop&aelig;dist collaborators may have thought to be an
+indispensable means subsidiary to the former end. They probably did
+think so&mdash;with such imperfect sincerity as is possible to those who set
+themselves, consciously or unconsciously, against God. The fact<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span> is,
+that the Encyclop&aelig;dists 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 implication, awaiting the unwary
+feet of the reader. 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
+Encyclop&aelig;dists 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 Encyclop&aelig;dists 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
+Encyclop&aelig;dists 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 "Encyclop&aelig;dia" was as revolutionary in
+politics as it was atheistic in religion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The leader in this movement of insurrectionary thought was Denis
+Diderot. Diderot (1713-1784) was born to be an encyclop&aelig;dist, and a
+captain of encyclop&aelig;dists. 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 any thing 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 over-earnest man; abundant physical health,&mdash;gifts such
+as these made up the manifold equipment of Diderot for rowing and
+steering the gigantic enterprise of the "Encyclop&aelig;dia" 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 but Diderot could have achieved the "Encyclop&aelig;dia." 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 "Encyclop&aelig;dia" would never have been achieved.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;not, of course, habitual, but occasional,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span> 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 conversation. His truest claim to praise
+for intellectual superiority is, perhaps, that he was a prolific
+begetter of wit in other men.</p>
+
+<p>D'Alembert (Jean le Rond, 1717-1783) was an eminent mathematician. He
+wrote especially, though not at first exclusively, on mathematical
+subjects, for the "Encyclop&aelig;dia." 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 "Encyclop&aelig;dia,"&mdash;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 "Encyclop&aelig;dia," 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 "Encyclop&aelig;dia" 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span> establish for themselves a theatre.
+This brought out Rousseau in an eloquent harangue against the theatre as
+exerting influence to debauch public morals. D'Alembert, in the contest,
+did not carry off the honors of the day. D'Alembert's "&Eacute;loges," 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.</p>
+
+<p>Diderot and D'Alembert are the only men whose names appear on the
+title-page of the "Encyclop&aelig;dia;" but Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot,
+Helv&eacute;tius, Duclos, Condillac, Buffon, Grimm, D'Holbach, with many others
+whom we must not stay even to mention, contributed to the work.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of the "Encyclop&aelig;dia," great during its day, is by no
+means yet exhausted. But it is an influence indirectly exerted, for the
+"Encyclop&aelig;dia" itself has long been an obsolete work.</p>
+
+<p>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 Encyclop&aelig;dists, 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 mean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>time was portentously preparing material
+for a literature which many wondering centuries to follow would occupy
+themselves with writing.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII.</h2>
+
+<p class="c">EPILOGUE.</p>
+
+
+<p>In looking backward over the preceding pages, we think of many things
+which we should like still to say. Of these many things, we limit
+ourselves to saying here, as briefly as we can, some four or five only.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, in nearly every successive case, we have found ourselves
+lamenting afresh that, from the authors to be represented, the
+representative extracts must needs be so few and so short. We have,
+therefore, sincerely begrudged to ourselves every line of room that we
+felt obliged to occupy with matter, preparatory, explanatory, or
+critical, of our own. Whatever success we may have achieved in
+fulfilling our purpose, our purpose has been to say ourselves barely so
+much as was indispensable in order finally to convey, upon the whole, to
+our readers, within the allotted space, the justest and the fullest
+impression of the selected authors, through the medium of their own
+quoted words.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, it was with great regret that we yielded to the
+necessity of omitting entirely, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span> dismissing with scant mention, such
+literary names, for example, as Boileau, of the age of Louis Quatorze,
+and, a little later than he, Fontenelle, spanning with his century of
+years the space from 1657 to 1757,&mdash;these, and, belonging to the period
+that ushered in the Revolution, Bernardin St. Pierre, the teller of the
+tale of "Paul and Virginia," with also that hero of a hundred romantic
+adventures, Beaumarchais, half Themistocles, half Alcibiades, the author
+of "The Barber of Seville." The line had to be drawn somewhere; and,
+whether wisely or not, at least thoughtfully, we drew it to run as it
+does.</p>
+
+<p>A third, and a yet graver, occasion of regret was that we must stop
+short on the threshold, without crossing it, of the nineteenth-century
+literature of France. With so many shining names seen just ahead of us,
+beacon-like, to invite our advance, we felt it as a real self-denial to
+stay our steps at that point. We hope still to deal with Chateaubriand,
+Madame de Sta&euml;l, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo,
+and perhaps others, in a future volume.</p>
+
+<p>Our eye is caught with the antithetical terms, "classicism" and
+"romanticism," occurring here and there; and the observation is forced
+upon us, that these terms, in their mutual relation, are nowhere by us
+defined. The truth is, they scarcely, as thus used, admit of hard and
+fast definition. It is in a somewhat loose conventional sense of each
+term, that, in late literary language, they are set<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span> off, one over
+against the other. They name two different, but by no means necessarily
+antagonistic, forces or tendencies in literature. Classicism stands for
+what you might call the established order, against which romanticism is
+a revolt. Paradoxical though it be to say so, both the established
+order, and the revolt against it, are good things. The established
+order, which was never really any thing more or less than the dominance
+in literature of rules and standards derived through criticism from the
+acknowledged best models, especially the ancient, tended at last to
+cramp and stifle the life which it should, of course, only serve to
+shape and conform. The mould, always too narrow perhaps, but at any rate
+grown too rigid, needed itself to be fashioned anew. Fresh life, a full
+measure, would do this. Such is the true mission of romanticism,&mdash;not to
+break the mould that classicism sought to impose on literary production,
+but to expand that mould, make it more pliant, more free. A mould, for
+things living and growing, should be plastic in the passive, as well as
+in the active, sense of that word,&mdash;should accept form, as well as give
+form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not
+when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when it
+shall have made classicism over, after the law of a larger life. To risk
+a concrete illustration&mdash;among our American poets, Bryant, in the
+perfectly self-consistent unity of his whole intellectual development,
+may be said to rep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span>resent classicism; while in Lowell, as Lowell appears
+in the later, more protracted, phase of his genius, romanticism is
+represented. The "Thanatopsis" of Bryant and the "Cathedral" of Lowell
+may stand for individual examples respectively of the classic and the
+romantic styles in poetry. Compare these two productions, and in the
+difference between the chaste, well-pruned severity of the one, and the
+indulged, perhaps stimulated, luxuriance of the other, you will feel the
+difference between classicism and romanticism. But Victor Hugo is the
+great recent romanticist; and when, hereafter, we come to speak somewhat
+at large of him, it will be seasonable to enter more fully into the
+question of these two tendencies in literature.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot consent to have said here our very last word, without
+emphasizing once again our sense of the really extraordinary
+pervasiveness in French literature of that element in it which one does
+not like to name, even to condemn it,&mdash;we mean its impurity. The
+influence of French literary models, very strong among us just now, must
+not be permitted insensibly to pervert our own cleaner and sweeter
+national habit and taste in this matter. But we, all of us together,
+need to be both vigilant and firm; for the beginnings of corruption here
+are very insidious. Let us never grow ashamed of our saving Saxon
+shamefacedness. They may nickname it prudery, if they will; but let us,
+American and English, for our part, always take pride in such prudery.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<h2 class="t"><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX.</h2>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><small>[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. <span class="smcap">N</span> notes a
+peculiar nasal sound, &uuml;, a peculiar vowel sound, having no equivalent
+in English.]</small></p>
+
+
+
+<ul>
+<li>Ab'&eacute;-lard (1079-1142), <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+<li>Academy, French, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>&AElig;s'chy-lus, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>
+<li>&AElig;'sop, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+<li>Al-ci-bi'a-des, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Alembert. <i>See</i> <a href="#dal">D'Alembert</a>.</li>
+<li>Al-ex-an'der (the Great), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>
+<li>Al-ex-an'drine, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+<li>Am-y-ot' (&auml;-me-o&acute;), Jacques (1513-1593), <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+<li>An'ge-lo, Michel, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>
+<li>Ariosto, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.</li>
+<li>Ar'is-tot-le, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+<li>Ar-nauld' (ar-n&#333;&acute;), Antoine (1612-1694), <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>
+<li>Ar'thur (King), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+<li>Au'gus-t&#299;ne, St., Latin Christian Father, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</li>
+<li>Au'gus'tus (the Emperor), <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Ba'con, Francis, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>
+<li>Ba'ker, Jehu, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>
+<li>B&#257;&acute;laam, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li>
+<li>B&#259;l&acute;zac, Jean Louis Guez de (1594-1654), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+<li>Beau-mar-chais&acute;, de (b&#333;-mar-sh&#257;&acute;), Pierre Augustin Caron
+(1732-1799), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Benedictines, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+<li>Boi-leau&acute;-Des-pr&eacute;-aux&acute; (bw&auml;-l&#333;&acute;-d&#257;-pr&#257;-o&acute;), Nicolas
+(1636-1711), <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Bolton, A. S., <a href="#Page_69">69</a>.</li>
+<li><b>BOS-SU-ET</b>&acute;(bo-s&uuml;-&#257;&acute;), Jacques B&eacute;nigne (1627-1704), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>,
+<a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182-188</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</li>
+<li><b>BOUR-DA-LOUE</b>&acute;, Louis (1632-1704), <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>,
+<a href="#Page_189">189-197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+<li>Brook Farm, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li>
+<li>Bry&acute;ant, William Cullen, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>
+<li>Buckle, Henry Thomas, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>
+<li>Buffon (b&uuml;f-fo<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Georges Louis Leclerc de (1707-1788), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>Bur&acute;gun-dy, Duke of (1682-1712), <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+<li>Burke, Edmund, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</li>
+<li>Bussy (b&uuml;s-se&acute;), Count, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</li>
+<li>By&acute;ron, Lord, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">C&aelig;sar, Julius, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>
+<li>Calas (c&auml;-l&auml;&acute;), Jean, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+<li>Calvin, John (1509-1564), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+<li>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>
+<li>Catherine (Empress of Russia), <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>
+<li>Cham-fort&acute; (sh&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>-for&acute;), S&eacute;bastien Roch Nicolas (1741-1794), <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Chanson </i>(sh&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>-so<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+<li>Char-le-magne&acute; (shar-le-m&#257;n&acute;), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+<li>Charles I. (of England), <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</li>
+<li>Charles IX. (of France), <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>
+<li>Cha-teau-bri-and&acute; (sh&auml;-t&#333;-bre-&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Fran&ccedil;ois Auguste de (1768-1848),
+<a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Chaucer, Geoffrey, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+<li>"Classicism," <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>
+<li>Claude, Jean (1619-1687), <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.</li>
+<li>Coleridge, S. T., <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+<li>Comines (k&#333;-meen&acute;), Philippe de (1445-1509), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li>
+<li>Cond&eacute; (ko<span class="smcap">N</span>-d&#257;&acute;), Prince of, "The Great Cond&eacute;" (1621-1686), <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>
+<li>Condillac (ko<span class="smcap">N</span>de-y&auml;k&acute;), &Eacute;tienne Bonnot de (1715-1780), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>Condorcet (ko<span class="smcap">N</span>-dor-s&#257;&acute;), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat de
+(1743-1794), <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+<li><b>CORNEILLE</b> (kor-n&#257;l&acute;), Pierre (1606-1684), <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>,
+<a href="#Page_151">151-166</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>.</li>
+<li>Cotin (ko-t&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Abb&eacute;, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+<li>Cotton, Charles (1630-1687), <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+<li>Cousin (koo-z&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Victor (1792-1867), <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1"><a name="dal" id="dal">D'Alembert</a> (d&auml;-l&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>-b&ecirc;r&acute;), Jean le Rond (1717-1783), <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>Dante, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li>
+<li>David (King), <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+<li>Descartes (d&#257;-k&auml;rt&acute;), Ren&eacute; (1596-1650), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>
+<li><a name="dhol" id="dhol">D'Holbach</a> (d&#333;l-b&auml;k&acute;), Paul Henri Thyry (1723-1789), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>Dickens, Charles, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+<li>Diderot (de-dr&#333;&acute;), Denis (1713-1784), <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>,
+<a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>Dryden, John, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+<li>Duclos (d&uuml;-kl&#333;&acute;), Charles Pineau (1704-1772), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">"<i>&Eacute;crasez l'Inf&acirc;me</i>," <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>
+<li>Edinburgh Review, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</li>
+<li>Edward (the Black Prince), <a href="#Page_21">21-25</a>.</li>
+<li>Edwards, President, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li>
+<li>Emerson, Ralph Waldo, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>
+<li>Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+<li><b>ENCYCLOP&AElig;DISTS</b>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282-288</a>.</li>
+<li>Epictetus, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>
+<li>Epicurus, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+<li>Erasmus, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>.</li>
+<li>Euripides, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1"><i>Fabliaux</i> (fab&acute;le-&#333;&acute;), <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+<li>Faug&egrave;re (f&#333;-zh&ecirc;r&acute;), Arnaud Prosper (1810-&nbsp;), <a href="#Page_128">128</a>.</li>
+<li><b>F&Eacute;NELON</b> (f&#257;n-lo<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Fran&ccedil;ois de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715), <a href="#Page_12">12</a>,
+<a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205-224</a>.</li>
+<li>Fl&eacute;chier (fl&#257;-she-&#257;&acute;), Esprit (1632-1710), <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.</li>
+<li>Foix (fw&auml;), Count de, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+<li>Fontenelle (fo<span class="smcap">N</span>t-n&#277;l&acute;), Bernard le Bovier (1657-1757), <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Franciscans, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+<li>Frederick (the Great), <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+<li>Friar John, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+<li><b>FROISSART</b> (frw&auml;-sar&acute;), Jean (1337-1410?), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18-28</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Gaillard (g&#259;-yar&acute;), Gabriel Henri (1726-1806), <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li>
+<li>Gar-gant&acute;ua, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</li>
+<li>Gibbon, Edward, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+<li>Goldsmith, Oliver, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225</a>.</li>
+<li>Grignan (green-y&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Madame de, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+<li>Grimm, Friedrich Melchior (1723-1807), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>Gulliver's Travels, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+<li>Guyon (&#287;e-yo<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Madame (1648-1717), <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Hallam, Henry, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li>
+<li>Havet (&auml;-va&acute;) (editor of Pascal's works), <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li>
+<li>Hawkesworth, Dr., <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+<li>Hazlitt, W. Carew, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>.</li>
+<li>Helv&eacute;tius (&#275;l-v&#257;-se-&uuml;ss&acute;), Claude Adrien (1715-1771), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>Henriette, Princess, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</li>
+<li>Henry of Navarre, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</li>
+<li>Herod (King), <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+<li>Herodotus, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</li>
+<li>Holbach. <i>See</i> <a href="#dhol">D'Holbach</a>.</li>
+<li>Homer, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>
+<li>Hooker ("The judicious"), <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>
+<li>Horace, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>
+<li>Hugo (&uuml;-go&acute;), Victor. <i>See</i> <a href="#vich">Victor Hugo</a>.</li>
+<li>Hume, David, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Isaiah (the prophet), <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+<li>Israel, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">James (King), <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li>
+<li>Job, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li>
+<li>John (the Baptist), <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+<li>John (King), <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>
+<li>Johnes, Thomas, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li>
+<li>Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>
+<li>Joinville (zhw&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>-vel&acute;), Jean de (1224?-1319?), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+<li>Julian (the Apostate), <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Kant, Emmanuel, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+<li>Knox, John, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">La Bo&euml;tie (l&auml; b&#333;-&#259;-t&#275;&acute;), &Eacute;tienne (1530-1563), <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+<li><b>LA BRUY&Egrave;RE</b> (l&auml; br&uuml;-e-y &#234;r&acute;), Jean (1646?-1696), <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75-81</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+<li><b>LA FONTAINE</b> (l&auml; fo<span class="smcap">N</span>-t&#257;n&acute;), Jean de (1621-1695), <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81-92</a>.</li>
+<li>Lamartine (l&auml;-mar-t&#275;n&acute;), Alphonse Marie Louis de (1780-1869), <a href="#Page_14">14</a>,
+<a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Langue d'oc</i>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Langue d'o&iuml;l</i>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+<li>Lanier, Sidney (1842-1881), <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+<li><b>LA ROCHEFOUCAULD</b> (l&auml; r&#333;sh-foo-k&#333;&acute;), Fran&ccedil;ois, Duc de (1613-1680),
+<a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66-75</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</li>
+<li>Longfellow, Henry W., <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+<li>Louis IX. (1215-1270) (St. Louis), <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+<li>Louis XI. (1423-1483), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+<li>Louis XIII. (1601-1643), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li>
+<li>Louis XIV. (1638-1715) (Quatorze), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>,
+<a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217-219</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>
+<li>Louis XV. (1710-1774), <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+<li>Louvois (loo-vw&auml;&acute;), Marquis de, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</li>
+<li>Lowell, James Russell, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>
+<li>Lucan, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>
+<li>Lucretius, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+<li>Luther, Martin, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Maintenon (m&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>-teh-no<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Madame de (1635-1719), <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li>
+<li>Malherbe (m&auml;l-&#234;rb&acute;), Fran&ccedil;ois (1555-1628), <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>
+<li>Martin (mar-t&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Henri (1810-&nbsp;), <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+<li>Mary, Queen of Scots, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+<li><b>MASSILLON</b> (m&auml;s-se-yo<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Jean Baptiste (1663-1742), <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>,
+<a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197-205</a>.</li>
+<li>M'Crie, Thomas, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li>
+<li>Michael (the Archangel), <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>
+<li>Milton, John, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.</li>
+<li><a name="mol" id="mol"><b>MOLI&Egrave;RE</b></a> (mo-le-&ecirc;r&acute;) (real name, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673), <a href="#Page_12">12</a>,
+<a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92-114</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>
+<li>Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.</li>
+<li><b>MONTAIGNE</b> (mon-t&#257;n&acute;), Michel Eyquem de (1533-1592), <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44-65</a>,
+<a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>
+<li>Montespan (mo<span class="smcap">N</span>-t&#277;ss-p&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Madame de (1641-1707), <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</li>
+<li><b>MONTESQUIEU</b>, de (mo<span class="smcap">N</span>-t&#277;s-k&#234;-uh&acute;), Charles de Secondat (1689-1755),
+<a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225-237</a>.</li>
+<li>Morley, Henry, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>
+<li>Morley, John, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>
+<li>Motteux, Peter Anthony (1660-1718), <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+<li>Musset (m&uuml;-s&#257;&acute;) (1810-1857), Alfred de, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Napoleon Bonaparte, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+<li>Nathan (the prophet), <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+<li>Newton, Sir Isaac, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>
+<li>Nicole (ne-k&#335;l&acute;), Pierre (1625-1695), <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">"Obscurantism" (disposition, in the sphere of the intellect, to love
+darkness rather than light), <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Pan-tag&acute;-ru-el, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+<li>Panurge (p&auml;-n&uuml;rzh&acute;), <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+<li><b>PASCAL</b>, Blaise (1623-1662), <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115-133</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>
+<li>Pascal, Jacqueline, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li>
+<li>Pelisson (p&#277;l-&#275;-so<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+<li>Petrarch, Francesco, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+<li>Ph&aelig;drus, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+<li>Plato, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+<li>Pleiades (pl&#275;&acute;ya-d&#275;z), <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+<li>Plutarch, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+<li>Po-co-cu&acute;rant-ism, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li>
+<li>Pompadour, Madame de, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+<li>Pompey, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+<li>Pope, Alexander, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+<li>Poquelin (po-ke-l&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;). <i>See</i> <a href="#mol">Moli&egrave;re</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li>
+<li>Port Royal, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>
+<li>Pradon (pr&auml;-do<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Proven&ccedil;al</i> (pro-v&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>-sal), <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+<li>Ptolemy Philadelphus, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Quentin Durward, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1"><b>RABELAIS</b> (r&#259;-bl&#257;&acute;), Fran&ccedil;ois (1495?-1553?), <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28-43</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>,
+<a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+<li><b>RACINE</b> (r&auml;-seen&acute;), Jean (1639-1699), <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>,
+<a href="#Page_166">166-181</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>
+<li>Rambouillet (r&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>-boo-y&#257;&acute;), H&ocirc;tel de, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>,
+<a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+<li>Raphael (archangel), <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>
+<li>R&eacute;camier (r&#257;-k&auml;-me-&#257;&acute;), Madame (1777-1849), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+<li>Richard, the Lion-hearted, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>
+<li>Richelieu (r&#275;sh-le-uh&acute;), Cardinal, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Roman</i> (ro-m&auml;N&acute;), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+<li>"Romanticism," <a href="#Page_224">224</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>.</li>
+<li>"Romanticists," <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>
+<li>Ronsard (ro<span class="smcap">N</span>-sar&acute;), Pierre de (1524-1585), <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+<li>Ronsardism, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>
+<li>Rousseau (roo-s&#333;&acute;), Jean Baptiste (1670-1741), <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>
+<li><b>ROUSSEAU</b>, Jean Jacques (1712-1778), <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>,
+<a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255-281</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+<li>Ruskin, John, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li>
+<li>Rutebeuf (r&uuml;-te-buf&acute;) (<i>b.</i> 1230), <i>trouv&egrave;re,</i> <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Sabl&iacute;&egrave;re (s&auml;-bl&iuml;-&ecirc;r&acute;), Madame de la, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+<li>Saci (s&auml;-se&acute;), M. de, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li>
+<li>Saintsbury, George, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>
+<li>Sainte-Beuve (s&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>t-buv&acute;), Charles Augustin (1804-1869), <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>,
+<a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Sal&acute;a-din (Saracen antagonist of Richard the Lion-hearted), <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Salon</i> (s&auml;-lo<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+<li>Sand (s&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>d), George (Madame Dudevant, 1804-1876), <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>
+<li>Saurin (s&#333;-r&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Jacques (1677-1730), <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.</li>
+<li>"Savoyard Curate's Confession," <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</li>
+<li>Scott, Sir Walter, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</li>
+<li>Selden, John ("The learned"), <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>
+<li>Seneca, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+<li>S&Eacute;VIGN&Eacute; (s&#257;-v&#275;n-y&#257;&acute;), Madame de, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
+(1626-1696), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134-151</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</li>
+<li>Shakspeare, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>
+<li>Socrates (contrasted by Rousseau with Jesus), <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>
+<li>Sophocles, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>
+<li>Sta&euml;l-Holstein (st&auml;-&#277;l&acute; ol-st&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Anne Louise Grermanie de
+(1766-1817), <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Stanislaus (King of Poland), <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>
+<li>St. John, Bayle, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>.</li>
+<li>St. Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de (1737-1814), <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>St. Simon (s&#275;-mo<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Louis de Rouvroi, Duc de (1675-1755), <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li>
+<li>Swift, Dean, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li>
+<li>Swinburne, Algernon Charles, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Tacitus, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+<li>Taine, H. (1828-), <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+<li>Tartuffe (tar-t&uuml;f&acute;), <a href="#Page_106">106-114</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+<li>Tasso, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.</li>
+<li>Th&eacute;l&egrave;me (t&#257;&#257;-l&#277;m&acute;), <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+<li>Themistocles, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>.</li>
+<li>Thibaud (t&#275;-b&#333;&acute;), <i>troubadour</i> (1201-1253), <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+<li>Trajan, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Troubadour</i>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+<li><i>Trouv&egrave;re</i> (troo-v&ecirc;r&acute;), <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+<li>Tully (Cicero), <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>
+<li>Turgot (t&uuml;r-g&#333;&acute;), Anne RobertJacques (1727-1781), <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Urquhart, Sir Thomas, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Van Laun, H., <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>
+<li>Vatel, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>
+<li>Vauvenargues (v&#333;-ve-narg&acute;), Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de (1715-1747),
+<a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+<li>Vercingetorix, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>
+<li><a name="vich" id="vich">Victor</a> Hugo (1802-1885), <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>
+<li>Villehardouin (v&#275;l-ar-doo-&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Geoffrey (1165?-1213?), <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+<li>Villemain (v&#275;l-m&#259;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Abel Fran&ccedil;ois (1790-1870), <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+<li>Virgil, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>
+<li>Voiture (vw&auml;-t&uuml;r&acute;), Vincent (1598-1648), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+<li><b>VOLTAIRE</b> (vol-t&ecirc;r&acute;), Fran&ccedil;ois Marie Arouet de (1694-1778), <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>,
+<a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>,
+<a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238-255</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="top1">Wall, C. H., <a href="#Page_106">106</a>.</li>
+<li>Walpole, Horace, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>
+<li>Warens (v&auml;-r&auml;<span class="smcap">N</span>&acute;), Madame de, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>.</li>
+<li>Webster, Daniel, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</li>
+<li>Wright, Elizur, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,9412 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Classic French Course in English, by
+William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Classic French Course in English
+
+Author: William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+Release Date: October 14, 2007 [EBook #23033]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE IN ENGLISH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Peter Vachuska, Chuck Greif and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+=_THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES._=
+
+CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE
+
+IN ENGLISH.
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON.
+
+  NEW YORK:
+  CHAUTAUQUA PRESS,
+  C. L. S. C. DEPARTMENT,
+  805 BROADWAY.
+  1886.
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1886,
+
+BY PHILLIPS & HUNT.
+
+_OTHER VOLUMES IN THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES_
+
+  BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
+
+  *PREPARATORY GREEK COURSE IN ENGLISH       $1.00
+  **PREPARATORY LATIN COURSE IN ENGLISH       1.00
+  *** COLLEGE GREEK COURSE IN ENGLISH         1.00
+  ****COLLEGE LATIN COURSE IN ENGLISH         1.00
+
+_The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of
+six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not
+involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every
+principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended._
+
+ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
+BY RAND, AVERY, & COMPANY.
+BOSTON.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The preparation of the present volume proposed to the author a task more
+difficult far than that undertaken in any one of the four preceding
+volumes of the group, THE AFTER-SCHOOL SERIES, to which it belongs.
+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 greater difficulty seen thus to inhere already in the nature itself
+of the task proposed for accomplishment, was gravely increased by the
+much more severe compression deemed to be in the present instance
+desirable. The room placed at the author's disposal for a display of
+French literature was less than half the room allowed him for the
+display of either the Greek or the Latin.
+
+The plan, therefore, of this volume, imposed the necessity of
+establishing from the outset certain limits, to be very strictly
+observed. First, it was resolved to restrict the attention bestowed upon
+the national history, the national geography, and the national language,
+of the French, to such brief occasional notices as, in the course of the
+volume, it might seem necessary, for illustration of the particular
+author, from time to time to make. The only introductory general matter
+here to be found will accordingly consist of a rapid and summary review
+of that literature, as a whole, which is the subject of the book. It was
+next determined to limit the authors selected for representation to
+those of the finished centuries. A third decision was to make the number
+of authors 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.
+
+It is proposed to follow the present volume with a volume similar in
+general character, devoted to German literature.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+I.
+                                                                  PAGE
+FRENCH LITERATURE                                             1
+
+II.
+
+FROISSART                                                    18
+
+III.
+
+RABELAIS                                                     28
+
+IV.
+
+MONTAIGNE                                                    44
+
+V.
+
+LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (LA BRUYERE; VAUVENARGUES)                  66
+
+VI.
+
+LA FONTAINE                                                  81
+
+VII.
+
+MOLIERE                                                      92
+
+VIII.
+
+PASCAL                                                      115
+
+IX.
+
+MADAME DE SEVIGNE                                           134
+
+X.
+
+CORNEILLE                                                   151
+
+XI.
+
+RACINE                                                      166
+
+XII.
+
+BOSSUET, BOURDALOUE, MASSILLON                              182
+
+XIII.
+
+FENELON                                                     205
+
+XIV.
+
+MONTESQUIEU                                                 225
+
+XV.
+
+VOLTAIRE                                                    238
+
+XVI.
+
+ROUSSEAU                                                    255
+
+XVII.
+
+THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS                                          282
+
+XVIII.
+
+EPILOGUE                                                    288
+
+INDEX                                                       293
+
+
+
+
+CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE 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 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 sombre 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 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 _oil_,
+yes--severally peculiar to them, and thus to be known respectively as
+_langue d'oc_, and _langue d'oil_. 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'oil_, 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. Provencal is an alternative name of the language.
+
+Side by side with the southern _troubadours_, or a little later than
+they, the _trouveres_ of the north sang, with more manly ambition, of
+national themes, and, like Virgil, of arms and of heroes. Some
+productions of the _trouveres_ 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 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 centre 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 metre 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 early 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 _trouvere_ 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
+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 Beranger 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 Abelard, 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
+Saint 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 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 lifetime
+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 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 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 Hotel de Rambouillet was one, and the French
+Academy was the other. The Hotel 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
+Sevigne 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
+Hotel 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 Recamier 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 Hotel de Rambouillet or the Academy,--more than
+both these two 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, Fenelon, Massillon, Moliere, La Fontaine, Boileau, La
+Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere,--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 centre 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 Encyclopaedists 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, earth-shaking explosion would
+follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called,--the
+usurpation, that is, of 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 afterwards 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 at length would 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 has already passed the limit
+within which our choice of authors for representation is necessarily
+confined.
+
+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
+Moliere 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 Shakspeare--was largely
+the pregnant cause of this attempted emancipation of the French literary
+mind from the burden 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, 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 farther 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, if the truth must be told, diffuses himself too widely to
+do his best possible work. He has, however, 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,--extracts, however, not unfrequently
+marred by wretched translation. The cyclopaedias 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
+cyclopaedias, or several successive editions of some one cyclopaedia, as,
+for example, the "Encyclopaedia 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 mediaeval Herodotus.
+His time is, indeed, almost this side the middle ages; but he belongs by
+character and by sympathy rather to the mediaeval than to the modern
+world. He is delightfully like Herodotus in the style and the spirit of
+his narrative. Like Herodotus, he became a traveller 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 other 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 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 a 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 had been able to 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 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:--
+
+     There was much pressing at this time, through eagerness to take the
+     king; and those who were nearest to him, and knew him, cried out,
+     "Surrender yourself, surrender yourself, or you are a dead man!" In
+     that part of the field was a young knight from St. Omer, who was
+     engaged by a salary in the service of the King of England; his name
+     was Denys de Morbeque; who for five years had attached himself to
+     the English, on account of having been banished in his younger days
+     from France, for a murder committed in an affray at St. Omer. It
+     fortunately happened for this knight, that he was at the time near
+     to the King of France, when he was so much pulled about. He, by
+     dint of force, for he was very strong and robust, pushed through
+     the crowd, and said to the king, in good French, "Sire, sire,
+     surrender yourself!" The king, who found himself very disagreeably
+     situated, turning to him, asked, "To whom shall I surrender myself?
+     to whom? Where is my cousin, the Prince of Wales? If I could see
+     him, I would speak to him."--"Sire," replied Sir Denys, "he is not
+     here; but surrender yourself to me, and I will lead you to
+     him."--"Who are you?" said the king. "Sire, I am Denys de Morbeque,
+     a knight from Artois; but I serve the King of England because I
+     cannot belong to France, having forfeited all I possessed there."
+     The king then gave him his right-hand glove, and said, "I surrender
+     myself to you." There was much crowding and pushing about; for
+     every one was eager to cry out, "I have taken him!" Neither the
+     king nor his youngest son Philip were able to get forward, and free
+     themselves from the throng....
+
+     The Prince [of Wales] asked them [his marshals] if they knew any
+     thing of the King of France: they replied, "No, sir, not for a
+     certainty; but we believe he must be either killed or made
+     prisoner, since he has never quitted his battalion." The prince
+     then, addressing the Earl of Warwick and Lord Cobham, said, "I beg
+     of you to mount your horses, and ride over the field, so that on
+     your return you may bring me some certain intelligence of him." The
+     two barons, immediately mounting their horses, left the prince, and
+     made for a small hillock, that they might look about them. From
+     their stand they perceived a crowd of men-at-arms on foot, who were
+     advancing very slowly. The King of France was in the midst of them,
+     and in great danger; for the English and Gascons had taken him from
+     Sir Denys de Morbeque, and were disputing who should have him, the
+     stoutest bawling out, "It is I that have got him."--"No, no,"
+     replied the others: "we have him." The king, to escape from this
+     peril, said, "Gentlemen, gentlemen, I pray you conduct me and my
+     son in a courteous manner to my cousin the prince; and do not make
+     such a riot about my capture, for I am so great a lord that I can
+     make all sufficiently rich." These words, and others which fell
+     from the king, appeased them a little; but the disputes were always
+     beginning again, and they did not move a step without rioting. When
+     the two barons saw this troop of people, they descended from the
+     hillock, and, sticking spurs into their horses, made up to them. On
+     their arrival, they asked what was the matter. They were answered,
+     that it was the King of France, who had been made prisoner, and
+     that upward of ten knights and squires challenged him at the same
+     time, as belonging to each of them. The two barons then pushed
+     through the crowd by main force, and ordered all to draw aside.
+     They commanded, in the name of the prince, and under pain of
+     instant death, that every one should keep his distance, and not
+     approach unless ordered or desired so to do. They all retreated
+     behind the king; and the two barons, dismounting, advanced to the
+     king with profound reverences, and conducted him in a peaceable
+     manner to the Prince of Wales.
+
+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):--
+
+     When evening was come, the Prince of Wales gave a supper in his
+     pavilion to the King of France, and to the greater part of the
+     princes and barons who were prisoners. The prince seated the King
+     of France, and his son the Lord Philip, at an elevated and
+     well-covered table: with them were Sir James de Bourbon, the Lord
+     John d'Artois, the earls of Tancarville, of Estampes, of Dammartin,
+     of Graville, and the Lord of Partenay. The other knights and
+     squires were placed at different tables. The prince himself served
+     the king's table, as well as the others, with every mark of
+     humility, and would not sit down at it, in spite of all his
+     entreaties for him so to do, saying that "he was not worthy of such
+     an honor, nor did it appertain to him to seat himself at the table
+     of so great a king, or of so valiant a man as he had shown himself
+     by his actions that day." He added, also, with a noble air, "Dear
+     sir, do not make a poor meal, because the Almighty God has not
+     gratified your wishes in the event of this day; for be assured that
+     my lord and father will show you every honor and friendship in his
+     power, and will arrange your ransom so reasonably, that you will
+     henceforward always remain friends. In my opinion, you have cause
+     to be glad that the success of this battle did not turn out as you
+     desired; for you have this day acquired such high renown for
+     prowess, that you have surpassed all the best knights on your side.
+     I do not, dear sir, say this to flatter you; for all those of our
+     side who have seen and observed the actions of each party, have
+     unanimously allowed this to be your due, and decree you the prize
+     and garland for it." At the end of this speech, there were murmurs
+     of praise heard from every one; and the French said the prince had
+     spoken nobly and truly, and that he would be one of the most
+     gallant princes in Christendom if God should grant him life to
+     pursue his career of glory.
+
+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 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 enamoured 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 not unfitly so
+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:--
+
+     Count Gaston Phoebus de Foix, of whom I am now speaking, was at
+     that time fifty-nine years old; and I must say, that although I
+     have seen very many knights, kings, princes, and others, I have
+     never seen any so handsome, either in the form of his limbs and
+     shape, or in countenance, which was fair and ruddy, with gray and
+     amorous eyes, that gave delight whenever he chose to express
+     affection. He was so perfectly formed, one could not praise him too
+     much. He loved earnestly the things he ought to love, and hated
+     those which it was becoming him so to hate. He was a prudent
+     knight, full of enterprise and wisdom. He had never any men of
+     abandoned character with him, reigned prudently, and was constant
+     in his devotions. There were regular nocturnals from the Psalter,
+     prayers from the rituals to the Virgin, to the Holy Ghost, and
+     from the burial service. He had every day distributed as alms, at
+     his gate, five florins in small coin, to all comers. He was liberal
+     and courteous in his gifts, and well knew how to take when it was
+     proper, and to give back where he had confidence. He mightily loved
+     dogs above all other animals, and during the summer and winter
+     amused himself much with hunting....
+
+     When he quitted his chamber at midnight for supper, twelve servants
+     bore each a lighted torch before him, which were placed near his
+     table, and gave a brilliant light to the apartment. The hall was
+     full of knights and squires, and there were plenty of tables laid
+     out for any person who chose to sup. No one spoke to him at his
+     table, unless he first began a conversation. He commonly ate
+     heartily of poultry, but only the wings and thighs; for in the
+     daytime, he neither ate nor drank much. He had great pleasure in
+     hearing minstrels; as he himself was a proficient in the science,
+     and made his secretaries sing songs, ballads, and roundelays. He
+     remained at table about two hours, and was pleased when fanciful
+     dishes were served up to him, which having seen, he immediately
+     sent them to the tables of his knights and squires.
+
+     In short, every thing considered, though I had before been in
+     several courts of kings, dukes, princes, counts, and noble ladies,
+     I was never at one that pleased me more, nor was I ever more
+     delighted with feats of arms, than at this of the Count de Foix.
+     There were knights and squires to be seen in every chamber, hall,
+     and court, going backwards and forwards, and conversing on arms and
+     amours. Every thing honorable was there to be found. All
+     intelligence from distant countries was there to be learnt, for the
+     gallantry of the count had brought visitors from all parts of the
+     world. It was there I was informed of the greater part of those
+     events which had happened in Spain, Portugal, Arragon, Navarre,
+     England, Scotland, and on the borders of Languedoc; for I saw,
+     during my residence, knights and squires arrive from every nation.
+     I therefore made inquiries from them, or from the count himself,
+     who cheerfully conversed with me.
+
+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.
+
+We take now a somewhat long forward step, in going, as we do, at once
+from Froissart to Rabelais. Comines, lying between, 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 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 Francois Rabelais the man, these few facts will be
+sufficient to know. In early youth he joined the monastic order of the
+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 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
+to 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 Motteux; 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:--
+
+     Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious
+     pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my
+     writings), Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's which is
+     entitled, "The Banquet," whilst he was setting forth the praises of
+     his schoolmaster Socrates (without all question the prince of
+     philosophers), amongst other discourses to that purpose said that
+     he resembled the Sileni. Sileni of old were little boxes, like
+     those we now may see in the shops of apothecaries, painted on the
+     outside with wanton toyish figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled
+     geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts,
+     and other such counterfeited pictures, at pleasure, to excite
+     people unto laughter, as Silenus himself, who was the foster-father
+     of good Bacchus, was wont to do; but within those capricious
+     caskets called Sileni, were carefully preserved and kept many rich
+     and fine drugs, such as balm, ambergreese, amomon, musk, civet,
+     with several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great
+     price. Just such another thing was Socrates; for to have eyed his
+     outside, and esteemed of him by his exterior appearance, you would
+     not have given the peel of an onion for him, so deformed he was in
+     body, and ridiculous in his gesture.... Opening this box, you would
+     have found within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than
+     human understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning,
+     invincible courage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of
+     mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible disregard of all that
+     for which men commonly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel,
+     toil, and turmoil themselves.
+
+     Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble
+     tend? For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly
+     fools of ease and leisure,... are too ready to judge, that there is
+     nothing in them but jests, mockeries, lascivious discourse, and
+     recreative lies;... therefore is it, that you must open the book,
+     and seriously consider of the matter treated in it. Then shall you
+     find that it containeth things of far higher value than the box did
+     promise; that is to say, that the subject thereof is not so
+     foolish, as by the title at the first sight it would appear to be.
+
+     ...Did you ever see a dog with a marrow-bone in his mouth?... Like
+     him, you must, by a sedulous lecture [reading], and frequent
+     meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow; that is, my
+     allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be
+     signified by these Pythagorical symbols;... the most glorious
+     doctrines and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth our
+     religion, as matters of the public state and life economical.
+
+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?
+
+     Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was
+     couching his Iliad and Odyssey, had any thought upon those
+     allegories which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius,
+     Phornutus, squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again
+     from them? If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come
+     near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little
+     dreamed of by Homer, as the gospel sacraments were by Ovid, in his
+     Metamorphoses; though a certain gulligut friar, and true
+     bacon-picker, would have undertaken to prove it, if, perhaps, he
+     had met with as very fools as himself, and, as the proverb says, "a
+     lid worthy of such a kettle."
+
+     If you give any credit thereto, why do not you the same to these
+     jovial new Chronicles of mine? Albeit, when I did dictate them, I
+     thought thereof no more than you, who possibly were drinking the
+     whilst, as I was. For, in the composing of this lordly book, I
+     never lost nor bestowed any more, nor any other time, than what was
+     appointed to serve me for taking of my bodily refection; that is,
+     whilst I was eating and drinking. And, indeed, that is the fittest
+     and most proper hour, wherein to write these high matters and deep
+     sentences; as Homer knew very well, the paragon of all philologues,
+     and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace calls him,
+     although a certain sneaking jobbernol alleged that his verses
+     smelled more of the wine than oil.
+
+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 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' 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 the allegorical sense hidden deep
+underneath the monstrous mass of the Rabelaisian buffoonery. A more
+judicial 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:--
+
+     And, therefore, to make an end of this Prologue, even as I give
+     myself to an hundred thousand panniers-full of fair devils, body
+     and soul,... in case that I lie so much as one single word in this
+     whole history; after the like manner, St. Anthony's fire burn you,
+     Mahoom's disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your
+     side, and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize
+     upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender
+     and thin as cow's hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into
+     you,... and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into
+     sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly
+     believe all that I shall relate unto you in this present Chronicle.
+
+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":--
+
+     The story requireth that we relate that which happened unto six
+     pilgrims, who came from Sebastian near to Nantes; and who, for
+     shelter that night, being afraid of the enemy, had hid themselves
+     in the garden upon the chickling peas, among the cabbages and
+     lettuces. Gargantua, finding himself somewhat dry, asked whether
+     they could get any lettuce to make him a salad; and, hearing that
+     there were the greatest and fairest in the country,--for they were
+     as great as plum trees, or as walnut trees,--he would go thither
+     himself, and brought thence in his hand what he thought good, and
+     withal carried away the six pilgrims, who were in so great fear
+     that they did not dare to speak nor cough. Washing them, therefore,
+     first at the fountain, the pilgrims said one to another, softly,
+     "What shall we do? We are almost drowned here amongst these
+     lettuce: shall we speak? But, if we speak, he will kill us for
+     spies." And, as they were thus deliberating what to do, Gargantua
+     put them, with the lettuce, into a platter of the house, as large
+     as the huge tun of the White Friars of the Cistertian order; which
+     done, with oil, vinegar, and salt, he ate them up, to refresh
+     himself a little before supper, and had already swallowed up five
+     of the pilgrims, the sixth being in the platter, totally hid under
+     a lettuce, except his bourbon, or staff, that appeared, and nothing
+     else. Which Grangousier [Gargantua's father] seeing, said to
+     Gargantua, "I think that is the horn of a shell snail: do not eat
+     it."--"Why not?" said Gargantua; "they are good all this month:"
+     which he no sooner said, but, drawing up the staff, and therewith
+     taking up the pilgrim, he ate him very well, then drank a terrible
+     draught of excellent white wine. The pilgrims, thus devoured, made
+     shift to save themselves, as well as they could, by drawing their
+     bodies out of the reach of the grinders of his teeth, but could
+     not escape from thinking they had been put in the lowest dungeon of
+     a prison. And, when Gargantua whiffed the great draught, they
+     thought to have drowned in his mouth, and the flood of wine had
+     almost carried them away into the gulf of his stomach.
+     Nevertheless, skipping with their bourbons, as St. Michael's
+     palmers used to do, they sheltered themselves from the danger of
+     that inundation under the banks of his teeth. But one of them, by
+     chance, groping, or sounding the country with his staff, to try
+     whether they were in safety or no, struck hard against the cleft of
+     a hollow tooth, and hit the mandibulary sinew or nerve of the jaw,
+     which put Gargantua to very great pain, so that he began to cry for
+     the rage that he felt. To ease himself, therefore, of his smarting
+     ache, he called for his tooth-picker, and, rubbing towards a young
+     walnut-tree, where they lay skulking, unnestled you my gentlemen
+     pilgrims. For he caught one by the legs, another by the scrip,
+     another by the pocket, another by the scarf, another by the band of
+     the breeches; and the poor fellow that had hurt him with the
+     bourbon, him he hooked to him by [another part of his clothes]....
+     The pilgrims, thus dislodged, ran away.
+
+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, differs from 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 Liliput 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 Theleme [Thelema]. This constitutes
+a kind of Rabelaisian Utopia. It was proper of the released monk to give
+his Utopian dream the form of an abbey, but 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 Theleme,--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 everybody to eat, and nobody to prepare:--
+
+     All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but
+     according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of
+     their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labor,
+     sleep, when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None
+     did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor
+     to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all
+     their rule, and strictest tie of their order, there was but this
+     one clause to be observed,--
+
+
+     DO WHAT THOU WILT.
+
+
+     ...By this liberty they entered into a very laudable emulation, to
+     do all of them what they saw did please one. If any of the gallants
+     or ladies should say, Let us drink, they would all drink. If any
+     one of them said, Let us play, they all played. If one said, Let us
+     go a walking into the fields, they went all.... There was neither
+     he nor she amongst them, but could read, write, sing, play upon
+     several musical instruments, speak five or six several languages,
+     and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and prose.
+     Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so
+     dextrous and skilful both on foot and a horseback, more brisk and
+     lively, more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of
+     weapons than were there. Never were seen ladies so proper and
+     handsome, so miniard and dainty, less forward, or more ready with
+     their hand, and with their needle, in every honest and free action
+     belonging to that sex, than were there. For this reason, when the
+     time came, that any man of the said abbey, either at the request of
+     his parents, or for some other cause, had a mind to go out of it,
+     he carried along with him one of the ladies, namely her who had
+     before that accepted him as her lover, and they were married
+     together.
+
+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, 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:--
+
+     Fail not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian,
+     and Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists;
+     and by frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of that
+     other world, called the microcosm, which is man. And at some of the
+     hours of the day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy
+     Scriptures: first, in Greek, the New Testament, with the Epistles
+     of the Apostles; and then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In brief,
+     let me see thee an abyss and bottomless pit of knowledge....
+
+     ...It behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to
+     cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and, by faith formed in
+     charity, to cleave unto him, so that thou mayst never be separated
+     from him by thy sins. Suspect the abuses of the world. Set not thy
+     heart upon vanity, for this life is transitory; but the Word of the
+     Lord endureth forever.
+
+"Friar John" is a mighty man of valor, who figures equivocally in the
+story of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Abbey of Theleme 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:--
+
+     He had threescore and three tricks to come by it [money] at his
+     need, of which the most honorable and most ordinary was in manner
+     of thieving, secret purloining, and filching, for he was a wicked,
+     lewd rogue, a cozener, drinker, roysterer, rover, and a very
+     dissolute and debauched fellow, if there were any in Paris;
+     otherwise, and in all matters else, the best and most virtuous man
+     in the world; and he was still contriving some plot, and devising
+     mischief against the serjeants and the watch.
+
+     At one time he assembled three or four especial good hacksters and
+     roaring boys; made them in the evening drink like Templars,
+     afterwards led them till they came under St. Genevieve, or about
+     the college of Navarre, and, at the hour that the watch was coming
+     up that way,--which he knew by putting his sword upon the pavement,
+     and his ear by it, and, when he heard his sword shake, it was an
+     infallible sign that the watch was near at that instant,--then he
+     and his companions took a tumbrel or garbage-cart, and gave it the
+     brangle, hurling it with all their force down the hill, and then
+     ran away upon the other side; for in less than two days he knew all
+     the streets, lanes, and turnings in Paris, as well as his _Deus
+     det._
+
+     At another time he laid, in some fair place where the said watch
+     was to pass, a train of gunpowder, and, at the very instant that
+     they went along, set fire to it, and then made himself sport to see
+     what good grace they had in running away, thinking that St.
+     Anthony's fire had caught them by the legs.... In one of his
+     pockets he had a great many little horns full of fleas and lice,
+     which he borrowed from the beggars of St. Innocent, and cast them,
+     with small canes or quills to write with, into the necks of the
+     daintiest gentlewomen that he could find, yea, even in the church;
+     for he never seated himself above in the choir, but always in the
+     body of the church amongst the women, both at mass, at vespers, and
+     at sermon.
+
+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":--
+
+     By the means of a little Pantagruelism (which, you know, is _a
+     certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune_), you see
+     me now ["at near seventy years of age," his translator says], hale
+     and cheery, as sound as a bell, and ready to drink, if you will.
+
+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!
+
+
+
+
+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 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, divided into 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:--
+
+     That men by various ways arrive at the same end; Whether the
+     governor of a place ought himself to go out to parley; Of liars; Of
+     quick or slow speech; A proceeding of some ambassadors; Various
+     events from the same counsel; Of cannibals; That we laugh and cry
+     from the same thing; Of smells; That the mind hinders itself; Of
+     thumbs; Of virtue; Of coaches; Of managing the will; Of cripples;
+     Of experience.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 self-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
+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:--
+
+     Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset
+     forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to
+     myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no
+     consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My
+     powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to
+     the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that,
+     having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein
+     recover some traits of my conditions and humors, and by that means
+     preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of
+     me. Had my intention been to seek the world's favor, I should
+     surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties. I desire therein
+     to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary
+     manner, without study and artifice; for it is myself I paint. My
+     defects are therein to be read to the life, and my imperfections
+     and my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me.
+     If I had lived among those nations which (they say) yet dwell under
+     the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure thee I would
+     most willingly have painted myself quite fully, and quite naked.
+     Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book. There's no reason
+     thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a
+     subject. Therefore, farewell.
+
+     From Montaigne, the 12th of June, 1580.
+
+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 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, Shakspeare 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, "Of 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:--
+
+     For a boy of quality, then, I say, I would also have his friends
+     solicitous to find him out a tutor who has rather a well-made than
+     a well-filled head, seeking, indeed, both the one and the other,
+     but rather of the two to prefer manners and judgment to mere
+     learning, and that this man should exercise his charge after a new
+     method.
+
+     'Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their
+     pupil's ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the
+     business of the pupil is only to repeat what the others have said:
+     now, I would have a tutor to correct this error, and that, at the
+     very first, he should, according to the capacity he has to deal
+     with, put it to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste
+     things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes
+     opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving him to open it for
+     himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent and speak,
+     but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.... Let him
+     make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and
+     accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet
+     rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own.... 'Tis a sign of
+     crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
+     condition it was swallowed: the stomach has not performed its
+     office, unless it have altered the form and condition of what was
+     committed to it to concoct....
+
+     Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift every thing he reads,
+     and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon
+     trust. Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to
+     him than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of
+     opinions be propounded to, and laid before, him; he will himself
+     choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt.
+
+     "Che, non men che saper, dubbiar m'aggrata." DANTE, _Inferno_, xl.
+     93.
+
+     ["That doubting pleases me, not less than knowing." LONGFELLOW'S
+     _Translation_.]
+
+     For, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own
+     reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who
+     follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is
+     inquisitive after nothing. "Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se
+     vindicet." ["We are under no king; let each look to
+     himself."--SENECA, _Ep._ 33.] Let him, at least, know that he
+     knows. It will be necessary that he imbibe their knowledge, not
+     that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no matter if he
+     forget where he had his learning, provided he know how to apply it
+     to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every one, and are
+     no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after;
+     'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both
+     he and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several
+     sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they
+     find them; but themselves afterward make the honey, which is all
+     and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the
+     several fragments he borrows from others he will transform and
+     shuffle together, to compile a work that shall be absolutely his
+     own; that is to say, his judgment: his instruction, labor, and
+     study tend to nothing else but to form that.... Conversation with
+     men is of very great use, and travel into foreign countries;... to
+     be able chiefly to give an account of the humors, manners, customs,
+     and laws of those nations where he has been, and that we may whet
+     and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against those of others....
+
+     In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those
+     who live only in the records of history: he shall, by reading those
+     books, converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages.
+
+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 had myself 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
+mould 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 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:--
+
+     In my infancy, and before I began to speak, he [my father]
+     committed me to the care of a German,... totally ignorant of our
+     language, but very fluent, and a great critic, in Latin. This man,
+     whom he had fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained
+     with a very great salary, for this only end, had me continually
+     with him: to him there were also joined two others, of inferior
+     learning, to attend me, and to relieve him, who all of them spoke
+     to me in no other language but Latin. As to the rest of his family,
+     it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself nor my mother, man
+     nor maid, should speak any thing in my company, but such Latin
+     words as every one had learned only to gabble with me. It is not to
+     be imagined how great an advantage this proved to the whole family:
+     my father and my mother by this means learned Latin enough to
+     understand it perfectly well, and to speak it to such a degree as
+     was sufficient for any necessary use, as also those of the servants
+     did, who were most frequently with me. In short, we Latined it at
+     such a rate, that it overflowed to all the neighboring villages,
+     where there yet remain, that have established themselves by custom,
+     several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools. As for what
+     concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood
+     either French or Perigordin ["Perigordin" is Montaigne's name for
+     the dialect of his province, Perigord (Gascony)], any more than
+     Arabic; and, without art, book, grammar, or precept, whipping, or
+     the expense of a tear, I had, by that time, learned to speak as
+     pure Latin as my master himself, for I had no means of mixing it up
+     with any other.
+
+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
+aesthetic was the matin _reveille_ that broke the slumbers of this
+hopeful young heir of Montaigne:--
+
+     Some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of
+     children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them
+     violently and over-hastily from sleep, wherein they are much more
+     profoundly involved than we, he [the father] caused me to be
+     wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never
+     unprovided of a musician for that purpose.... The good man, being
+     extremely timorous of any way failing in a thing he had so wholly
+     set his heart upon, suffered himself at last to be overruled by the
+     common opinions:... he sent me, at six years of age, to the College
+     of Guienne, at that time the best and most flourishing in France.
+
+In short, as in the case of Mr. Tulliver, the world was "too many" for
+Eyquem _pere_; 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:--
+
+     A woman, fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread,
+     cried and lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her
+     throat, where she thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious
+     fellow that was brought to her, seeing no outward tumor nor
+     alteration, supposing it to be only a conceit taken at some crust
+     of bread that had hurt her as it went down, caused her to vomit,
+     and, unseen, threw a crooked pin into the basin, which the woman no
+     sooner saw, but, believing she had cast it up, she presently found
+     herself eased of her pain....
+
+     Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field, have, I make
+     no question, heard the story of the falconer, who, having earnestly
+     fixed his eyes upon a kite in the air, laid a wager that he would
+     bring her down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it
+     was said; for _the tales I borrow, I charge upon the consciences of
+     those from whom I have them_.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+     Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of
+     Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to
+     receive the enemy's charge, "by reason that" (I shall here steal
+     Plutarch's own words, which are better than mine) "he by so doing
+     deprived himself of the violent impression the motion of running
+     adds to the first shock of arms, and hindered that clashing of the
+     combatants against one another, which is wont to give them greater
+     impetuosity and fury, especially when they come to rush in with
+     their utmost vigor, their courages increasing by the shouts and the
+     career; 'tis to render the soldiers' ardor, as a man may say, more
+     reserved and cold." This is what he says. But, if Caesar had come by
+     the worse, why might it not as well have been urged by another,
+     that, on the contrary, the strongest and most steady posture of
+     fighting is that wherein a man stands planted firm, without motion;
+     and that they who are steady upon the march, closing up, and
+     reserving their force within themselves for the push of the
+     business, have a great advantage against those who are disordered,
+     and who have already spent half their breath in running on
+     precipitately to the charge? Besides that, an army is a body made
+     up of so many individual members, it is impossible for it to move
+     in this fury with so exact a motion as not to break the order of
+     battle, and that the best of them are not engaged before their
+     fellows can come on to help them.
+
+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. This 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 subjoined, you will have the
+sensation of coming suddenly upon a treasure-trove of coined proverbial
+wisdom:--
+
+     Our minds are never at home, but ever beyond home.
+
+     I will take care, if possible, that my death shall say nothing that
+     my life has not said.
+
+     Life in itself is neither good nor bad: it is the place of what is
+     good or bad.
+
+     Knowledge should not be stuck on to the mind, but incorporated in
+     it.
+
+     Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our
+     nature.
+
+     Age wrinkles the mind more than the face.
+
+     Habit is a second nature.
+
+     Hunger cures love.
+
+     It is easier to get money than to keep it.
+
+     Anger has often been the vehicle of courage.
+
+     It is more difficult to command than to obey.
+
+     A liar should have a good memory.
+
+     Ambition is the daughter of presumption.
+
+     To serve a prince, you must be discreet and a liar.
+
+     We learn to live when life has passed.
+
+     The mind is ill at ease when its companion has the colic.
+
+     We are all richer than we think, but we are brought up to go
+     a-begging.
+
+     The greatest masterpiece of man is... to be born at the right time.
+
+We append a saying of Montaigne's not found in Mr. St. John's
+collection:--
+
+     There is no so good man who so squares all his thoughts and actions
+     to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten
+     times in his life.
+
+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 Boetie is forever
+associated with the name of Montaigne. La Boetie 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, 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 Boetie
+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 Boetie is
+sometimes now printed with Montaigne's "Essays," in French editions of
+our author's works: La Boetie says:--
+
+     You sow your fruits [crops] that he [the king] may ravage them; you
+     furnish and fill your houses that he may have something to steal;
+     you bring up your daughters that he may slake his luxury; you bring
+     up your sons that he may take them to be butchered in his wars, to
+     be the ministers of his avarice, the executors of his vengeance;
+     you disfigure your forms by labor [your own selves you inure to
+     toil] that he may cocker himself in delight, and wallow in nasty
+     and disgusting pleasure.
+
+Montaigne seems really to have loved this friend of his, whom he
+reckoned the greatest man in France. His account of La Boetie's death is
+boldly, and not presumptuously, paralleled by Mr. St. John with the
+"Phaedon" 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
+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:--
+
+     I gently turn aside, and avert my eyes from the stormy and cloudy
+     sky I have before me, which, thanks be to God, I regard without
+     fear, but not without meditation and study, and amuse myself in the
+     remembrance of my better years:--
+
+     "Animus quod perdidit, optat, Atque in praeterita se totus imagine
+     versat."
+
+       PETRONIUS, c. 128.
+
+     ["The mind desires what it has lost, and in fancy flings itself
+     wholly into the past."]
+
+     Let childhood look forward, and age backward: is not this the
+     signification of Janus' double face? Let years haul me along if
+     they will, but it shall be backward; as long as my eyes can discern
+     the pleasant season expired, I shall now and then turn them that
+     way; though it escape from my blood and veins, I shall not,
+     however, root the image of it out of my memory:--
+
+     "Hoc est Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui."
+
+       MARTIAL, x. 23, 7.
+
+     ["'Tis to live twice to be able to enjoy former life again."]
+
+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:--
+
+     I have enjoined myself to dare to say all that I dare to do; even
+     thoughts that are not to be published, displease me; the worst of
+     my actions and qualities do not appear to me so evil, as I find it
+     evil and base not to dare to own them....
+
+     ...I am greedy of making myself known, and I care not to how many,
+     provided it be truly.... Many things that I would not say to a
+     particular individual, I say to the people; and, as to my most
+     secret thoughts, send my most intimate friends to my book.... For
+     my part, if any one should recommend me as a good pilot, as being
+     very modest, or very chaste, I should owe him no thanks [because
+     the recommendation would be false].
+
+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:--
+
+     In farewells, we oftener than not heat our affections towards the
+     things we take leave of: I take my last leave of the pleasures of
+     this world; these are our last embraces.
+
+Mr. Emerson, in his "Representative Men," makes Montaigne stand for The
+Sceptic. Sceptic 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 scai-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
+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,
+speaking as "moral philosopher," in his "Essays," 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 scai-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 Shakspeare. 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 "The Great Eastern" overlay 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 if he
+had 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. 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 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
+prepared, 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.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: 1613-1680 (La Bruyere: 1646 (?)-1696; Vauvenargues:
+1715-1747).
+
+
+In La Rochefoucauld 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 the "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. 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 sceptical 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 Francois 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 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:"--
+
+     No. 11. The passions often beget their contraries. Avarice
+     sometimes produces prodigality, and prodigality avarice: we are
+     often firm from weakness, and daring from timidity.
+
+     No. 13. Our self-love bears more impatiently the condemnation of
+     our tastes than of our opinions.
+
+How much just detraction from all mere natural human greatness is
+contained in the following penetrative maxim!--
+
+     No. 18. Moderation is a fear of falling into the envy and contempt
+     which those deserve who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it
+     is a vain parade of the strength of our mind; and, in short, the
+     moderation of men in their highest elevation is a desire to appear
+     greater than their fortune.
+
+What effectively quiet satire in these few words!--
+
+     No. 19. We have strength enough to bear the ills of others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 20. The steadfastness of sages is only the art of locking up
+     their uneasiness in their hearts.
+
+Of course, had it lain in the author's chosen line to do so, he might,
+with as much apparent truth, have pointed out, 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:--
+
+     No. 22. Philosophy triumphs easily over troubles passed and
+     troubles to come, but present troubles triumph over it.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 34. If we had no pride, we should not complain of that of
+     others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 39. Interest [self-love] speaks all sorts of languages, and
+     plays all sorts of parts, even that of disinterestedness.
+
+     No. 49. We are never so happy, or so unhappy, as we imagine.
+
+     No. 78. The love of justice is, in most men, only the fear of
+     suffering injustice.
+
+What a subtly unsoldering distrust the following maxim introduces into
+the sentiment of mutual friendship!--
+
+     No. 83. What men have called friendship, is only a partnership, a
+     mutual accommodation of interests, and an exchange of good offices:
+     it is, in short, only a traffic, in which self-love always proposes
+     to gain something.
+
+     No. 89. Every one complains of his memory, and no one complains of
+     his judgment.
+
+How striking, from its artful suppression of strikingness, is the first
+following, and what a wide, easy sweep of well-bred satire it
+contains!--
+
+     No. 93. Old men like to give good advice, to console themselves for
+     being no longer able to give bad examples.
+
+     No. 119. We are so much accustomed to disguise ourselves to others,
+     that, at last, we disguise ourselves to ourselves.
+
+     No. 127. The true way to be deceived, is to think one's self
+     sharper than others.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 132. It is easier to be wise for others, than to be so for
+     one's self.
+
+How pitilessly this inquisitor pursues his prey, "the human soul, into
+all its useless hiding-places!--
+
+     No. 138. We would rather speak ill of ourselves, than not talk of
+     ourselves.
+
+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:"--
+
+     No. 139. One of the causes why we find so few people who appear
+     reasonable and agreeable in conversation, is, that there is
+     scarcely any one who does not think more of what he wishes to say,
+     than of replying exactly to what is said to him. The cleverest and
+     the most compliant think it enough to show an attentive air; while
+     we see in their eyes and in their mind a wandering from what is
+     said to them, and a hurry to return to what they wish to say,
+     instead of considering that it is a bad way to please or to
+     persuade others, to try so hard to please one's self, and that to
+     listen well is one of the greatest accomplishments we can have in
+     conversation.
+
+If we are indignant at the maxims following, it is probably rather
+because they are partly true than, because they are wholly false:--
+
+     No. 144. We are not fond of praising, and, without interest, we
+     never praise any one. Praise is a cunning flattery, hidden and
+     delicate, which, in different ways, pleases him who gives and him
+     who receives it. The one takes it as a reward for his merit: the
+     other gives it to show his equity and his discernment.
+
+     No. 146. We praise generally only to be praised.
+
+     No. 147. Few are wise enough to prefer wholesome blame to
+     treacherous praise.
+
+     No. 149. Disclaiming praise is a wish to be praised a second time.
+
+     No. 152. If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others
+     could not hurt us.
+
+     No. 184. We acknowledge our faults in order to atone, by our
+     sincerity, for the harm they do us in the minds of others.
+
+     No. 199. The desire to appear able often prevents our becoming so.
+
+     No. 201. Whoever thinks he can do without the world, deceives
+     himself much; but whoever thinks the world cannot do without him,
+     deceives himself much more.
+
+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:--
+
+     No. 214. Valor, in private soldiers, is a perilous calling, which
+     they have taken to in order to gain their living.
+
+Here is, perhaps, the most current of all La Rochefoucauld's maxims:--
+
+     No. 218. Hypocrisy is a homage which vice renders to virtue.
+
+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!--
+
+     No. 226. Too great eagerness to requite an obligation is a kind of
+     ingratitude.
+
+     No. 298. The gratitude of most men is only a secret desire to
+     receive greater favors.
+
+     No. 304. We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive
+     those whom we bore.
+
+     No. 318. Why should we have memory enough to retain even the
+     smallest particulars of what has happened to us, and yet not have
+     enough to remember how often we have told them to the same
+     individual?
+
+The first following maxim satirizes both princes and courtiers. It might
+be entitled, "How to insult a prince, and not suffer for your
+temerity":--
+
+     No. 320. To praise princes for virtues they have not, is to insult
+     them with impunity.
+
+     No. 347. We find few sensible people, except those who are of our
+     way of thinking.
+
+     No. 409. We should often be ashamed of our best actions, if the
+     world saw the motives which cause them.
+
+     No. 424. We boast of faults the reverse of those we have: when we
+     are weak, we boast of being stubborn.
+
+Here, at length, is a maxim that does not depress,--that animates you:--
+
+     No. 432. To praise noble actions heartily, is in some sort to take
+     part in them.
+
+The following is much less exhilarating:--
+
+     No. 454. There are few instances in which we should make a bad
+     bargain, by giving up the good that is said of us, on condition
+     that nothing bad be said.
+
+This, also:--
+
+     No. 458. Our enemies come nearer to the truth, in the opinions they
+     form of us, than we do ourselves.
+
+Here is a celebrated maxim, vainly "suppressed" by the author, after
+first publication:--
+
+     No. 583. In the adversity of our best friends, we always find
+     something which does not displease us.
+
+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.
+
+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 Bruyere 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 Bruyere'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 Bruyere
+begins:--
+
+     Every thing has been said; and one comes too late, after more than
+     seven thousand years that there have been men, and men who have
+     thought.
+
+La Bruyere has something to say, and that at length unusual for him, of
+pulpit eloquence. We select a few specimen sentences:--
+
+     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 amusement, 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
+     pronounces against. The orator pleases some, displeases others, and
+     has an understanding with all in one thing,--that as he does not
+     seek to render them better, so they do not think of becoming
+     better.
+
+The almost cynical acerbity of the preceding is ostensibly relieved of
+an obvious application to certain illustrious contemporary examples
+among preachers by the following open allusion to Bossuet and
+Bourdaloue:--
+
+     The Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] and Father Bourdaloue make me think
+     of Demosthenes and Cicero. Both of them, masters of pulpit
+     eloquence, have had the fortune of great models; the one has made
+     bad critics, the other, bad imitators.
+
+Here is a happy instance of La Bruyere's successful pains in redeeming a
+commonplace sentiment by means of a striking form of expression; the
+writer is disapproving the use of oaths in support of one's testimony:--
+
+     An honest man who says, Yes, or No, deserves to be believed; his
+     character swears for him.
+
+Highly satiric in his quiet way, La Bruyere knew how to be. Witness the
+following thrust at a contemporary author, not named by the satirist,
+but, no doubt, recognized by the public of the time:--
+
+     He maintains that the ancients, however unequal and negligent they
+     may be, have fine traits; he points these out; and they are so fine
+     that they make his criticism readable.
+
+How painstakingly, how self-consciously, La Bruyere did his literary
+work, is evidenced by the following:--
+
+     A good author, and one who writes with care, often has the
+     experience of finding that the expression which he was a long time
+     in search of without reaching it, and which at length he has found,
+     is that which was the most simple, the most natural, and that
+     which, as it would seem, should have presented itself at first, and
+     without effort.
+
+We feel that the quality of La Bruyere is such as to fit him for the
+admiration and enjoyment of but a comparatively small class of readers.
+He was somewhat over-exquisite. His art at times became
+artifice--infinite labor of style to make commonplace thought seem
+valuable by dint of perfect expression. We dismiss La Bruyere with a
+single additional extract,--his celebrated parallel between Corneille
+and Racine:--
+
+     Corneille subjects us to his characters and to his ideas; Racine
+     accommodates himself to ours. The one paints men as they ought to
+     be; the other paints them as they are. There is more in the former
+     of what one admires, and of what one ought even to imitate; there
+     is more in the latter of what one observes in others, or of what
+     one experiences in one's self. The one inspires, astonishes,
+     masters, instructs; the other pleases, moves, touches, penetrates.
+     Whatever there is most beautiful, most noble, most imperial, in the
+     reason is made use of by the former; by the latter, whatever is
+     most seductive and most delicate in passion. You find in the
+     former, maxims, rules, and precepts; in the latter, taste and
+     sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of Corneille; you are
+     more shaken and more softened in those of Racine. Corneille is more
+     moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make Sophocles his
+     model; the other owes more to Euripides.
+
+* * *
+
+Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere had shown
+the way, Vauvenargues followed in a similar style of authorship,
+promising almost to rival the fame of his two predecessors. This writer,
+during his brief life (he died at thirty-two), produced one not
+inconsiderable literary work more integral and regular in form,
+entitled, "Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind"; but it is
+his disconnected thoughts and observations chiefly that continue to
+preserve his name.
+
+Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, though nobly born, was poor.
+His health was frail. He did not receive a good education in his youth.
+Indeed, he was still in his youth when he went to the wars. His culture
+always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know
+Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his
+accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the
+small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost
+immediately after he abandoned a military career which had been fruitful
+to him of hardship, but not of promotion. In spite of all that was thus
+against him, Vauvenargues, in those years, few and evil, that were his,
+thought finely and justly enough to earn for himself a lasting place in
+the literary history of his nation. He was in the eighteenth century of
+France, without being of it. You have to separate him in thought from
+the infidels and the "philosophers" of his time. He belongs in spirit to
+an earlier age. His moral and intellectual kindred was with such as
+Pascal, far more than with such as Voltaire. Vauvenargues is, however, a
+writer for the few, instead of for the many. His fame is high, but it is
+not wide. Historically, he forms a stepping-stone of transition to a
+somewhat similar nineteenth-century name, that of Joubert. A very few
+sentences of his will suffice to indicate to our readers the quality of
+Vauvenargues. Self-evidently, the following antithesis drawn by him
+between Corneille and Racine is subtly and ingeniously thought, as well
+as very happily expressed--this, whatever may be considered to be its
+aptness in point of literary appreciation:--
+
+     Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them;
+     Racine's inspire them without saying them.
+
+Here is a good saying:--
+
+     It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising.
+
+There is worldly wisdom also here:--
+
+     He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account,
+     practises a large and noble economy.
+
+Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is
+recalled by this:--
+
+     The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.
+
+So much for Vauvenargues.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+LA FONTAINE.
+
+1621-1695.
+
+
+La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the
+firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any
+nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet
+as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever
+among the French, by long proof more secure, than is La Fontaine's, of
+universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the
+most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain
+thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true
+poetry,--this surely is an achievement entitling La Fontaine to
+monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.
+
+Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at Chateau-Thierry in Champagne.
+His early education was sadly neglected. At twenty years of age he was
+still phenomenally ignorant. About this time, being now better situated,
+he developed a taste for the classics and for poetry. With La Fontaine
+the man, it is the sadly familiar French story of debauched manners in
+life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to
+condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation.
+As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking
+friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any
+sterling worth of character felt in him, as by an exhaustless,
+easy-going good-nature, that, despite his social insipidity, made La
+Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy
+to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La
+Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait
+in his character would he perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed
+not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude,
+no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man
+in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring
+personal regard. The mirror of _bonhomie_ (easy-hearted
+good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost
+untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's
+case. On his amiable side--a full hemisphere or more of the man--it sums
+him up completely. Twenty years long, this mirror of _bonhomie_ was
+domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the
+celebrated Madame de la Sabliere. There was truth as well as humor
+implied in what she said one day: "I have sent away all my domestics; I
+have kept only my dog, my cat, and La Fontaine."
+
+But La Fontaine had that in him which kept the friendship of serious
+men. Moliere, a grave, even melancholy spirit, however gay in his
+comedies; Boileau and Racine, decorous both of them, at least in
+manners,--constituted, together with La Fontaine, a kind of private
+"Academy," existing on a diminutive scale, which was not without its
+important influence on French letters. La Fontaine seems to have been a
+sort of Goldsmith in this club of wits, the butt of many pleasantries
+from his colleagues, called out by his habit of absent-mindedness. St.
+Augustine was one night the subject of an elaborate eulogy, which La
+Fontaine lost the benefit of, through a reverie of his own indulged
+meantime on a quite different character. Catching, however, at the name,
+La Fontaine, as he came to himself for a moment, betrayed the secret of
+his absent thoughts by asking, "Do you think St. Augustine had as much
+wit as Rabelais?"--"Take care, Monsieur La Fontaine: you have put one of
+your stockings on wrong side out,"--he had actually done so,--was the
+only answer vouchsafed to his question. The speaker in this case was a
+doctor of the Sorbonne (brother to Boileau), present as guest. The story
+is told of La Fontaine, that egged on to groundless jealousy of his
+wife,--a wife whom he never really loved, and whom he soon would finally
+abandon,--he challenged a military friend of his to combat with swords.
+The friend was amazed, and, amazed, reluctantly fought with La Fontaine,
+whom he easily put at his mercy. "Now, what is this for?" he demanded.
+"The public says you visit my house for my wife's sake, not for mine,"
+said La Fontaine. "Then I never will come again." "Far from it,"
+responds La Fontaine, seizing his friend's hand. "I have satisfied the
+public. Now you must come to my house every day, or I will fight you
+again." The two went back in company, and breakfasted together in mutual
+good humor.
+
+A trait or two more, and there will have been enough of the man La
+Fontaine. It is said that when, on the death of Madame de la Sabliere,
+La Fontaine was homeless, he was met on the street by a friend, who
+exclaimed, "I was looking for you; come to my house, and live with me!"
+"I was on the way there," La Fontaine characteristically replied. At
+seventy, La Fontaine went through a process of "conversion," so called,
+in which he professed repentance of his sins. On the genuineness of this
+inward experience of La Fontaine, it is not for a fellow-creature of
+his, especially at this distance of time, to pronounce. When he died,
+at seventy-three, Fenelon could say of him (in Latin), "La Fontaine is
+no more! He is no more; and with him have gone the playful jokes, the
+merry laugh, the artless graces, and the sweet Muses!"
+
+La Fontaine's earliest works were _Contes_, so styled; that is, stories,
+tales, or romances. These are in character such that the subsequent
+happy change in manners, if not in morals, has made them
+unreadable,--for their indecency. We need concern ourselves only with
+the Fables, for it is on these that La Fontaine's fame securely rests.
+The basis of story in them was not generally original with La Fontaine.
+He took whatever fittest came to his hand. With much modesty, he
+attributed all to AEsop and Phaedrus. But invention of his own is not
+altogether wanting to his books of fables. Still, it is chiefly the
+consummate artful artlessness of the form that constitutes the
+individual merit of La Fontaine's productions. With something, too, of
+the air of real poetry, he has undoubtedly invested his verse.
+
+We give, first, the brief fable which is said to have been the prime
+favorite of the author himself. It is the fable of "The Oak and the
+Reed." Of this fable, French critics have not scrupled to speak in terms
+of almost the very highest praise. Chamfort says, "Let one consider,
+that, within the limit of thirty lines, La Fontaine, doing nothing but
+yield himself to the current of his story, has taken on every tone,
+that of poetry the most graceful, that of poetry the most lofty, and one
+will not hesitate to affirm, that, at the epoch at which this fable
+appeared, there was nothing comparable to it in the French language."
+There are, to speak precisely, thirty-two lines in the fable. In this
+one case, let us try representing La Fontaine's compression by our
+English form. For the rest of our specimens, we shall use Elizur
+Wright's translation,--a meritorious one, still master of the field
+which, near fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here
+expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to forty-four. The additions are
+not ungraceful, but they encumber somewhat the Attic neatness and
+simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly
+broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines--lines of
+six feet--obligatory in French verse. He rhymes irregularly, at choice,
+and makes his verses long or short, as pleases him. The closing verse of
+the present piece is, in accordance with the intended majesty of the
+representation, an Alexandrine.
+
+          The Oak one day said to the Reed,
+      "Justly might you dame Nature blame:
+      A wren's weight would bow down your frame;
+          The lightest wind that chance may make
+          Dimple the surface of the lake
+          Your head bends low indeed,
+      The while, like Caucasus, my front
+      To meet the branding sun is wont,
+      Nay, more, to take the tempest's brunt.
+
+          A blast you feel, I feel a breeze.
+      Had you been born beneath my roof,
+      Wide-spread, of leafage weather-proof,
+          Less had you known your life to tease;
+          I should have sheltered you from storm.
+          But oftenest you rear your form
+      On the moist limits of the realm of wind.
+      Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned."
+          "Your pity," answers him the Heed,
+      "Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain;
+      I more than you may winds disdain.
+          I bend, and break not. You, indeed,
+      Against their dreadful strokes till now
+      Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow:
+      But wait we for the end."
+                                Scarce had he spoke,
+      When fiercely from the far horizon broke
+      The wildest of the children, fullest fraught
+      With terror, that till then the North had brought.
+          The tree holds good; the reed it bends.
+          The wind redoubled might expends,
+      And so well works that from his bed
+      Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head
+      Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead.
+
+In the fable of the "Rat retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies
+the monks. "With French _finesse_, he hits his mark by expressly
+avoiding it. "What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No,
+but a Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always
+ready with his help to the needy!"
+
+      The sage Levantines have a tale
+          About a rat that weary grew
+      Of all the cares which life assail,
+          And to a Holland cheese withdrew.
+      His solitude was there profound,
+      Extending through his world so round.
+      Our hermit lived on that within;
+      And soon his industry had been
+      With claws and teeth so good,
+          That in his novel heritage,
+          He had in store for wants of age,
+      Both house and livelihood.
+      What more could any rat desire?
+          He grew fat, fair, and round.
+          God's blessings thus redound
+      To those who in his vows retire.
+      One day this personage devout,
+      Whose kindness none might doubt,
+      Was asked, by certain delegates
+      That came from Rat United States,
+      For some small aid, for they
+      To foreign parts were on their way,
+      For succor in the great cat-war:
+      Ratopolis beleaguered sore,
+          Their whole republic drained and poor,
+      No morsel in their scrips they bore.
+          Slight boon they craved, of succor sure
+      In days at utmost three or four.
+      "My friends," the hermit said,
+      "To worldly things I'm dead.
+      How can a poor recluse
+      To such a mission be of use?
+      What can he do but pray
+      That God will aid it on its way?
+      And so, my friends, it is my prayer
+      That God will have you in his care."
+      His well-fed saintship said no more,
+      But in their faces shut the door.
+          What think you, reader, is the service,
+      For which I use this niggard rat?
+          To paint a monk? No, but a dervise.
+      A monk, I think, however fat,
+      Must be more bountiful than that.
+
+The fable entitled "Death and the Dying" is much admired for its union
+of pathos with wit. "The Two Doves" is another of La Fontaine's more
+tender inspirations. "The Mogul's Dream" is a somewhat ambitious flight
+of the fabulist's muse. On the whole, however, the masterpiece among the
+fables of La Fontaine is that of "The Animals Sick of the Plague." Such
+at least is the opinion of critics in general. The idea of this fable is
+not original with La Fontaine. The homilists of the middle ages used a
+similar fiction to enforce on priests the duty of impartiality in
+administering the sacrament, so called, of confession. We give this
+famous fable as our closing specimen of La Fontaine:--
+
+                The sorest ill that Heaven hath
+            Sent oil this lower world in wrath,--
+            The plague (to call it by its name),
+                    One single day of which
+                Would Pluto's ferryman enrich,
+            Waged war on beasts, both wild and tame.
+            They died not all, but all were sick:
+            No hunting now, by force or trick,
+            To save what might so soon expire.
+            No food excited their desire:
+            Nor wolf nor fox now watched to slay
+            The innocent and tender prey.
+                            The turtles fled,
+            So love and therefore joy were dead.
+            The lion council held, and said,
+            "My friends, I do believe
+            This awful scourge for which we grieve,
+            Is for our sins a punishment
+            Most righteously by Heaven sent.
+            Let us our guiltiest beast resign,
+            A sacrifice to wrath divine.
+            Perhaps this offering, truly small,
+            May gain the life and health of all.
+            By history we find it noted
+            That lives have been just so devoted.
+            Then let us all turn eyes within,
+            And ferret out the hidden sin.
+            Himself, let no one spare nor flatter,
+            But make clean conscience in the matter.
+            For me, my appetite has played the glutton
+            Too much and often upon mutton.
+            What harm had e'er my victims done?
+                            I answer, truly, None.
+            Perhaps, sometimes, by hunger pressed,
+                  I've eat the shepherd with the rest.
+                  I yield myself if need there be;
+                  And yet I think, in equity,
+            Each should confess his sins with me;
+            For laws of right and justice cry,
+            The guiltiest alone should die."
+            "Sire," said the fox, "your majesty
+            Is humbler than a king should be,
+            And over-squeamish in the case.
+                  What! eating stupid sheep a crime?
+                  No, never, sire, at any time.
+
+            It rather was an act of grace,
+            A mark of honor to their race.
+            And as to shepherds, one may swear,
+                    The fate your majesty describes,
+            Is recompense less full than fair
+                    For such usurpers o'er our tribes."
+
+                    Thus Renard glibly spoke,
+            And loud applause from listeners broke.
+            Of neither tiger, boar, nor bear,
+            Did any keen inquirer dare
+            To ask for crimes of high degree;
+                    The fighters, biters, scratchers, all
+            From every mortal sin were free;
+                    The very dogs, both great and small,
+                    Were saints, as far as dogs could be.
+
+                    The ass, confessing in his turn,
+            Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:
+            "I happened through a mead to pass;
+            The monks, its owners, were at mass:
+            Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass,
+                    And, add to these the devil, too,
+                    All tempted me the deed to do.
+            I browsed the bigness of my tongue:
+            Since truth must out, I own it wrong."
+            On this, a hue and cry arose,
+            As if the beasts were all his foes.
+            A wolf, haranguing lawyer-wise,
+            Denounced the ass for sacrifice,--
+            The bald-pate, scabby, ragged lout,
+            By whom the plague had come, no doubt.
+            His fault was judged a hanging crime.
+                    What! eat another's grass? Oh, shame!
+            The noose of rope, and death sublime,
+                    For that offence were all too tame!
+                    And soon poor Grizzle felt the same.
+
+            Thus human courts acquit the strong,
+            And doom the weak, as therefore wrong.
+
+It is suitable to add, in conclusion, that La Fontaine is a crucial
+author for disclosing the irreconcilable difference that exists, at
+bottom, between the Englishman's and the Frenchman's idea of poetry. No
+English-speaker, heir of Shakspeare and Milton, will ever be able to
+satisfy a Frenchman with admiration such as he can conscientiously
+profess for the poetry of La Fontaine.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+MOLIERE.
+
+1623-1673.
+
+
+MOLIERE is confessedly the greatest writer of comedy in the world. Greek
+Menander might have disputed the palm; but Menander's works have
+perished, and his greatness must be guessed. Who knows but we guess him
+too great? Moliere's works survive, and his greatness may be measured.
+
+We have stinted our praise. Moliere is not only; the foremost name in a
+certain department of literature; he is one of the foremost names in
+literature. The names are few on which critics are willing to bestow
+this distinction. But critics generally agree in bestowing this
+distinction on Moliere.
+
+Moliere's comedy is by no means mere farce. Farces he wrote,
+undoubtedly; and some element of farce, perhaps, entered to qualify
+nearly every comedy that flowed from his pen. But it is not for his
+farce that Moliere is rated one of the few greatest producers of
+literature. Moliere's comedy constitutes to Moliere the patent that it
+does of high degree in genius, not because it provokes laughter, but
+because, amid laughter provoked, it not seldom reveals, as if with
+flashes of lightning,--lightning playful, indeed, but lightning that
+might have been deadly,--the "secrets of the nethermost abyss" of human
+nature. Not human manners merely, those of a time, or of a race, but
+human attributes, those of all times, and of all races, are the things
+with which, in his higher comedies, Moliere deals. Some transient whim
+of fashion may in these supply to him the mould of form that he uses,
+but it is human nature itself that supplies to Moliere the substance of
+his dramatic creations. Now and again, if you read Moliere wisely and
+deeply, you find your laughter at comedy fairly frozen in your throat,
+by a gelid horror seizing you, to feel that these follies or these
+crimes displayed belong to that human nature, one and the same
+everywhere and always, of which also you yourself partake. Comedy,
+Dante, too, called his poem, which included the "Inferno." And a
+Dantesque quality, not of method, but of power, is to be felt in
+Moliere.
+
+This character in Moliere the writer, accords with the character of the
+man Moliere. It might not have seemed natural to say of Moliere, as was
+said of Dante, "There goes the man that has been in hell." But Moliere
+was melancholy enough in temper and in mien to have well inspired an
+exclamation such as, 'There goes the man that has seen the human heart.'
+
+A poet as well as a dramatist, his own fellow-countrymen, at least, feel
+Moliere to be. In Victor Hugo's list of the eight greatest poets of all
+time, two are Hebrews (Job and Isaiah), two Greeks (Homer and AEschylus),
+one is a Roman (Lucretius), one an Italian (Dante), one an Englishman
+(Shakspeare),--seven. The eighth could hardly fail to be a Frenchman,
+and that Frenchman is Moliere. Mr. Swinburne might perhaps make the list
+nine, but he would certainly include Victor Hugo himself.
+
+Curiously enough, Moliere is not this great writer's real name. It is a
+stage name. It was assumed by the bearer when he was about twenty-four
+years of age, on occasion of his becoming one in a strolling band of
+players,--in 1646 or thereabout. This band, originally composed of
+amateurs, developed into a professional dramatic company, which passed
+through various transformations, until, from being at first
+grandiloquently self-styled, L'Illustre Theatre, it was, twenty years
+after, recognized by the national title of Theatre Francais. Moliere's
+real name was Jean Baptiste Poquelin.
+
+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. Moliere'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--Moliere finally married. She led her jealous husband a wretched
+conjugal life. A peculiarly dark tradition of shame, connected with
+Moliere'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. (Moliere, to the very
+end of his life, acted in the comedies that he wrote.) When some play of
+his represented the torments 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 Moliere and his wife,
+confronted with each other in performing the piece.
+
+Despite his faults, Moliere was cast in a noble, generous mould, 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.
+
+Moliere 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 Moliere
+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 Moliere 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:--
+
+     M. JOURDAIN. I have the greatest desire in the world to be learned;
+     and it vexes me more than I can tell, that my father and mother
+     did not make me learn thoroughly all the sciences when I was young.
+
+     PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY. This is a praiseworthy feeling. _Nam sine
+     doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago._ You understand this, and you
+     have, no doubt, a knowledge of Latin?
+
+     M. JOUR. Yes; but act as if I had none. Explain to me the meaning
+     of it.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The meaning of it is, that, without science, life is an
+     image of death.
+
+     M. JOUR. That Latin is quite right.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Have you any principles, any rudiments, of science?
+
+     M. JOUR. Oh, yes! I can read and write.
+
+     PROP. PHIL. With what would you like to begin? Shall I teach you
+     logic?
+
+     M. JOUR. And what may this logic be?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. It is that which teaches us the three operations of the
+     mind.
+
+     M. JOUR. What are they--these three operations of the mind?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The first, the second, and the third. The first is to
+     conceive well by means of universals; the second, to judge well by
+     means of categories; and the third, to draw a conclusion aright by
+     means of the figures Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio, Baralipton,
+     etc.
+
+     M. JOUR. Pooh! what repulsive words! This logic does not by any
+     means suit me. Teach me something more enlivening.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Will you learn moral philosophy?
+
+     M. JOUR. Moral philosophy?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Yes.
+
+     M. JOUR. What does it say, this moral philosophy?
+
+     PROF. PHIL.It treats of happiness, teaches men to moderate their
+     passions, and--
+
+     M. JOUR. No, none of that. I am devilishly hot-tempered, and
+     morality, or no morality, I like to give full vent to my anger
+     whenever I have a mind to it.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Would you like to learn physics?
+
+     M. JOUR. And what have physics to say for themselves?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Physics are that science which explains the principles
+     of natural things and the properties of bodies; which discourses of
+     the nature of the elements, of metals, minerals, stones, plants,
+     and animals; which teaches us the cause of all the meteors, the
+     rainbow, the _ignis fatuus,_ comets, lightning, thunder,
+     thunderbolts, rain, snow, hail, and whirlwinds.
+
+     M. JOUR. There is too much hullaballoo in all that, too much riot
+     and rumpus.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Very good.
+
+     M. JOUR. And now I want to intrust you with a great secret. I am in
+     love with a lady of quality, and I should be glad if you would help
+     me to write something to her in a short letter which I mean to drop
+     at her feet.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Very well.
+
+     M. JOUR. That will be gallant, will it not?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Undoubtedly. Is it verse you wish to write to her?
+
+     M. JOUR. Oh, no! not verse.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. You only wish prose?
+
+     M. JOUR. No. I wish for neither verse nor prose.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. It must be one or the other.
+
+     M. JOUR.Why?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Because, sir, there is nothing by which we can express
+     ourselves except prose or verse.
+
+     M. JOUR. There is nothing but prose or verse?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. No, sir. Whatever is not prose, is verse; and whatever
+     is not verse, is prose.
+
+     M. JOUR.And when we speak, what is that, then?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Prose.
+
+     M. JOUR. What! when I say, "Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give
+     me my nightcap," is that prose?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Yes, sir.
+
+     M. JOUR. Upon my word, I have been speaking prose these forty years
+     without being aware of it; and I am under the greatest obligation
+     to you for informing me of it. Well, then, I wish to write to her
+     in a letter, "Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of
+     love;" but I would have this worded in a genteel manner, and turned
+     prettily.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Say that the fire of her eyes has reduced your heart to
+     ashes; that you suffer day and night for her, tortures--
+
+     M. JOUR. No, no, no, I don't any of that. I simply wish for what I
+     tell you,--"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of
+     love."
+
+     PROF. PHIL. Still, you might amplify the thing a little.
+
+     M. JOUR. No, I tell you, I will have nothing but these very words
+     in the letter; but they must be put in a fashionable way, and
+     arranged as they should be. Pray show me a little, so that I may
+     see the different ways in which they can be put.
+
+     PROF. PHIL. They may be put first of all, as you have said, "Fair
+     Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of love;" or else, "Of
+     love die make me, fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes;" or, "Your
+     beautiful eyes of love make me, fair Marchioness, die;" or, "Die of
+     love your beautiful eyes, fair Marchioness, make me;" or else, "Me
+     make your beautiful eyes die, fair Marchioness, of love."
+
+     M. JOUR. But of all these ways, which is the best?
+
+     PROF. PHIL. The one you said,--"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful
+     eyes make me die of love."
+
+     M. JOUR. Yet I have never studied, and I did all right off at the
+     first shot.
+
+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 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 Hotel de Rambouillet reduced to absurdity. That
+fashionable affectation Moliere made the subject of his comedy, "The
+Learned Women."
+
+In the following extracts, Moliere 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:--
+
+     TRISSOTIN. Sonnet to the Princess Urania on her Fever, Your
+     prudence sure is fast asleep, That thus luxuriously you keep And
+     lodge magnificently so Your very hardest-hearted foe.
+
+     BELISE. Ah! what a pretty beginning!
+
+     ARMANDE. What a charming turn it has!
+
+     PHILAMINTE. He alone possesses the talent of making easy verses.
+
+     ARM. We must yield to _prudence fast asleep_.
+
+     BEL. _Lodge one's very hardest-hearted foe_ is full of charms for
+     me.
+
+     PHIL. I like _luxuriously_ and _magnificently_: these two adverbs
+     joined together sound admirably.
+
+     BEL. Let us hear the rest.
+
+     TRISS. Your prudence sure is fast asleep, That thus luxuriously you
+     keep And lodge magnificently so Your very hardest-hearted foe.
+
+     ARM. _Prudence fast asleep._
+
+     BEL. _To lodge one's foe._
+
+     PHIL. _Luxuriously_ and _magnificently_.
+
+     TRISS. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say, From out your
+     chamber, decked so gay, Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,
+     Bold she assails your lovely life.
+
+     BEL. Ah! gently. Allow me to breathe, I beseech you.
+
+     ARM.Give us time to admire, I beg.
+
+     PHIL. One feels, at hearing these verses, an indescribable
+     something which goes through one's inmost soul, and makes one feel
+     quite faint.
+
+     ARM. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say, From out your chamber,
+     decked so gay--
+
+     How prettily _chamber, decked so gay_, is said here! And with what
+     wit the metaphor is introduced!
+
+     PHIL. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say.
+
+     Ah! in what an admirable taste that _whate'er men say _is! To my
+     mind, the passage is invaluable.
+
+     ARM. My heart is also in love with _whate'er men say_.
+
+     BEL. I am of your opinion: _whate'er men say_ is a happy
+     expression.
+
+     ARM. I wish I had written it.
+
+     BEL. It is worth a whole poem.
+
+     PHIL. But do you, like me, thoroughly understand the wit of it?
+
+     ARM. _and_ BEL. Oh! Oh!
+
+     PHIL. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say. Although another
+     should take the fever's part, pay no attention; laugh at the
+     gossips.
+
+      Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,
+      Whate'er men say, whate'er men say.
+
+This _whate'er men say_, says a great deal more than it seems. I do not
+know if every one is like me, but I discover in it a hundred meanings.
+
+     BEL. It is true that it says more than its size seems to imply.
+
+     PHIL. (_to_ TRISSOTIN). But when you wrote this charming _whate'er
+     men say_, did you yourself understand all its energy? Did you
+     realize all that it tells us? And did you then think that you were
+     writing something so witty?
+
+     TRISS. Ah! ah!
+
+     ARM. I have likewise the _ingrate_ in my head,--this ungrateful,
+     unjust, uncivil fever that ill-treats people who entertain her.
+
+     PHIL. In short, both the stanzas are admirable. Let us come quickly
+     to the triplets, I pray.
+
+     ARM. Ah! once more, _whate'er men say_, I beg.
+
+     TRISS. Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BEL. _Whate'er men say!_
+
+     TRISS. From out your chamber, decked so gay,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BEL. _Chamber decked so gay!_
+
+     TRISS. Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BEL. That _ingrate_ fever!
+
+     TRISS. Bold she assails your lovely life.
+
+     PHIL. _Your lovely life!_
+
+     ARM. _and_ BEL. Ah!
+
+     TRISS. What! reckless of your ladyhood, Still fiercely seeks to
+     shed your blood,--
+
+     PHIL., ARM., _and_ BEL. Ah!
+
+     TRISS. And day and night to work you harm. When to the baths
+     sometime you've brought her, No more ado, with your own arm Whelm
+     her and drown her in the water.
+
+     PHIL. Ah! It is quite overpowering.
+
+     BEL. I faint.
+
+     ARM. I die from pleasure.
+
+     PHIL. A thousand sweet thrills seize one.
+
+     ARM. _When to the baths sometime you've brought her,_
+
+     BEL. _No more ado, with your own arm_
+
+     PHIL. _Whelm her and drown her in the water._ With your own arm,
+     drown her there in the baths.
+
+     ARM. In your verses we meet at each step with charming beauty.
+
+     BEL. One promenades through them with rapture.
+
+     PHIL. One treads on fine things only.
+
+     ARM. They are little lanes all strewn with roses.
+
+     TRISS. Then, the sonnet seems to you--
+
+     PHIL. Admirable, new; and never did any one make any thing more
+     beautiful.
+
+     BEL. (_to_ HENRIETTE). What! my niece, you listen to what has been
+     read without emotion! You play there but a sorry part!
+
+     HEN. We each of us play the best part we can, my aunt; and to be a
+     wit does not depend on our will.
+
+     TRISS. My verses, perhaps, are tedious to you.
+
+     HEN. No. I do not listen.
+
+     PHIL. Ah! Let us hear the epigram.
+
+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 Moliere's time a fashionable study rendered
+such by the contemporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents
+the limitations imposed upon her sex:--
+
+     ARM. It is insulting our sex too grossly to limit our intelligence
+     to the power of judging of a skirt, of the make of a garment, of
+     the beauties of lace, or of a new brocade.
+
+     BEL. We must rise above this shameful condition, and bravely
+     proclaim our emancipation.
+
+     TRISS. Every one knows my respect for the fairer sex, and that, if
+     I render homage to the brightness of their eyes, I also honor the
+     splendor of their intellect.
+
+     PHIL. And our sex does you justice in this respect: but we will
+     show to certain minds who treat us with proud contempt, that women
+     also have knowledge; that, like men, they can hold learned
+     meetings--regulated, too, by better rules; that they wish to unite
+     what elsewhere is kept apart, join noble language to deep learning,
+     reveal nature's laws by a thousand experiments; and, on all
+     questions proposed, admit every party, and ally themselves to none.
+
+     TRISS. For order, I prefer peripateticism.
+
+     PHIL. For abstractions, I love platonism.
+
+     ARM. Epicurus pleases me, for his tenets are solid.
+
+     BEL. I agree with the doctrine of atoms; but I find it difficult to
+     understand a vacuum, and I much prefer subtile matter.
+
+     TRISS. I quite agree with Descartes about magnetism.
+
+     ARM. I like his vortices.
+
+     PHIL. And I, his falling worlds.
+
+     ARM. I long to see our assembly opened, and to distinguish
+     ourselves by some great discovery.
+
+     TRISS. Much is expected from your enlightened knowledge, for nature
+     has hidden few things from you.
+
+     PHIL. For my part, I have, without boasting, already made one
+     discovery; I have plainly seen men in the moon.
+
+     BEL. I have not, I believe, as yet quite distinguished men, but I
+     have seen steeples as plainly as I see you.
+
+     ARM. In addition to natural philosophy, we will dive into grammar,
+     history, verse, ethics, and politics.
+
+     PHIL. I find in ethics charms which delight my heart; it was
+     formerly the admiration of great geniuses: but I give the
+     preference to the Stoics, and I think nothing so grand as their
+     founder.
+
+"Les Precieuses 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 Hotel de Rambouillet, conversation was cultivated
+as a fine art. There was, no doubt, something overstrained in the
+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 precieuse." Hence at last the term _precieuse_ as a
+designation of ridicule. Madame de Sevigne was a _precieuse_. But she,
+with many of her peers, was too rich in sarcastic common sense to be a
+_precieuse ridicule_. Moliere 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
+Moliere'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 Moliere's comedies, is written
+in rhymed verse. We could not, with any effort, make the English-reading
+student of Moliere 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 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 Moliere 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
+Cleante, his brother, whom, in his eagerness, he begs to excuse his not
+answering a question just addressed to him:--
+
+     ORGON (_to_ CLEANTE). Brother, pray excuse me: you will kindly
+     allow me to allay my anxiety by asking news of the family. (_To_
+     DORINE, _a maid-servant_.) Has every thing gone on well these last
+     two days? What has happened? How is everybody?
+
+     DOR. The day before yesterday our mistress was very feverish from
+     morning to night, and suffered from a most extraordinary headache.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. Tartuffe! He is wonderfully well, stout and fat, with blooming
+     cheeks and ruddy lips.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. In the evening she felt very faint, and the pain in her head
+     was so great that she could not touch any thing at supper.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. He ate his supper by himself before her, and very devoutly
+     devoured a brace of partridges, and half a leg of mutton hashed.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. She spent the whole of the night without getting one wink of
+     sleep: she was very feverish, and we had to sit up with her until
+     the morning.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. Overcome by a pleasant sleepiness, he passed from the table to
+     his room, and got at once into his warmed bed, where he slept
+     comfortably till the next morning.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. At last yielding to our persuasions, she consented to be bled,
+     and immediately felt relieved.
+
+     ORG. And Tartuffe?
+
+     DOR. He took heart right valiantly, and fortifying his soul against
+     all evils, to make up for the blood which our lady had lost, drank
+     at breakfast four large bumpers of wine.
+
+     ORG. Poor man!
+
+     DOR. Now, at last, they are both well; and I will go and tell our
+     lady how glad you are to hear of her recovery.
+
+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:--
+
+     MADAME PERNELLE. I can never believe, my son, that he would commit
+     so base an action.
+
+     ORG. What?
+
+     PER. Good people are always subject to envy.
+
+     ORG. What do you mean, mother?
+
+     PER. That you live after a strange sort here, and that I am but too
+     well aware of the ill will they all bear him.
+
+     ORG. What has this ill will to do with what I have just told you?
+
+     PER. I have told it you a hundred times when you were young, that
+     in this world virtue is ever liable to persecution, and that,
+     although the envious die, envy never dies.
+
+     ORG. But what has this to do with what has happened to-day?
+
+     PER. They have concocted a hundred foolish stories against him.
+
+     ORG. I have already told you that I saw it all myself.
+
+     PER. The malice of evil-disposed persons is very great.
+
+     ORG. You would make me swear, mother! I tell you that I saw his
+     audacious attempt with my own eyes.
+
+     PER. Evil tongues have always some venom to pour forth; and here
+     below, there is nothing proof against them.
+
+     ORG. You are maintaining a very senseless argument. I saw it, I
+     tell you,--saw it with my own eyes! what you can call s-a-w, saw!
+     Must I din it over and over into your ears, and shout as loud as
+     half a dozen people?
+
+     PER. Gracious goodness! appearances often deceive us! We must not
+     always judge by what we see.
+
+     ORG. I shall go mad!
+
+     PER. We are by nature prone to judge wrongly, and good is often
+     mistaken for evil.
+
+     ORG. I ought to look upon his desire of seducing my wife as
+     charitable?
+
+     PER. You ought to have good reasons before you accuse another, and
+     you should have waited till you were quite sure of the fact.
+
+     ORG. Heaven save the mark! how could I be more sure? I suppose,
+     mother, I ought to have waited till--you will make me say something
+     foolish.
+
+     PER. In short, his soul is possessed with too pure a zeal; and I
+     cannot possibly conceive that he would think of attempting what you
+     accuse him of.
+
+     ORG. If you were not my mother, I really don't know what I might
+     now say to you, you make me so savage.
+
+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:--
+
+     LOY. (to DORINE _at the farther part of the stage_). Good-day, my
+     dear sister; pray let me speak to your master.
+
+     DOR. He is with friends, and I do not think he can see any one just
+     now.
+
+     LOY. I would not be intrusive. I feel sure that he will find
+     nothing unpleasant in my visit: in fact, I come for something which
+     will be very gratifying to him.
+
+     DOR. What is your name?
+
+     LOY. Only tell him that I come from Mr. Tartuffe, for his benefit.
+
+     DOR. (to ORGON). It is a man who comes in a civil way from Mr.
+     Tartuffe, on some business which will make you glad, he says.
+
+     CLE. (to ORGON). You must see who it is, and what the man wants.
+
+     ORG. (to CLEANTE). He is coming, perhaps, to settle matters between
+     us in a friendly way. How, in this case, ought I to behave to him?
+
+     CLE. Don't show any resentment, and, if he speaks of an agreement,
+     listen to him.
+
+     LOY. (to ORGON). Your servant, sir! May heaven punish whoever
+     wrongs you! and may it be as favorable to you, sir, as I wish!
+
+     ORG. (_aside to_ CLEANTE). This pleasant beginning agrees with my
+     conjectures, and argues some sort of reconciliation.
+
+     LOY. All your family was always dear to me, and I served your
+     father.
+
+     ORG. Sir, I am sorry and ashamed to say that I do not know who you
+     are, neither do I remember your name.
+
+     LOY. My name is Loyal; I was born in Normandy, and am a royal
+     bailiff in spite of envy. For the last forty years I have had the
+     good fortune to fill the office, thanks to Heaven, with great
+     credit; and I come, sir, with your leave, to serve you the writ of
+     a certain order.
+
+     ORG. What! you are here--
+
+     LOY. Gently, sir, I beg. It is merely a summons,--a notice for you
+     to leave this place, you and yours; to take away all your goods and
+     chattels, and make room for others, without delay or adjournment,
+     as hereby decreed.
+
+     ORG. I! leave this place?
+
+     LOY. Yes, sir; if you please. The house incontestably belongs, as
+     you are well aware, to the good Mr. Tartuffe. He is now lord and
+     master of your estates, according to a deed I have in my keeping.
+     It is in due form, and cannot be challenged.
+
+     DAMIS (_to_ MR. LOYAL). This great impudence is, indeed, worthy of
+     all admiration.
+
+     LOY. (_to_ DAMIS). Sir, I have nothing at all to do with you.
+     (_Pointing to_ ORGON.) My business is with this gentleman. He is
+     tractable and gentle, and knows too well the duty of a gentleman to
+     try to oppose authority.
+
+     ORG. But--
+
+     LOY. Yes, sir: I know that you would not, for any thing, show
+     contumacy; and that you will allow me, like a reasonable man, to
+     execute the orders I have received....
+
+The scene gives in conclusion some spirited by-play 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:--
+
+     ORG. Well, mother, you see whether I am right; and you can judge of
+     the rest by the writ. Do you at last acknowledge his rascality?
+
+     PER. I am thunderstruck, and can scarcely believe my eyes and ears.
+
+The next scene introduces Valere, the noble lover of that daughter whom
+the infatuated father was bent on sacrificing to Tartuffe. Valere comes
+to announce that Tartuffe, the villain, has accused Orgon to the king.
+Orgon must fly. Valere 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:--
+
+     TAR. (_stopping_ ORGON). Gently, sir, gently; not so fast, I beg.
+     You have not far to go to find a lodging, and you are a prisoner in
+     the king's name.
+
+     ORG. Wretch! you had reserved this shaft for the last; by it you
+     finish me, and crown all your perfidies.
+
+     TAR. Your abuse has no power to disturb me, and I know how to
+     suffer every thing for the sake of Heaven.
+
+     CLE. Your moderation is really great, we must acknowledge.
+
+     DA. How impudently the infamous wretch sports with Heaven!
+
+     TAR. Your anger cannot move me. I have no other wish but to fulfil
+     my duty.
+
+     MARIANNE. You may claim great glory from the performance of this
+     duty: it is a very honorable employment for you.
+
+     TAR. The employment cannot be otherwise than glorious, when it
+     comes from the power that sends me here.
+
+     ORG. But do you remember that my charitable hand, ungrateful
+     scoundrel, raised you from a state of misery?
+
+     TAR. Yes, I know what help I have received from you; but the
+     interest of my king is my first duty. The just obligation of this
+     sacred duty stifles in my heart all other claims; and I would
+     sacrifice to it friend, wife, relations, and myself with them.
+
+     ELMIRE. The impostor!
+
+     DOR. With what treacherous cunning he makes a cloak of all that men
+     revere!...
+
+     TAR. (_to the_ OFFICER). I beg of you, sir, to deliver me from all
+     this noise, and to act according to the orders you have received.
+
+     OFFICER. I have certainly put off too long the discharge of my
+     duty, and you very rightly remind me of it. To execute my order,
+     follow me immediately to the prison in which a place is assigned to
+     you.
+
+     TAR. Who? I, sir?
+
+     OFFICER. Yes, you.
+
+     TAR. Why to prison?
+
+     OFFICER. To you I have no account to render. (_To_ ORGON.) Pray,
+     sir, recover from your great alarm. We live under a king [Louis
+     XIV.] who is an enemy to fraud,--a king who can read the heart, and
+     whom all the arts of impostors cannot deceive. His great mind,
+     endowed with delicate discernment, at all times sees things in
+     their true, light.... He annuls, by his sovereign will, the terms
+     of the contract by which you gave him [Tartuffe] your property. He
+     moreover forgives you this secret offence in which you were
+     involved by the flight of your friend. This to reward the zeal
+     which you once showed for him in maintaining his rights, and to
+     prove that his heart, when it is least expected, knows how to
+     recompense a good action. Merit with him is never lost, and he
+     remembers good better than evil.
+
+     DOR. Heaven be thanked!
+
+     PER. Ah! I breathe again.
+
+     EL. What a favorable end to our troubles!
+
+     MAR. Who would have foretold it?
+
+     ORG. (to TARTUFFE, _as the_ OFFICER _leads him off_). Ah, wretch!
+     now you  are--
+
+Tartuffe thus disposed of, the play promptly ends, with a vanishing
+glimpse afforded us of a happy marriage in prospect for Valere with the
+daughter.
+
+Moliere 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 Shakspeare,
+so there is but one Moliere.
+
+
+
+
+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 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 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 universally 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 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 defence 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 defence
+of Arnauld, the writer went on to take up a line of offence 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:--
+
+     "You know," he said, "that the ruling passion of persons in that
+     rank of life [the rank of gentleman] is 'the point of honor,' which
+     is perpetually driving them into acts of violence apparently quite
+     at variance with Christian piety; so that, in fact, they would be
+     almost all of them excluded from our confessionals, had not our
+     fathers relaxed a little from the strictness of religion, to
+     accommodate themselves to the weakness of humanity. Anxious to keep
+     on good terms, both with the gospel, by doing their duty to God,
+     and with the men of the world, by showing charity to their
+     neighbor, they needed all the wisdom they possessed to devise
+     expedients for so nicely adjusting matters as to permit these
+     gentlemen to adopt the methods usually resorted to for vindicating
+     their honor without wounding their consciences, and thus reconcile
+     things apparently so opposite to each other as piety and the point
+     of honor."...
+
+     "I should certainly [so replies M. Montalte, with the most
+     exquisite irony couched under a cover of admiring simplicity],--I
+     should certainly have considered the thing perfectly impracticable,
+     if I had not known, from what I have seen of your fathers, that
+     they are capable of doing with ease what is impossible to other
+     men. This led me to anticipate that they must have discovered some
+     method for meeting the difficulty,--a method which I admire, even
+     before knowing it, and which I pray you to explain to me."
+
+     "Since that is your view of the matter," replied the monk, "I
+     cannot refuse you. Know, then, that this marvellous principle is
+     our grand method of _directing the intention_--the importance of
+     which, in our moral system, is such, that I might almost venture to
+     compare it with the doctrine of probability. You have had some
+     glimpses of it in passing, from certain maxims which I mentioned to
+     you. For example, when I was showing you how servants might execute
+     certain troublesome jobs with a safe conscience, did you not remark
+     that it was simply by diverting their intention from the evil to
+     which they were accessory, to the profit which they might reap from
+     the transaction? Now, that is what we call _directing the
+     intention_. You saw, too, that, were it not for a similar
+     divergence of _the mind_, those who give money for benefices might
+     be downright simoniacs. But I will now show you this grand method
+     in all its glory, as it applies to the subject of homicide,--a
+     crime which it justifies in a thousand instances,--in order that,
+     from this startling result, you may form an idea of all that it is
+     calculated to effect."
+
+     "I foresee already," said I, "that, according to this mode, every
+     thing will be permitted: it will stick at nothing."
+
+     "You always fly from the one extreme to the other," replied the
+     monk; "prithee avoid that habit. For just to show you that we are
+     far from permitting every thing, let me tell you that we never
+     suffer such a thing as a formal intention to sin, with the sole
+     design of sinning; and, if any person whatever should persist in
+     having no other end but evil in the evil that he does, we break
+     with him at once; such conduct is diabolical. This holds true,
+     without exception of age, sex, or rank. But when the person is not
+     of such a wretched disposition as this, we try to put in practice
+     our method of _directing the intention_, which consists in his
+     proposing to himself, as the end of his actions, some allowable
+     object. Not that we do not endeavor, as far as we can, to dissuade
+     men from doing things forbidden; but, when we cannot prevent the
+     action, we at least purify the motive, and thus correct the
+     viciousness of the mean by the goodness of the end. Such is the way
+     in which our fathers have contrived to permit those acts of
+     violence to which men usually resort in vindication of their honor.
+     They have no more to do than to turn off their intention from the
+     desire of vengeance, which is criminal, and direct it to a desire
+     to defend their honor, which, according to us, is quite
+     warrantable. And in this way our doctors discharge all their duty
+     towards God and towards man. By permitting the action, they gratify
+     the world; and by purifying the intention, they give satisfaction
+     to the gospel. This is a secret, sir, which was entirely unknown to
+     the ancients; the world is indebted for the discovery entirely to
+     our doctors. You understand it now, I hope?"
+
+     "Perfectly," was my reply. "To men you grant the outward material
+     effect of the action, and to God you give the inward and spiritual
+     movement of the intention; and, by this equitable partition, you
+     form an alliance between the laws of God and the laws of men. But,
+     my dear sir, to be frank with you, I can hardly trust your
+     premises, and I suspect that your authors will tell another tale."
+
+     "You do me injustice," rejoined the monk; "I advance nothing but
+     what I am ready to prove, and that by such a rich array of
+     passages, that altogether their number, their authority, and their
+     reasonings, will fill you with admiration. To show you, for
+     example, the alliance which our fathers have formed between the
+     maxims of the gospel and those of the world, by thus regulating the
+     intention, let me refer you to Reginald. (_In praxi._, liv. xxi.,
+     num. 62, p. 260.) [These, and all that follow, are verifiable
+     citations from real and undisputed Jesuit authorities, not to this
+     day repudiated by that order.] 'Private persons are forbidden to
+     avenge themselves; for St. Paul says to the Romans (ch. 12th),
+     "Recompense to no man evil for evil;" and Ecclesiasticus says (ch.
+     28th), "He that taketh vengeance shall draw on himself the
+     vengeance of God, and his sins will not be forgotten." Besides all
+     that is said in the gospel about forgiving offences, as in the 6th
+     and 18th chapters of St. Matthew.'"
+
+     "Well, father, if after that, he [Reginald] says any thing contrary
+     to the Scripture, it will, at least, not be from lack of scriptural
+     knowledge. Pray, how does he conclude?"
+
+     "You shall hear," he said. "From all this it appears that a
+     military man may demand satisfaction on the spot from the person
+     who has injured him--not, indeed, with the intention of rendering
+     evil for evil, but with that of preserving his honor--_non ut malum
+     pro malo reddat, sed ut conservat honorem_. See you how carefully,
+     because the Scripture condemns it, they guard against the intention
+     of rendering evil for evil? This is what they will tolerate on no
+     account. Thus Lessius observes (De Just., liv. ii., c. 9, d. 12, n.
+     79), that, 'If a man has received a blow on the face, he must on no
+     account have an intention to avenge himself; but he may lawfully
+     have an intention to avert infamy, and may, with that view, repel
+     the insult immediately, even at the point of the sword--_etiam cum
+     gladio_.' So far are we from permitting any one to cherish the
+     design of taking vengeance on his enemies, that our fathers will
+     not allow any even to _wish their death_--by a movement of hatred.
+     'If your enemy is disposed to injure you,' says Escobar, 'you have
+     no right to wish his death, by a movement of hatred; though you
+     may, with a view to save yourself from harm.' So legitimate,
+     indeed, is this wish, with such an intention, that our great
+     Hurtado de Mendoza says that 'we may _pray God_ to visit with
+     speedy death those who are bent on persecuting us, if there is no
+     other way of escaping from it.'" (In his book, De Spe, vol. ii., d.
+     15, sec. 4, 48.)
+
+     "May it please your reverence," said I, "the Church has forgotten
+     to insert a petition to that effect among her prayers."
+
+     "They have not put every thing into the prayers that one may
+     lawfully ask of God," answered the monk. "Besides, in the present
+     case, the thing was impossible, for this same opinion is of more
+     recent standing than the Breviary. You are not a good chronologist,
+     friend. But, not to wander from the point, let me request your
+     attention to the following passage, cited by Diana from Gaspar
+     Hurtado (De Sub. Pecc., diff. 9; Diana, p. 5; tr. 14, r. 99), one
+     of Escobar's four-and-twenty fathers: 'An incumbent may, without
+     any mortal sin, desire the decease of a life-renter on his
+     benefice, and a son that of his father, and rejoice when it
+     happens; provided always it is for the sake of the profit that is
+     to accrue from the event, and not from personal aversion.'"
+
+     "Good," cried I. "That is certainly a very happy hit, and I can
+     easily see that the doctrine admits of a wide application. But yet
+     there are certain cases, the solution of which, though of great
+     importance for gentlemen, might present still greater
+     difficulties."
+
+     "Propose such, if you please, that we may see," said the monk.
+
+     "Show me, with all your directing of the intention," returned I,
+     "that it is allowable to fight a duel."
+
+     "Our great Hurtado de Mendoza," said the father, "will satisfy you
+     on that point in a twinkling. 'If a gentleman,' says he, in a
+     passage cited by Diana, 'who is challenged to fight a duel, is well
+     known to have no religion, and if the vices to which he is openly
+     and unscrupulously addicted, are such as would lead people to
+     conclude, in the event of his refusing to fight, that he is
+     actuated, not by the fear of God, but by cowardice, and induce them
+     to say of him that he was a _hen_, and not a man--_gallina, et non
+     vir_; in that case he may, to save his honor, appear at the
+     appointed spot--not, indeed, with the express intention of fighting
+     a duel, but merely with that of defending himself, should the
+     person who challenged him come there unjustly to attack him. His
+     action in this case, viewed by itself, will be perfectly
+     indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one's stepping into a
+     field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a person, and
+     defending one's self in the event of being attacked? And thus the
+     gentleman is guilty of no sin whatever; for in fact, it cannot be
+     called accepting a challenge at all, his intention being directed
+     to other circumstances, and the acceptance of a challenge
+     consisting in an express intention to fight, which we are supposing
+     the gentleman never had.'"
+
+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:--
+
+     I have been asked why I employed a pleasant, jocose, and diverting
+     style. I reply... I thought it a duty to write so as to be
+     comprehended by women and men of the world, that they might know
+     the danger of their maxims and propositions which were then
+     universally propagated.... I have been asked, lastly, if I myself
+     read all the books which I quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so,
+     I must have passed a great part of my life in reading very bad
+     books; but I read Escobar twice through, and I employed some of my
+     friends in reading the others. But I did not make use of a single
+     passage without having myself read it in the book from which it is
+     cited, without having examined the subject of which it treats, and
+     without having read what went before and followed, so that I might
+     run no risk of quoting an objection as an answer, which would have
+     been blameworthy and unfair.
+
+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 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: "Moliere'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 "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. Faugere 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 Faugere, 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 sceptic of
+the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This sceptic represents his
+own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:--
+
+     'I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is,
+     nor what I am myself. I am in a frightful ignorance of all things.
+     I do not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is,
+     and that very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which
+     reflects upon every thing and upon itself, and is no better
+     acquainted with itself than with any thing else. I see these
+     appalling spaces of the universe which enclose me, and I find
+     myself tethered in one corner of this immense expansion without
+     knowing why I am stationed in this place rather than in another, or
+     why this moment of time which is given me to live is assigned me at
+     this point rather than at another of the whole eternity that has
+     preceded me, and of that which is to follow me.
+
+     'I see nothing but infinities on every side, which enclose me like
+     an atom, and like a shadow which endures but for an instant, and
+     returns no more.
+
+     'All that I know, is that I am soon to die; but what I am most
+     ignorant of, is that very death which I am unable to avoid.
+
+     'As I know not whence I came, so I know not whither I go; and I
+     know only, that in leaving this world I fall forever either into
+     nothingness or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing
+     which of these two conditions is to be eternally my lot. Such is my
+     state,--full of misery, of weakness, and of uncertainty.
+
+     'And from all this I conclude, that I ought to pass all the days
+     of my life without a thought of trying to learn what is to befall
+     me hereafter. Perhaps in my doubts I might find some enlightenment;
+     but I am unwilling to take the trouble, or go a single step in
+     search of it; and, treating with contempt those who perplex
+     themselves with such solicitude, my purpose is to go forward
+     without forethought and without fear to try the great event, and
+     passively to approach death in uncertainty of the eternity of my
+     future condition.'
+
+     Who would desire to have for a friend a man who discourses in this
+     manner? Who would select such a one for the confidant of his
+     affairs? Who would have recourse to such a one in his afflictions?
+     And, in fine, for what use of life could such a man be destined?
+
+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:--
+
+     Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking
+     reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to
+     crush him. An exhalation, a drop of water, suffices to kill him.
+     But were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble
+     than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and
+     knows the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe
+     knows nothing of it.
+
+     Our whole dignity consists, then, in 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."
+
+What a sudden, almost ludicrous, reduction in scale, the greatness of
+Caesar, 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 Caesar, when he began fighting for universal empire, was fifty-one
+years of age:)--
+
+     Caesar was too old, it seems to me, to amuse himself with conquering
+     the world. This amusement was well enough for Augustus or
+     Alexander; they were young people, whom it is difficult to stop;
+     but Caesar ought to have been more mature.
+
+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:--
+
+     I lay it down as a fact, that, if all men knew what others say of
+     them, there would not be four friends in the world.
+
+Here is one of the most current of Pascal's sayings:--
+
+     Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.
+
+The following "Thought" condenses the substance of the book proposed,
+into three short sentences:--
+
+     The knowledge of God without that of our misery produces pride. The
+     knowledge of our misery without that of God gives despair. The
+     knowledge of Jesus Christ is intermediate, because therein we find
+     God and our misery.
+
+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:--
+
+     Console thyself; thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found
+     me.
+
+     I thought on thee in my agony; such drops of blood I shed for thee.
+
+It is austerity again, but not unjust austerity, that speaks as
+follows:--
+
+     Religion is a thing so great that those who would not take the
+     pains to seek it if it is obscure, should be deprived of it. What
+     do they complain of, then, if it is such that they could find it by
+     seeking it?
+
+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 practising, 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.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+MADAME DE SEVIGNE.
+
+1626-1696.
+
+
+Of Madame de Sevigne, 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 Sevigne'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 Sevigne'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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne 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 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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne remarked, on returning to her seat after her
+dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and
+would certainly obscure the lustre 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 Sevigne 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 and 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.
+
+We owe it to our readers (and to Madame de Sevigne 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:--
+
+THE ROCKS, Sunday, June 28, 1671.
+
+     You have amply made up to me my late losses; I have received two
+     letters from you which have filled me with transports of joy. The
+     pleasure I take in reading them is beyond all imagination. If I
+     have in any way contributed to the improvement of your style I did
+     it in the thought that I was laboring for the pleasure of others,
+     not for my own. But Providence, who has seen fit to separate us so
+     often, and to place us at such immense distances from each other,
+     has repaid me a little for the privation in the charms of your
+     correspondence, and still more in the satisfaction you express in
+     your situation, and the beauty of your castle; you represent it to
+     me with an air of grandeur and magnificence that enchants me. I
+     once saw a similar account of it by the first Madame de Grignan;
+     but I little thought at that time, that all these beauties were one
+     day to be at your command. I am very much obliged to you for having
+     given me so particular an account of it. If I could be tired in
+     reading your letters, it would not only betray a very bad taste in
+     me, but would likewise show that I could have very little love or
+     friendship for you. Divest yourself of the dislike you have taken
+     to circumstantial details. I have often told you, and you ought
+     yourself to feel the truth of this remark, that they are as dear to
+     us from those we love, as they are tedious and disagreeable from
+     others. If they are displeasing to us, it is only from the
+     indifference we feel for those who write them. Admitting this
+     observation to be true, I leave you to judge what pleasure yours
+     afford me. It is a fine thing, truly, to play the great lady, as
+     you do at present.
+
+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 Sevigne 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 Sevigne idealized her absent daughter, and literally
+"loved but only her." We need not wholly admire such maternal affection.
+But we should not criticise it too severely.
+
+We choose next a marvellously 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:--
+
+     I was at Versailles last Saturday with the Villarses.... At three
+     the king, the queen, Monsieur [eldest brother to the king], Madame
+     [that brother's wife], Mademoiselle [that brother's eldest
+     unmarried daughter], and every thing else which is royal, together
+     with Madame de Montespan [the celebrated mistress of the king] and
+     train, and all the courtiers, and all the ladies,--all, in short,
+     which constitutes the court of France, is assembled in the
+     beautiful apartment of the king's, which you remember. All is
+     furnished divinely, all is magnificent. Such a thing as heat is
+     unknown; you pass from one place to another without the slightest
+     pressure. A game at _reversis_ [the description is of a gambling
+     scene, in which Dangeau figures as a cool and skilful gamester]
+     gives the company a form and a settlement. The king and Madame de
+     Montespan keep a bank together; different tables are occupied by
+     Monsieur, the queen, and Madame de Soubise, Dangeau and party,
+     Langlee and party. Everywhere you see heaps of louis d'ors; they
+     have no other counters. I saw Dangeau play, and thought what fools
+     we all were beside him. He dreams of nothing but what concerns the
+     game; he wins where others lose; he neglects nothing, profits by
+     every thing, never has his attention diverted; in short, his
+     science bids defiance to chance. Two hundred thousand francs in ten
+     days, a hundred thousand crowns in a month, these are the pretty
+     memorandums he puts down in his pocket-book. He was kind enough to
+     say that I was partners with him, so that I got an excellent seat.
+     I made my obeisance to the king, as you told me; and he returned it
+     as if I had been young and handsome.... The duke said a thousand
+     kind things without minding a word he uttered. Marshal de Lorges
+     attacked me in the name of the Chevalier de Grignan; in short,
+     _tutti quanti_ [the whole company]. You know what it is to get a
+     word from everybody you meet. Madame de Montespan talked to me of
+     Bourbon, and asked me how I liked Vichi, and whether the place did
+     me good. She said that Bourbon, instead of curing a pain in one of
+     her knees, injured both.... Her size is reduced by a good half, and
+     yet her complexion, her eyes, and her lips, are as fine as ever.
+     She was dressed all in French point, her hair in a thousand
+     ringlets, the two side ones hanging low on her cheeks, black
+     ribbons on her head, pearls (the same that belonged to Madame de
+     l'Hopital), the loveliest diamond earrings, three or four
+     bodkins--nothing else on the head; in short, a triumphant beauty,
+     worthy the admiration of all the foreign ambassadors. She was
+     accused of preventing the whole French nation from seeing the king;
+     she has restored him, you see, to their eyes; and you cannot
+     conceive the joy it has given all the world, and the splendor it
+     has thrown upon the court. This charming confusion, without
+     confusion, of all which is the most select, continues from three
+     till six. If couriers arrive, the king retires a moment to read the
+     despatches, and returns. There is always some music going on, to
+     which he listens, and which has an excellent effect. He talks with
+     such of the ladies as are accustomed to enjoy that honor.... At
+     six the carriages are at the door. The king is in one of them with
+     Madame de Montespan, Monsieur and Madame de Thianges, and honest
+     d'Heudicourt in a fool's paradise on the stool. You know how these
+     open carriages are made; they do not sit face to face, but all
+     looking the same way. The queen occupies another with the princess;
+     and the rest come flocking after, as it may happen. There are then
+     gondolas on the canal, and music; and at ten they come back, and
+     then there is a play; and twelve strikes, and they go to supper;
+     and thus rolls round the Saturday. If I were to tell you how often
+     you were asked after, how many questions were put to me without
+     waiting for answers, how often I neglected to answer, how little
+     they cared, and how much less I did, you would see the _iniqua
+     corte_ [wicked court] before you in all its perfection. However, it
+     never was so pleasant before, and everybody wishes it may last.
+
+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:--
+
+     FRIDAY, 1st Oct. (1677).
+
+     Yesterday evening at Cone, we descended into a veritable hell, the
+     true forges of Vulcan. Eight or ten Cyclops were at work, forging,
+     not arms for AEneas, but anchors for ships. You never saw strokes
+     redoubled so justly, nor with so admirable a cadence. We stood in
+     the middle of four furnaces; and the demons came passing about us,
+     all melting in sweat, with pale faces, wild-staring eyes, savage
+     mustaches, and hair long and black,--a sight enough to frighten
+     less well-bred folks than ourselves. As for me, I could not
+     comprehend the possibility of refusing any thing which these
+     gentlemen, in their hell, might have chosen to exact. We got out at
+     last, by the help of a shower of silver, with which we took care to
+     refresh their souls, and facilitate our exit.
+
+Once more:--
+
+     PARIS, 29th November (1679).
+
+     I have been to the wedding of Madame de Louvois. How shall I
+     describe it? Magnificence, illuminations, all France, dresses all
+     gold and brocade, jewels, braziers full of fire, and stands full of
+     flowers, confusions of carriages, cries out of doors, lighted
+     torches, pushings back, people run over; in short, a whirlwind, a
+     distraction; questions without answers, compliments without knowing
+     what is said, civilities without knowing who is spoken to, feet
+     entangled in trains. From the midst of all this, issue inquiries
+     after your health, which not being answered as quick as lightning,
+     the inquirers pass on, contented to remain in the state of
+     ignorance and indifference in which they [the inquiries] were made.
+     O vanity of vanities! Pretty little De Mouchy has had the
+     small-pox. O vanity, et caetera!
+
+Yet again. The gay writer has been sobered, perhaps hurt, by a friend's
+frankly writing to her, "You are old." To her daughter:--
+
+     So you were struck with the expression of Madame de la Fayette,
+     blended with so much friendship. 'Twas a truth, I own, which I
+     ought to have borne in mind; and yet I must confess it astonished
+     me, for I do not yet perceive in myself any such decay.
+     Nevertheless, I cannot help making many reflections and
+     calculations, and I find the conditions of life hard enough. It
+     seems to me that I have been dragged, against my will, to the fatal
+     period when old age must be endured; I see it; I have come to it;
+     and I would fain, if I could help it, not go any farther; not
+     advance a step more in the road of infirmities, of pains, of losses
+     of memory, of _disfigurements_ ready to do me outrage; and I hear a
+     voice which says, "You must go on in spite of yourself; or, if you
+     will not go on, you must die;" and this is another extremity from
+     which nature revolts. Such is the lot, however, of all who advance
+     beyond middle life. What is their resource? To think of the will of
+     God and of universal law, and so restore reason to its place, and
+     be patient. Be you, then, patient accordingly, my dear child, and
+     let not your affection soften into such tears as reason must
+     condemn.
+
+She dates a letter, and recalls that the day was the anniversary of an
+event in her life:--
+
+     PARIS, Friday, Feb. 5, 1672.
+
+     This day thousand years I was married.
+
+Here is a passage with power in it. The great war minister of Louis has
+died. Madame de Sevigne was now sixty-five years old. The letter is to
+her cousin Coulanges:--
+
+     I am so astonished at the news of the sudden death of M. de
+     Louvois, that I am at a loss how to speak of it. Dead, however, he
+     is, this great minister, this potent being, who occupied so great
+     a place; whose me (_le moi_), as M. Nicole says, had so wide a
+     dominion; who was the centre of so many orbs. What affairs had he
+     not to manage! what designs, what projects, what secrets! what
+     interests to unravel, what wars to undertake, what intrigues, what
+     noble games at chess to play and to direct! Ah! my God, grant me a
+     little time; I want to give check to the Duke of Savoy--checkmate
+     to the Prince of Orange. No, no, you shall not have a moment, not a
+     single moment. Are events like these to be talked of? Not they. We
+     must reflect upon them in our closets.
+
+A glimpse of Bourdaloue:--
+
+     Ah, that Bourdaloue! his sermon on the Passion was, they say, the
+     most perfect thing of the kind that can be imagined; it was the
+     same he preached last year, but revised and altered with the
+     assistance of some of his friends, that it might be wholly
+     inimitable. How can one love God, if one never hears him properly
+     spoken of? You must really possess a greater portion of grace than
+     others.
+
+A distinguished caterer or steward, a gentleman described as possessing
+talent enough to have governed a province, commits suicide on a
+professional point of honor:--
+
+     PARIS, Sunday, April 26, 1671.
+
+     I have just learned from Moreuil, of what passed at Chantilly with
+     regard to poor Vatel. I wrote to you last Friday that he had
+     stabbed himself--these are the particulars of the affair: The king
+     arrived there on Thursday night; the walk, and the collation, which
+     was served in a place set apart for the purpose, and strewed with
+     jonquils, were just as they should be. Supper was served; but there
+     was no roast meat at one or two of the tables, on account of
+     Vatel's having been obliged to provide several dinners more than
+     were expected. This affected his spirits; and he was heard to say
+     several times, "I have lost my honor! I cannot bear this disgrace!"
+     "My head is quite bewildered," said he to Gourville. "I have not
+     had a wink of sleep these twelve nights; I wish you would assist me
+     in giving orders." Gourville did all he could to comfort and assist
+     him, but the failure of the roast meat (which, however, did not
+     happen at the king's table, but at some of the other twenty-five)
+     was always uppermost with him. Gourville mentioned it to the prince
+     [Conde, the great Conde, the king's host], who went directly to
+     Vatel's apartment, and said to him, "Every thing is extremely well
+     conducted, Vatel; nothing could be more admirable than his
+     Majesty's supper." "Your highness's goodness," replied he,
+     "overwhelms me; I am sensible that there was a deficiency of roast
+     meat at two tables." "Not at all," said the prince; "do not perplex
+     yourself, and all will go well." Midnight came; the fireworks did
+     not succeed; they were covered with a thick cloud; they cost
+     sixteen thousand francs. At four o'clock in the morning Vatel went
+     round and found everybody asleep; he met one of the
+     under-purveyors, who was just come in with only two loads of fish.
+     "What!" said he, "is this all?" "Yes, sir," said the man, not
+     knowing that Vatel had despatched other people to all the seaports
+     around. Vatel waited for some time; the other purveyors did not
+     arrive; his head grew distracted; he thought there was no more fish
+     to be had. He flew to Gourville: "Sir," said he, "I cannot outlive
+     this disgrace." Gourville laughed at him. Vatel, however, went to
+     his apartment, and setting the hilt of his sword against the door,
+     after two ineffectual attempts, succeeded, in the third, in forcing
+     his sword through his heart. At that instant the couriers arrived
+     with the fish; Vatel was inquired after to distribute it. They ran
+     to his apartment, knocked at the door, but received no answer; upon
+     which they broke it open, and found him weltering in his blood. A
+     messenger was immediately despatched to acquaint the prince with
+     what had happened, who was like a man in despair. The Duke wept,
+     _for his Burgundy journey depended upon Vatel_.
+
+The italics here are our own. We felt that we must use them.
+
+Is it not all pathetic? But how exquisitely characteristic of the nation
+and of the times! "Poor Vatel," is the extent to which Madame de Sevigne
+allows herself to go in sympathy. Her heart never bleeds very
+freely--for anybody except her daughter. Madame de Sevigne's heart,
+indeed, we grieve to fear, was somewhat hard.
+
+In another letter, after a long strain as worldly as any one could wish
+to see, this lively woman thus touches, with a sincerity as
+unquestionable as the levity is, on the point of personal religion:--
+
+     But, my dear child, the greatest inclination I have at present is
+     to be a little religious. I plague La Mousse about it every day. I
+     belong neither to God nor to the devil. I am quite weary of such a
+     situation; though, between you and me, I look upon it as the most
+     natural one in the world. I am not the devil's, because I fear God,
+     and have at the bottom a principle of religion; then, on the other
+     hand, I am not properly God's, because his law appears hard and
+     irksome to me, and I cannot bring myself to acts of self-denial; so
+     that altogether I am one of those called lukewarm Christians, the
+     great number of which does not in the least surprise me, for I
+     perfectly understand their sentiments, and the reasons that
+     influence them. However, we are told that this is a state highly
+     displeasing to God; if so, we must get out of it. Alas! this is the
+     difficulty. Was ever any thing so mad as I am, to be thus eternally
+     pestering you with my rhapsodies?
+
+Madame de Sevigne involuntarily becomes a maxim-maker:--
+
+     The other day I made a maxim off-hand, without once thinking of it;
+     and I liked it so well that I fancied I had taken it out of M. de
+     la Rochefoucauld's. Pray tell me whether it is so or not, for in
+     that case my memory is more to be praised than my judgment. I said,
+     with all the ease in the world, that "ingratitude begets reproach,
+     as acknowledgment begets new favors." Pray, where did this come
+     from? Have I read it? Did I dream it? Is it my own idea? Nothing
+     can be truer than the thing itself, nor than that I am totally
+     ignorant how I came by it. I found it properly arranged in my
+     brain, and at the end of my tongue.
+
+The partial mother lets her daughter know whom the maxim was meant for.
+She says, "It is intended for your brother." This young fellow had, we
+suspect, been first earning his mother's "reproaches" for spendthrift
+habits, and then getting more money from her by "acknowledgment."
+
+She hears that son of hers read "some chapters out of Rabelais," "which
+were enough," she declares, "to make us die with laughing." "I cannot
+affect," she says, "a prudery which is not natural to me." No, indeed, a
+prude this woman was not. She had the strong aesthetic stomach of her
+time. It is queer to have Rabelais rubbing cheek and jowl with Nicole
+("We are going to begin a moral treatise of Nicole's"), a severe
+Port-Royalist, in one and the same letter. But this is French; above
+all, it is Madame de Sevigne. By the way, she and her friends, first and
+last, "die" a thousand jolly deaths "with laughing."
+
+A contemporary allusion to "Tartuffe," with more French manners
+implied:--
+
+     The other day La Biglesse played Tartuffe to the life. Being at
+     table, she happened to tell a fib about some trifle or other, which
+     I noticed, and told her of it; she cast her eyes to the ground, and
+     with a very demure air, "Yes, indeed, madam," said she, "I am the
+     greatest liar in the world; I am very much obliged to you for
+     telling me of it. "We all burst out a-laughing, for it was exactly
+     the tone of Tartuffe,--"Yes, brother, I am a wretch, a vessel of
+     iniquity."
+
+M. de La Rochefoucauld appears often by name in the letters. Here he
+appears anonymously by his effect:--
+
+     "Warm affections are never tranquil"; a _maxim_.
+
+Not a very sapid bit of gnomic wisdom, certainly. We must immediately
+make up to our readers, on Madame de Sevigne's behalf, for the
+insipidity of the foregoing "maxim" of hers, by giving here two or three
+far more sententious excerpts from the letters, excerpts collected by
+another:--
+
+     There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way
+     of being delivered from it but by ingratitude.
+
+     Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.
+
+     Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would
+     appear to be. The world is not unjust long.
+
+Madame de Sevigne makes a confession, which will comfort readers who may
+have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks:--
+
+     I send you M. de Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," revised and corrected,
+     with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I
+     can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others that,
+     to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. God knows how
+     it will be with you.
+
+What was it changed this woman's mood to serious? She could not have
+been hearing Massillon's celebrated sermon on the "fewness of the
+elect," for Massillon was yet only a boy of nine years; she may have
+been reading Pascal's "Thoughts,"--Pascal had been dead ten years, and
+the "Thoughts" had been published; or she may have been listening to one
+of those sifting, heart-searching discourses of Bourdaloue,--the date of
+her letter is March 16, 1672, and during the Lent of that year
+Bourdaloue preached at Versailles,--when she wrote sombrely as
+follows:--
+
+     You ask me if I am as fond of life as ever. I must own to you that
+     I experience mortifications, and severe ones too; but I am still
+     unhappy at the thoughts of death; I consider it so great a
+     misfortune to see the termination of all my pursuits, that I should
+     desire nothing better, if it were practicable, than to begin life
+     again. I find myself engaged in a scene of confusion and trouble; I
+     was embarked in life without my own consent, and know I must leave
+     it again; this distracts me, for how shall I leave it? In what
+     manner? By what door? At what time? In what disposition? Am I to
+     suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a
+     state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some
+     sudden accident? How shall I stand with God? What shall I have to
+     offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall
+     I have no other sentiment but that of fear? What have I to hope? Am
+     I worthy of heaven? Or have I deserved the torments of hell?
+     Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater
+     madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet
+     what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the
+     foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently
+     buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so
+     dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it, than I
+     do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me,
+     then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it; but, if I had
+     been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse's arms;
+     it would have spared me many vexations, and would have insured
+     heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something
+     else.
+
+A memorable sarcasm saved for us by Madame de Sevigne, at the very close
+of one of her letters:--
+
+     Guillenagues said yesterday that Pelisson abused the privilege men
+     have of being ugly.
+
+Readers familiar with Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities," will recognize in
+the following narrative a state of society not unlike that described by
+the novelist as immediately preceding the French Revolution:--
+
+     The Archbishop of Rheims, as he returned yesterday from St.
+     Germain, met with a curious adventure. He drove at his usual rate,
+     like a whirlwind. If he thinks himself a great man, his servants
+     think him still greater. They passed through Nanterre, when they
+     met a man on horseback, and in an insolent tone bid him clear the
+     way. The poor man used his utmost endeavors to avoid the danger
+     that threatened him, but his horse proved unmanageable. To make
+     short of it, the coach-and-six turned them both topsy-turvy; but at
+     the same time the coach, too, was completely overturned. In an
+     instant the horse and the man, instead of amusing themselves with
+     having their limbs broken, rose almost miraculously; the man
+     remounted, and galloped away, and is galloping still, for aught I
+     know; while the servants, the archbishop's coachman, and the
+     archbishop himself at the head of them, cried out, "Stop that
+     villain, stop him! thrash him soundly!" The rage of the archbishop
+     was so great, that afterward, in relating the adventure, he said,
+     if he could have caught the rascal, he would have broke all his
+     bones, and cut off both his ears.
+
+If such things were done by the aristocracy--and the spiritual
+aristocracy at that!--in the green tree, what might not be expected in
+the dry? The writer makes no comment--draws no moral. "Adieu, my dear,
+delightful child. I cannot express my eagerness to see you," are her
+next words. She rattles along, three short sentences more, and finishes
+her letter.
+
+We should still not have done with these letters, were we to go on a
+hundred pages, or two hundred, farther. Readers have already seen truly
+what Madame de Sevigne is. They have only not seen fully all that she
+is. And that they would not see short of reading her letters entire.
+Horace Walpole aspired to do in English for his own time something like
+what Madame de Sevigne had done in French for hers. In a measure he
+succeeded. The difference is, that he was imitative and affected, where
+she was original and genuine.
+
+Lady Mary Wortley Montagu must, of course, also be named, as, by her
+sex, her social position, her talent, and the devotion of her talent, an
+English analogue to Madame de Sevigne. But these comparisons, and all
+comparison, leave the French woman without a true parallel, alone in her
+rank, the most famous letter-writer in the world.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+CORNEILLE.
+
+1606-1684.
+
+
+The two great names in French tragedy are Corneille and Racine. French
+tragedy is a very different affair from either modern tragedy in English
+or ancient tragedy in Greek. It comes nearer being Roman epic, such as
+Lucan wrote Roman epic, dramatized.
+
+Drama is everywhere and always, and this from the nature of things, a
+highly conventional literary form. But the convention under which
+French tragedy should be judged differs, on the one hand, from that
+which existed for Greek tragedy, and, on the other hand, from that
+existing for the English. The atmosphere of real life present in English
+tragedy is absent in French. The quasi-supernatural religious awe that
+reigned over Greek tragedy, French tragedy does not affect. You miss
+also in French tragedy the severe simplicity, the self-restraint, the
+statuesque repose, belonging to the Greek model. Loftiness, grandeur, a
+loftiness somewhat strained, a grandeur tending to be tumid, an heroic
+tone sustained at sacrifice of ease and nature--such is the element in
+which French tragedy lives and flourishes. You must grant your French
+tragedists this their conventional privilege, or you will not enjoy
+them. You must grant them this, or you cannot understand them. Resolve
+that you will like grandiloquence, requiring only that the
+grandiloquence be good, and on this condition we can promise that you
+will be pleased with Corneille and Racine. In fact, our readers, we are
+sure, will find the grandiloquence of these two tragedy-writers so very
+good that a little will suffice them.
+
+Voltaire in his time impressed himself strongly enough on his countrymen
+to get accepted by his own generation as an equal third in tragedy with
+Corneille and Racine. There was then a French triumvirate of tragedists
+to be paralleled with the triumvirate of the Greeks. Corneille was
+AEschylus; Racine was Sophocles; and, of course, Euripides had his
+counterpart in Voltaire. Voltaire has since descended from the tragic
+throne, and that neat symmetry of trine comparison is spoiled. There is,
+however, some trace of justice in making Corneille as related to Racine
+resemble AEschylus as related to Sophocles. Corneille was first, more
+rugged, loftier; Racine was second, more polished, more severe in taste.
+Racine had, too, in contrast with Corneille, more of the Euripidean
+sweetness. In fact, La Bruyere's celebrated comparison of the two
+Frenchmen--made, of course, before Voltaire--yoked them, Corneille with
+Sophocles, Racine with Euripides.
+
+It was perhaps not without its influence on the style of Corneille, that
+a youthful labor of his in authorship was to translate, wholly or
+partially, the "Pharsalia" of Lucan. Corneille always retained his
+fondness for Lucan. This taste on his part, and the rhymed Alexandrines
+in which he wrote tragedy, may together help account for the
+hyper-heroic style which is Corneille's great fault. A lady criticised
+his tragedy, "The Death of Pompey," by saying: "Very fine, but too many
+heroes in it." Corneille's tragedies generally have, if not too many
+heroes, at least too much hero, in them. Concerning the historian
+Gibbon's habitual pomp of expression, it was once wittily said that
+nobody could possibly tell the truth in such a style as that. It would
+be equally near the mark if we should say of Corneille's chosen mould
+of verse, that nobody could possibly be simple and natural in that.
+Moliere's comedy, however, would almost confute us.
+
+Pierre Corneille was born in Rouen. He studied law, and he was admitted
+to practice as an advocate, like Moliere; but, like Moliere, he heard
+and he heeded an inward voice summoning him away from the bar to the
+stage. Corneille did not, however, like Moliere, tread the boards as an
+actor. He had a lively sense of personal dignity. He was eminently the
+"lofty, grave tragedian," in his own esteem. "But I am Pierre Corneille
+notwithstanding," he self-respectingly said once, when friends were
+regretting to him some deficiency of grace in his personal carriage. One
+can imagine him taking off his hat to himself with unaffected deference.
+
+But this serious genius began dramatic composition with writing comedy.
+He made several experiments in this kind with no commanding success; but
+at thirty he wrote the tragedy of "The Cid," and instantly became
+famous. His subsequent plays were chiefly on classical subjects. The
+subject of "The Cid" was drawn from Spanish literature. This was
+emphatically what has been called an "epoch-making" production.
+Richelieu's "Academy," at the instigation, indeed almost under the
+dictation, of Richelieu, who was jealous of Corneille, tried to write it
+down. They succeeded about as Balaam succeeded in prophesying against
+Israel. "The Cid" triumphed over them, and over the great minister. It
+established not only Corneille's fame, but his authority. The man of
+genius taken alone, proved stronger than the men of taste taken
+together.
+
+For all this, however, our readers would hardly relish "The Cid." Let us
+go at once to that tragedy of Corneille's which, by the general consent
+of French critics, is the best work of its author, the "Polyeuctes." The
+following is the rhetorical climax of praise in which Gaillard, one of
+the most enlightened of Corneille's eulogists, arranges the different
+masterpieces of his author: "'The Cid' raised Corneille above his
+rivals; the 'Horace' and the 'Cinna' above his models; the 'Polyeuctes'
+above himself." This tragedy will, we doubt not, prove to our readers
+the most interesting of all the tragedies of Corneille.
+
+"The great Corneille"--to apply the traditionary designation which,
+besides attributing to our tragedian his conceded general eminence in
+character and genius, serves also to distinguish him by merit from his
+younger brother, who wrote very good tragedy--was an illustrious figure
+at the Hotel de Rambouillet, that focus of the best literary criticism
+in France. Corneille reading a play of his to the _coterie_ of wits
+assembled there under the presidency of ladies whose eyes, as in a kind
+of tournament of letters, rained influence on authors, and judged the
+prize of genius, is the subject of a striking picture by a French
+painter. Corneille read "Polyeuctes" at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and
+that awful court decided against the play. Corneille, like Michel
+Angelo, had to a good degree the courage of his own productions; but, in
+the face of adverse decision so august on his work, he needed
+encouragement, which happily he did not fail to receive, before he would
+allow his "Polyeuctes" to be represented. The theatre crowned it with
+the laurels of victory. It thus fell to Corneille to triumph
+successively, single-handed, over two great adversary courts of critical
+appreciation,--the Academy of Richelieu and the not less formidable
+Hotel de Rambouillet.
+
+The objection raised by the Hotel de Rambouillet against the
+"Polyeuctes" was that it made the stage encroach on the prerogative of
+the pulpit, and preach instead of simply amusing. And, indeed, never,
+perhaps, since the Greek tragedy, was the theatre made so much to serve
+the solemn purposes of religion. (We except the miracle and passion
+plays and the mysteries of the middle ages, as not belonging within the
+just bounds of a comparison like that now made.) Corneille's final
+influence was to elevate and purify the French theatre. In his early
+works, however, he made surprising concessions to the lewd taste in the
+drama that he found prevailing when he began to write. With whatever
+amount of genuine religious scruple affecting his conscience,--on that
+point we need not judge the poet,--Corneille used, before putting them
+on the stage, to take his plays to the "Church,"--that is, to the
+priestly hierarchy who constituted the "Church,"--that they might be
+authoritatively judged as to their possible influence on the cause of
+Christian truth.
+
+In the "Polyeuctes," the motive is religion. Polyeuctes is an historic
+or traditional saint of the Roman-Catholic church. His conversion from
+paganism is the theme of the play. Polyeuctes has a friend Nearchus who
+is already a Christian convert, and who labors earnestly to make
+Polyeuctes a proselyte to the faith. Polyeuctes has previously married a
+noble Roman lady, daughter of Felix, governor of Armenia, in which
+province the action of the story occurs. (The persecuting Emperor Decius
+is on the throne of the Roman world.) Paulina is the daughter's name.
+Paulina married Polyeuctes against her own choice, for she loved Roman
+Severus better. Her father had put his will upon her, and Paulina had
+filially obeyed in marrying Polyeuctes. Such are the relations of the
+different persons of the drama. It will be seen that there is ample room
+for the play of elevated and tragic passions. Paulina, in fact, is the
+lofty, the impossible, ideal of wifely and daughterly truth and
+devotion. Pagan though she is, she is pathetically constant, both to the
+husband that was forced upon her, and to the father that did the
+forcing; while still she loves, and cannot but love, the man whom, in
+spite of her love for him, she, with an act like prolonged suicide,
+stoically separates from her torn and bleeding heart.
+
+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 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 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 gods; 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
+noblest things in French tragedy--a French critic would be likely to
+say, the very noblest 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 sturdy
+     independence that animated Johnson in annotating Shakspeare, 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. The Greeks were frigid declaimers in
+     comparison with this passage of Corneille."] Severus, learn to know
+     Paulina all in all.
+
+     My Polyeuctes touches on his last hour; he has but a moment to
+     live; you are the cause of this, though innocently so. I know not
+     if your heart, yielding to your desires, may have dared build any
+     hope on his destruction; but know that there is no death so cruel
+     that to it with firm brow I would not bend my steps, that there are
+     in hell no horrors that I would not endure, rather than soil a
+     glory so pure, rather than espouse, after his sad fate, a man that
+     was in any wise the cause of his death; and if you suppose me of a
+     heart so little sound, the love which I had for you would all turn
+     to hate. You are generous; be so even to the end. My father is in a
+     state to yield every thing to you; he fears you; and I further
+     hazard this saying, that, if he destroys my husband, it is to you
+     that he sacrifices him. Save this unhappy man, use your influence
+     in his favor, exert yourself to become his support. I know that
+     this is much that I ask; but the greater the effort, the greater
+     the glory from it. To preserve a rival of whom you are jealous,
+     that is a trait of virtue which appertains only to you. And if your
+     renown is not motive sufficient, it is much that a woman once so
+     well beloved, and the love of whom perhaps is still capable of
+     touching you, will owe to your great heart the dearest possession
+     that she owns; remember, in short, that you are Severus. Adieu.
+     Decide with yourself alone what you ought to do; if you are not
+     such as I dare hope that you are, then, in order that I may
+     continue to esteem you, I wish not to know it.
+
+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):--
+
+     That advice might be good for some common soul. Though he [the
+     Emperor Decius] holds in his hands my life and my fortune, I am yet
+     Severus; and all that mighty power is powerless over my glory, and
+     powerless over my duty. Here honor compels me, and I will satisfy
+     it; whether fate afterward show itself propitious or adverse,
+     perishing glorious I shall perish content.
+
+     I will tell thee further, but under confidence, the sect of
+     Christians is not what it is thought to be. They are hated, why I
+     know not; and I see Decius unjust only in this regard. From
+     curiosity I have sought to become acquainted with them. They are
+     regarded as sorcerers taught from hell; and, in this supposition,
+     the punishment of death is visited on secret mysteries which we do
+     not understand. But Eleusinian Ceres and the Good Goddess have
+     their secrets, like those at Rome and in Greece; still we freely
+     tolerate everywhere, their god alone excepted, every kind of god;
+     all the monsters of Egypt have their temples in Rome; our fathers,
+     at their will, made a god of a man; and, their blood in our veins
+     preserving their errors, we fill heaven with all our emperors; but,
+     to speak without disguise of deifications so numerous, the effect
+     is very doubtful of such metamorphoses.
+
+     Christians have but one God, absolute master of all, whose mere
+     will does whatever he resolves; but, if I may venture to say what
+     seems to me true, our gods very often agree ill together; and,
+     though their wrath crush me before your eyes, we have a good many
+     of them for them to be true gods. Finally, among the Christians,
+     morals are pure, vices are hated, virtues flourish; they offer
+     prayers on behalf of us who persecute them; and, during all the
+     time since we have tormented them, have they ever been seen
+     mutinous? Have they ever been seen rebellious? Have our princes
+     ever had more faithful soldiers? Fierce in war, they submit
+     themselves to our executioners; and, lions in combat, they die like
+     lambs. I pity them too much not to defend them. Come, let us find
+     Felix; let us commune with his son-in-law; and let us thus, with
+     one single action, gratify at once Paulina, and my glory, and my
+     compassion.
+
+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 him to be a
+prudent man. Felix at length says, "Adore the 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 Corneille, the father of French
+tragedy, 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. Moliere is reported to have said that
+Corneille had a familiar, or a fairy, that came to him at times, and
+enabled 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.
+
+Besides his plays, there is a translation in verse by him of the
+"Imitation of Christ;" there are metrical versions of a considerable
+number of the Psalms; there are odes, madrigals, sonnets, stanzas,
+addresses to the king. Then there are discourses in prose on dramatic
+poetry, on tragedy, and on the three unities. Add to these, elaborate
+appreciations by himself of a considerable number of his own plays,
+prefaces, epistles, arguments to his pieces, and you have, what with the
+notes, the introductions, the eulogies, and other such things that the
+faithful French editor knows so well how to accumulate, matter enough of
+Corneille to swell out eleven, or, in one edition,--that issued under
+Napoleon as First Consul,--even twelve, handsome volumes of his works.
+
+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 AEschylus, 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 Moliere, 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
+friend 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 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 AEschylus 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 theatre, 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.
+
+The "Thebaid" was Racine's first tragedy,--at least his first that
+attained to the honor of being represented. Moliere brought it out in
+his theatre, the Palais Royal. His second tragedy, the "Alexander the
+Great," was also put into the hands of Moliere.
+
+This latter play the author took to 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 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.
+
+The "Andromache" followed the "Alexander," and then Racine did try his
+hand in another poetical line; for he wrote a comedy, his only one, "The
+Suitors," as is loosely translated "Les Plaideurs," a title which has a
+legal, and not an amorous, meaning. This play, after it had at first
+failed, Louis XIV. laughed into court favor. It became thenceforward a
+great success. It still keeps its place on the stage. It is, however, a
+farce, rather than a comedy.
+
+We pass over now one or two of the subsequent productions of Racine, to
+mention next a play of his which had a singular history. It was a 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 in "The Suitors," hurt the old
+man's pride. That pride suffered a worse hurt still. The chief Parisian
+theatre, 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 Sevigne 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
+"Phaedra," 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 theatre
+were all bought by his enemies, and left solidly vacant. The best seats
+at Pradon's theatre 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 theatre, 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 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 Athaliah,
+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 "Athaliah," as in the "Esther," Racine
+introduced the feature of the chorus, a restoration which had all the
+effect of an innovation. The chorus in "Athaliah" 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 "Athaliah" is almost proof against
+technical criticism. It is acknowledged to be, after its kind, a nearly
+ideal product of art.
+
+There is a curious story about the fortune of this piece with the
+public, that will interest our readers. The first success of "Athaliah"
+was not great. In fact, it was almost a flat failure. But a company of
+wits, playing at forfeits somewhere in the country, severely sentenced
+one of their number to go by himself, and read the first act of
+"Athaliah." The victim went, and did not return. Sought at length, he
+was found just commencing a second perusal of the play entire. He
+reported of it so enthusiastically, that he was asked to read it before
+the company, which he did, to their delight. This started a reaction in
+favor of the condemned play, which soon came to be counted the
+masterpiece of its author.
+
+First, in specimen of the choral feature of the drama, we content
+ourselves with giving a single chorus from the "Athaliah." 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 a 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, is the state of feeling represented in the
+present chorus. Salomith is the leading singer:--
+
+      SALOMITH.
+
+        The Lord hath deigned to speak,
+      But what he to his prophet now hath shown--
+      Who unto us will make it clearly known?
+        Arms he himself to save us, poor and weak?
+        Arms he himself to have us overthrown?
+
+      THE WHOLE CHORUS.
+
+      O promises! O threats! O mystery profound!
+        What woe, what weal, are each in turn foretold?
+      How can so much of wrath be found
+        So much of love to enfold?
+
+      A VOICE.
+
+      Zion shall be no more; a cruel flame
+        Will all her ornaments devour.
+
+      A SECOND VOICE.
+
+        God shelters Zion; she has shield and tower
+      In His eternal name.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      I see her splendor all from vision disappear.
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+      I see on every side her glory shine more clear.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      Into a deep abyss is Zion sunk from sight.
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+      Zion lifts up her brow amid celestial light.
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      What dire despair!
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+        What praise from every tongue!
+
+      FIRST VOICE.
+
+      What cries of grief!
+
+      SECOND VOICE.
+
+        What songs of triumph sung!
+
+      A THIRD VOICE.
+
+      Cease we to vex ourselves; our God, one day,
+        Will this great mystery make clear.
+
+      ALL THREE VOICES.
+
+        Let us his wrath revere,
+      While on his love, no less, our hopes we stay.
+
+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:--
+
+     What pity touches you? Is it that in a holocaust to be this day
+     offered, I, like Jephtha's daughter in other times, must pacify by
+     my death the anger of the Lord? Alas, a son has nothing that does
+     not belong to his father!
+
+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, 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:--
+
+     JOASH. I feel myself ready, if he wishes it, to give to him my
+     life.
+
+     JEHOIADA. You have often heard read the history of our kings. Do
+     you remember, my son, what strict laws a king worthy of the crown
+     ought to impose upon himself?
+
+     JOASH. A wise and good king, so hath God himself declared, puts not
+     his reliance upon riches and gold; he fears the Lord his God, has
+     ever before him his precepts, his laws, his judgments severe, and
+     does not with unjust burdens overwhelm his brethren.
+
+Fenelon 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 Fenelon.
+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 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:--
+
+      God of the Jews, 'tis thou that dost prevail!
+      Ay, it is Joash; all without avail
+      Seek I to cheat myself with other thought:
+      I know the wound my weapon on him wrought;
+      I see his father Ahaziah's face;
+      Naught but brings back to me that hated race.
+      David doth triumph, Ahab only fall,--
+      Unpitying God, thou only hast done all!
+      'Tis thou that flattering me to hope in vain
+      For easy vengeance, o'er and o'er again
+      Hast with myself myself embroiled anew,
+      Now pangs of conscience rousing, not a few,
+      Now dazzling me with thy rich treasures rare,
+      Which I to burn or pillage did not dare.
+      Let him, then, reign, this son, thy care, thy toil,
+      And, so to signalize his new-got spoil,
+      Let him into my bosom plunge the knife,
+      And take with filial hand his mother's life.
+      Hearken what wish for him she dying breathes--
+      Wish? nay, what hope, assured hope, bequeaths,--
+      That, disobedient, proud, rebellious, he,
+      Faithful to Ahab's blood received from me,
+      To his grandfather, to his father, like,
+      Abhorrent heir of David, down may strike
+      Thy worship and thy fane, avenger fell
+      Of Athaliah, Ahab, Jezebel!
+
+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 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 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 Fenelon, 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.
+
+
+We group three names in one title, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon, to
+represent the pulpit orators of France. There are other great names,--as
+Flechier, with Claude and Saurin, the last two, Protestants both,--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 pure and classic style, became at once, and permanently became, a
+part of French literature.
+
+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 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 Benigne 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 Hotel 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 Bruyere 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
+everybody knows Louis sincerely practised--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."
+
+In proceeding now to give, from the three 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 the last one left of the children of 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
+Bourdaloue, we succeeded in obtaining a printed translation which we
+could modify to suit our purpose.) Bossuet:--
+
+     It was then reserved for my lot to pay this funereal tribute to the
+     high and potent princess, Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans.
+     She whom I had seen so attentive while I was discharging a like
+     office for the queen her mother, was so soon after to be the
+     subject of a similar discourse, and my sad voice was predestined to
+     this melancholy service. O vanity! O nothingness! O mortals!
+     ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago, would she have believed
+     it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was
+     shedding so many tears in this place, that she was so soon to
+     assemble you here to deplore her own loss? O princess! the worthy
+     object of the admiration of two great kingdoms, was it not enough
+     that England should deplore your absence, without being yet further
+     compelled to deplore your death? France, who with so much joy
+     beheld you again, surrounded with a new brilliancy, had she not in
+     reserve other pomps and other triumphs for you, returned from that
+     famous voyage whence you had brought hither so much glory, and
+     hopes so fair? "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Nothing is left
+     for me to say but that; that is the only sentiment which, in
+     presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well-grounded and so
+     poignant, permits me to indulge. Nor have I explored the Holy
+     Scriptures in order to find therein some text which I might apply
+     to this princess; I have taken, without premeditation and without
+     choice, the first expression presented to me by the Preacher, with
+     whom vanity, although it has been so often named, is yet, to my
+     mind, not named often enough to suit the purpose that I have in
+     view. I wish, in a single misfortune, to lament all the calamities
+     of the human race, and in a single death to exhibit the death and
+     the nothingness of all human greatness. This text, which suits all
+     the circumstances and all the occurrences of our life, becomes, by
+     a special adaptedness, appropriate to my mournful theme; since
+     never were the vanities of the earth either so clearly disclosed or
+     so openly confounded. No, after what we have just seen, health is
+     but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and
+     pleasures are but a dangerous diversion. Every thing is vain within
+     us, except the sincere acknowledgment made before God of our
+     vanity, and the fixed judgment of the mind, leading us to despise
+     all that we are.
+
+     But did I speak the truth? Man, whom God made in his own image, is
+     he but a shadow? That which Jesus Christ came from heaven to earth
+     to seek, that which he deemed that he could, without degrading
+     himself, ransom with his own blood, is that a mere nothing? Let us
+     acknowledge our mistake; surely this sad spectacle of the vanity of
+     things human was leading us astray, and public hope, baffled
+     suddenly by the death of this princess, was urging us too far. It
+     must not be permitted to man to despise himself entirely, lest he,
+     supposing, in common with the wicked, that our life is but a game
+     in which chance reigns, take his way without rule and without
+     self-control, at the pleasure of his own blind wishes. It is for
+     this reason that the Preacher, after having commenced his inspired
+     production by the expressions which I have cited, after having
+     filled all its pages with contempt for things human, is pleased at
+     last to show man something more substantial, by saying to him,
+     "Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of
+     man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every
+     secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil." Thus
+     every thing is vain in man, if we regard what he gives to the
+     world; but, on the contrary, every thing is important, if we
+     consider what he owes to God. Once again, every thing is vain in
+     man, if we regard the course of his mortal life; but every thing is
+     of value, every thing is important, if we contemplate the goal
+     where it ends, and the account of it which he must render. Let us,
+     therefore, meditate to-day, in presence of this altar and of this
+     tomb, the first and the last utterance of the Preacher; of which
+     the one shows the nothingness of man, the other establishes his
+     greatness. Let this tomb convince us of our nothingness, provided
+     that this altar, where is daily offered for us a Victim of price so
+     great, teach us at the same time our dignity. The princess whom we
+     weep shall be a faithful witness, both of the one and of the other.
+     Let us survey that which a sudden death has taken away from her;
+     let us survey that which a holy death has bestowed upon her. Thus
+     shall we learn to despise that which she quitted without regret, in
+     order to attach all our regard to that which she embraced with so
+     much ardor,--when her soul, purified from all earthly sentiments,
+     full of the heaven on whose border she touched, saw the light
+     completely revealed. Such are the truths which I have to treat, and
+     which I have deemed worthy to be proposed to so great a prince, and
+     to the most illustrious assembly in the world.
+
+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
+orator against "the most illustrious assembly in the world."
+
+The ordinary sermons of Bossuet are less read, and they less deserve
+perhaps 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. 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 levelled 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 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:--
+
+     I have said more particularly that in the world in which you
+     live,--I mean the court,--the disease of a perverted conscience is
+     far more common, and far more difficult to be avoided; and I am
+     sure that in this you will agree with me. For it is at the court
+     that the passions bear sway, that desires are more ardent, that
+     self-interest is keener, and that, by infallible consequence,
+     self-blinding is more easy, and consciences, even the most
+     enlightened and the most upright, become gradually perverted. It is
+     at the court that the goddess of the world, I mean fortune,
+     exercises over the minds of men, and in consequence over their
+     consciences, a more absolute dominion. It is at the court that the
+     aim to maintain one's self, the impatience to raise one's self, the
+     frenzy to push one's self, the fear of displeasing, the desire of
+     making one's self agreeable, produce consciences, which anywhere
+     else would pass for monstrous, but which, finding themselves there
+     authorized by custom, seem to have acquired a right of possession
+     and of prescription. People, from living at court, and from no
+     other cause than having lived there, are filled with these errors.
+     Whatever uprightness of conscience they may have brought thither,
+     by breathing its air and by hearing its language, they are
+     habituated to iniquity, they come to have less horror of vice, and,
+     after having long blamed it, a thousand times condemned it, they at
+     last behold it with a more favorable eye, tolerate it, excuse it;
+     that is to say, without observing what is happening, they make over
+     their consciences, and, by insensible steps, from Christian, which
+     they were, by little and little become quite worldly, and not far
+     from pagan.
+
+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?--
+
+     You would say, and it really seems, that for the court, there are
+     other principles of religion than for the rest of the world, and
+     that the courtier has a right to make for himself a conscience
+     different in kind and in quality from that of other men; for such
+     is the prevailing idea of the matter,--an idea well sustained, or
+     rather unfortunately justified, by experience.... Nevertheless, my
+     dear hearers, St. Paul assures us, that there is but one God and
+     one faith; and woe to the man who dividing Him, this one God, shall
+     represent Him as at court less an enemy to human transgressions
+     than He is outside of the court; or, severing this one faith, shall
+     suppose it in the case of one class more indulgent than in the case
+     of another.
+
+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:--
+
+     Behold one of the abuses of our time. Means have been found to
+     consecrate slander, to change it into a virtue, and even into one
+     of the holiest virtues--that means is, zeal for the glory of
+     God.... We must humble those people, is the cry; and it is for the
+     good of the Church to tarnish their reputation and to diminish
+     their credit. That idea becomes, as it were, a principle; the
+     conscience is fashioned accordingly, and there is nothing that is
+     not permissible to a motive so noble. You fabricate, you
+     exaggerate, you give things a poisonous taint, you tell but half
+     the truth; you make your prejudices stand for indisputable facts;
+     you spread abroad a hundred falsehoods; you confound what is
+     individual with what is general; what one man has said that is bad,
+     you pretend that all have said; and what many have said that is
+     good, you pretend that nobody has said; and all that, once again,
+     for the glory of God. For such direction of the intention justifies
+     all that. Such direction of the intention will not suffice to
+     justify a prevarication, but it is more than sufficient to justify
+     calumny, provided only you are convinced that you are serving God
+     thereby.
+
+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. 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:--
+
+     There are some just, fervent, perfect souls, who, like children in
+     the house of the Heavenly Father, strive to please and possess him,
+     in order only to possess and to love him; and who, incessantly
+     animated by this unselfish motive, inviolably adhere to his divine
+     precepts, and lay it down as a rigorous and unalterable rule, to
+     obey the least intimation of his will. They serve him with an
+     affection entirely filial. But there are also dastards, worldlings,
+     sinners, terrestrial and sensual men, who are scarcely susceptible
+     of any other impressions than those of the judgments and vengeance
+     of God. Talk to them of his greatness, of his perfections, of his
+     benefits, or even of his rewards, and they will hardly listen to
+     you; and, if they are prevailed upon to pay some attention and
+     respect to your words, they will sound in their ears, but not reach
+     their hearts.... Therefore, to move them, to stir them up, to
+     awaken them from the lethargic sleep with which they are
+     overwhelmed, the thunder of divine wrath and the decree that
+     condemns them to eternal flames must be dinned into their ears:
+     "Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire" (Matt. XXV.).
+     Make them consider attentively, and represent to them with all the
+     force of grace, the consequences and horror of this word
+     "eternal."...
+
+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:--
+
+     ...Struck with horror at so doleful a destiny, I apply to this
+     eternity all the powers of my mind; I examine and scrutinize it in
+     all its parts; and I survey, as it were, its whole dimensions.
+     Moreover, to express it in more lively colors, and to represent it
+     in my mind more conformably to the senses and the human
+     understanding, I borrow comparisons from the Fathers of the Church,
+     and I make, if I may so speak, the same computations. I figure to
+     myself all the stars of the firmament; to this innumerable
+     multitude I add all the drops of water in the bosom of the ocean;
+     and if this be not enough, I reckon, or at least endeavor to
+     reckon, all the grains of sand on its shore. Then I interrogate
+     myself, I reason with myself, and I put to myself the question--If
+     I had for as many ages, and a thousand times as many, undergone
+     torments in that glowing fire which is kindled by the breath of the
+     Lord in his anger to take eternal vengeance, would eternity be at
+     an end? No; and why? Because it is eternity, and eternity is
+     endless. To number up the stars that shine in the heavens, to count
+     the drops of water that compose the sea, to tell the grains of sand
+     that lie upon the shore, is not absolutely impossible; but to
+     measure in eternity the number of days, of years, of ages, is what
+     cannot be compassed, because the days, the years, and the ages are
+     without number; or, to speak more properly, because in eternity
+     there are neither days, nor years, nor ages, but a single, endless,
+     infinite duration.
+
+     To this thought I devote my mind. I imagine I see and rove through
+     this same eternity, and discover no end, but find it to be always a
+     boundless tract. I imagine the wide prospect lies open on all
+     sides, and encompasseth me around; that if I rise up, or if I sink
+     down, or what way soever I turn my eyes, this eternity meets them;
+     and that after a thousand efforts to get forward, I have made no
+     progress, but find it still eternity. I imagine that after long
+     revolutions of time, I behold in the midst of this eternity a
+     damned soul, in the same state, in the same affliction, in the same
+     misery still; and putting myself mentally in the place of this
+     soul, I imagine that in this eternal punishment I feel myself
+     continually devoured by that fire which nothing extinguishes; that
+     I continually shed those floods of tears which nothing can dry up;
+     that I am continually gnawed by the worm of conscience, which
+     never dies; that I continually express my despair and anguish by
+     that gnashing of teeth, and those lamentable cries, which never can
+     move the compassion of God. This idea of myself, this
+     representation, amazes and terrifies me. My whole body shudders, I
+     tremble with fear, I am filled with horror, I have the same
+     feelings as the royal prophet, when he cried, "Pierce thou my flesh
+     with thy fear, for I am afraid of thy judgments."
+
+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 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 deep 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 in that volume of
+his which goes by the name of "Le Petit Careme,"--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 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
+marvellous 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 dialectic, could have
+accomplished. But there immediately follows a culmination in power, such
+as was distinctly beyond the height of Bourdaloue. Genius must be
+superadded to talent if you would have the supreme, either in poetry or
+in eloquence. There was an extreme point in Massillon's discourse 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:--
+
+     I confine myself to you, my brethren, who are gathered here. I
+     speak no longer of the rest of mankind. I look at you as if you
+     were the only ones on the earth; and here is the thought that
+     seizes me, and that terrifies me. I make the supposition that this
+     is your last hour, and the end of the world; that the heavens are
+     about to open above your heads, that Jesus Christ is to appear in
+     his glory in the midst of this sanctuary, and that you are gathered
+     here only to wait for him, and as trembling criminals on whom is to
+     be pronounced either a sentence of grace or a decree of eternal
+     death. For, vainly do you flatter yourselves; you will die such in
+     character as you are to-day. All those impulses toward change with
+     which you amuse yourselves, you will amuse yourselves with them
+     down to the bed of death. Such is the experience of all
+     generations. The only thing new you will then find in yourselves
+     will be, perhaps, a reckoning a trifle larger than that which you
+     would to-day have to render; and according to what you would be if
+     you were this moment to be judged, you may almost determine what
+     will befall you at the termination of your life.
+
+     Now I ask you, and I ask it smitten with terror, not separating in
+     this matter my lot from yours, and putting myself into the same
+     frame of mind into which I desire you to come,--I ask you, then, If
+     Jesus Christ were to appear in this sanctuary, in the midst of this
+     assembly, the most illustrious in the world, to pass judgment on
+     us, to draw the dread line of distinction between the goats and the
+     sheep, do you believe that the majority of all of us who are here
+     would be set on his right hand? Do you believe that things would
+     even be equal? Nay, do you believe there would be found so many as
+     the ten righteous men whom anciently the Lord could not find in
+     five whole cities? I put the question to you, but you know not; I
+     know not myself. Thou only, O my God, knowest those that belong to
+     thee! But if we know not those who belong to him, at least we know
+     that sinners do not belong to him. Now, of what classes of persons
+     do the professing Christians in this assembly consist? Titles and
+     dignities must be counted for naught; of these you shall be
+     stripped before Jesus Christ. Who make up this assembly? Sinners,
+     in great number, who do not wish to be converted; in still greater
+     number, sinners who would like it, but who put off their
+     conversion; many others who would be converted, only to relapse
+     into sin; finally, a multitude who think they have no need of
+     conversion. You have thus made up the company of the reprobate. Cut
+     off these four classes of sinners from this sacred assembly, for
+     they will be cut off from it at the great day! Stand forth now, ye
+     righteous! where are you? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right
+     hand! True wheat of Jesus Christ, disengage yourselves from this
+     chaff, doomed to the fire! O God! where are thine elect? and what
+     remains there for thy portion?
+
+     Brethren, our perdition is well-nigh assured, and we do not give it
+     a thought. Even if in that dread separation which one day shall be
+     made, there were to be but a single sinner out of this assembly
+     found on the side of the reprobate, and if a voice from heaven
+     should come to give us assurance of the fact in this sanctuary,
+     without pointing out the person intended, who among us would not
+     fear that he might himself be the wretch? Who among us would not at
+     once recoil upon his conscience, to inquire whether his sins had
+     not deserved that penalty? Who among us would not, seized with
+     dismay, ask of Jesus Christ, as did once the apostles, "Lord, is it
+     I?"
+
+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
+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
+Fenelon, 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.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+FENELON.
+
+1651-1715.
+
+
+If Bossuet is to Frenchmen a synonym for sublimity, no less to them is
+Fenelon a synonym for saintliness. From the French point of view, one
+might say, "the sublime Bossuet," "the saintly Fenelon," somewhat as one
+says, "the learned Selden," "the judicious Hooker." It is as much a
+French delight to idealize Fenelon an archangel Raphael, affable and
+mild, as it is to glorify Bossuet a Michael in majesty and power.
+
+But saintliness of character was in Fenelon 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 Fenelon, both
+the exterior and the interior man:--
+
+  Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye,
+  In every gesture dignity and love.
+
+The consent is general among those who saw Fenelon, 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 Fenelon's friend Bossuet was destined later to prove a
+bitter antagonist, almost a personal foe.
+
+Until he was forty-two years old, Francois Fenelon lived 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 Fenelon in the currents of
+history. Louis XIV., grown old, and become as selfishly greedy now of
+personal salvation as all his life he has 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. Fenelon 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 Fenelon 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 lustre of Fenelon'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 Fenelon 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 Fenelon 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 the
+portrait in words, drawn by him from the life, of Fenelon's princely
+pupil, we transfer here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon
+says:--
+
+     In the first place, it must be said that Monseigneur the Duke of
+     Burgundy had by nature a most formidable disposition. He was
+     passionate to the extent of wishing to dash to pieces his clocks
+     when they struck the hour which called him to what he did not like,
+     and of flying into the utmost rage against the rain if it
+     interfered with what he wanted to do. Resistance threw him into
+     paroxysms of fury. I speak of what I have often witnessed in his
+     early youth. Moreover, an ungovernable impulse drove him into
+     whatever indulgence, bodily or mental, was forbidden him. His
+     sarcasm was so much the more cruel as it was witty and piquant, and
+     as it seized with precision upon every point open to ridicule. All
+     this was sharpened by a vivacity of body and of mind that proceeded
+     to the degree of impetuosity, and that during his early days never
+     permitted him to learn any thing except by doing two things at
+     once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a violent avidity, and
+     all this with a pride and a haughtiness impossible to describe;
+     dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men and things, and to
+     detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and to reason
+     himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers. But at
+     the same time, as soon as his passion was spent, reason resumed
+     her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes
+     with such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively,
+     alert, penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling
+     literally in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time
+     piety and grace made of him a different being, and transformed
+     faults so numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite.
+
+St. Simon attributes to Fenelon "every virtue under heaven;" but his way
+was to give to God rather than to man the praise of the remarkable
+change which, during Fenelon'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 Fenelon 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 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. Fenelon 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 Fenelon's name from the
+list of the household of his grandson and heir. The archbishop--for
+Fenelon 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. Fenelon 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 Fenelon must condemn Madame Guyon. But
+Fenelon 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 Fenelon, meek, docile, suasive. The
+world wondered, and watched the duel. Fenelon 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 the heresy of
+Fenelon. At this moment of crisis for Fenelon, 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 Fenelon 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 perfectly frigid facility
+separated herself from the side of the accused. The controversy was
+carried to Rome, where at length Fenelon's book was
+condemned,--condemned mildly, but condemned. The pope is said to have
+made the remark that Fenelon erred by loving God too much, and Fenelon's
+antagonists by loving their fellow-man too little. Fenelon 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.
+Fenelon 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 Fenelon, 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 Europe. This composition of Fenelon'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 it 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
+Fenelon'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, till 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 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 Fenelon was assured, and was near. The
+father of the Duke of Burgundy died, and nothing then seemed to stand
+between Fenelon'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 Fenelon. Sternly forbidden, by the jealous and
+watchful king, his grandfather, to communicate with his old teacher, he
+yet had found means to send to Fenelon, from time to time, reassuring
+signals of his trust and his love. Fenelon 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,
+Fenelon 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 Fenelon; "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 Fenelon:
+"Here was a man who could have served us well under the disasters by
+which my kingdom is about to be assailed!"
+
+Fenelon's literary productions are various; but they all 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 Fenelon. His argument on the "Being of a
+God" was prepared as a duty of his preceptorship to the prince. But the
+one book of Fenelon 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
+Fenelon 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. Fenelon'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 Fenelon 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 Fenelon hoped his royal pupil would finally turn out to be. Nothing
+can exceed the urbanity and grace with which the delicate business is
+conducted by Fenelon, 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 to Louis XIV., and the state of France, in mind, which,
+when the book was first printed, gave it such an exciting interest in
+the eyes of Europe. Telemachus, after the manner of AEneas 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:--
+
+     The king's authority over the subject is absolute, but the
+     authority of the law is absolute over him. His power to do good is
+     unlimited, but he is restrained from doing evil. The laws have put
+     the people into his hands, as the most valuable deposit, upon
+     condition that he shall treat them as his children. It is the
+     intent of the law that the wisdom and equity of one man shall be
+     the happiness of many, and not that the wretchedness and slavery of
+     many should gratify the pride and luxury of one. The king ought to
+     possess nothing more than the subject, except what is necessary to
+     alleviate the fatigue of his station, and impress upon the minds of
+     the people a reverence of that authority by which the laws are
+     executed. Moreover, the king should indulge himself less, as well
+     in ease as in pleasure, and should be less disposed to the pomp and
+     the pride of life than any other man. He ought not to be
+     distinguished from the rest of mankind by the greatness of his
+     wealth, or the vanity of his enjoyments, but by superior wisdom,
+     more heroic virtue, and more splendid glory. Abroad he ought to be
+     the defender of his country, by commanding her armies; and at home
+     the judge of his people, distributing justice among them, improving
+     their morals, and increasing their felicity. It is not for himself
+     that the gods have intrusted him with royalty. He is exalted above
+     individuals, only that he may be the servant of the people. To the
+     public he owes all his time, all his attention, and all his love;
+     he deserves dignity only in proportion as he gives up private
+     enjoyments for the public good.
+
+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
+Encyclopaedists, prepared the Revolution, had already begun virtually to
+be written when Fenelon wrote his "Telemachus." It is easy to see why
+the fame of Fenelon 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 free-thinkers, 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 Fenelon 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 truly foreshadowed? The "Telemachus:"--
+
+     Remember, that the sovereign who is most absolute is always least
+     powerful; he seizes upon all, and his grasp is ruin. He is, indeed,
+     the sole proprietor of whatever his state contains; but, for that
+     reason, his state contains nothing of value: the fields are
+     uncultivated, and almost a desert; the towns lose some of their few
+     inhabitants every day; and trade every day declines. The king, who
+     must cease to be a king when he ceases to have subjects, and who is
+     great only in virtue of his people, is himself insensibly losing
+     his character and his power, as the number of his people, from
+     whom alone both are derived, insensibly diminishes. His dominions
+     are at length exhausted of money and of men: the loss of men is the
+     greatest and the most irreparable he can sustain. Absolute power
+     degrades every subject to a slave. The tyrant is flattered, even to
+     an appearance of adoration, and every one trembles at the glance of
+     his eye; but, at the least revolt, this enormous power perishes by
+     its own excess. It derived no strength from the love of the people;
+     it wearied and provoked all that it could reach, and rendered every
+     individual of the state impatient of its continuance. At the first
+     stroke of opposition, the idol is overturned, broken to pieces, and
+     trodden under foot. Contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust,
+     and every other passion of the soul, unite against so hateful a
+     despotism. The king who, in his vain prosperity, found no man bold
+     enough to tell him the truth, in his adversity finds no man kind
+     enough to excuse his faults, or to defend him against his enemies.
+
+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 Fenelon
+appear more purely now in his character as dreamer and poet. Young
+Prince Telemachus has, Ulysses-like, and AEneas-like, his descent into
+Hades. This incident affords Fenelon 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 Fenelon. It is the
+spectacle of kings who on earth abused their power, that Telemachus is
+beholding:--
+
+     Telemachus observed the countenance of these criminals to be pale
+     and ghastly, strongly expressive of the torment they suffered at
+     the heart. They looked inward with a self-abhorrence, now
+     inseparable from their existence. Their crimes themselves had
+     become their punishment, and it was not necessary that greater
+     should be inflicted. They haunted them like hideous spectres, and
+     continually started up before them in all their enormity. They
+     wished for a second death, that might separate them from these
+     ministers of vengeance, as the first had separated their spirits
+     from the body,--a death that might at once extinguish all
+     consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the depths of hell
+     to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in impenetrable
+     darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance, which,
+     though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth,
+     from which they fled, has overtaken them, an invincible and
+     unrelenting enemy. The ray which once might have illuminated them,
+     like the mild radiance of the day, now pierces them like
+     lightning,--a fierce and fatal fire, that, without injury to the
+     external parts, infixes a burning torment at the heart. By truth,
+     now an avenging flame, the very soul is melted like metal in a
+     furnace; it dissolves all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the
+     first elements of life, yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as
+     it were, divided against himself, without rest and without comfort;
+     animated by no vital principle, but the rage that kindles at his
+     own misconduct, and the dreadful madness that results from despair.
+
+If the "perpetual feast of nectared 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:"--
+
+     In this place resided all the good kings who had wisely governed
+     mankind from the beginning of time. They were separated from the
+     rest of the just; for, as wicked princes suffer more dreadful
+     punishment than other offenders in Tartarus, so good kings enjoy
+     infinitely greater felicity than other lovers of virtue, in the
+     fields of Elysium.
+
+     Telemachus advanced towards these kings, whom he found in groves of
+     delightful fragrance, reclining upon the downy turf, where the
+     flowers and herbage were perpetually renewed. A thousand rills
+     wandered through these scenes of delight, and refreshed the soil
+     with a gentle and unpolluted wave; the song of innumerable birds
+     echoed in the groves. Spring strewed the ground with her flowers,
+     while at the same time autumn loaded the trees with her fruit. In
+     this place the burning heat of the dog-star was never felt, and the
+     stormy north was forbidden to scatter over it the frosts of winter.
+     Neither War that thirsts for blood, nor Envy that bites with an
+     envenomed tooth, like the vipers that are wreathed around her arms,
+     and fostered in her bosom, nor Jealousy, nor Distrust, nor Fears,
+     nor vain Desires, invade these sacred domains of peace. The day is
+     here without end, and the shades of night are unknown. Here the
+     bodies of the blessed are clothed with a pure and lambent light,
+     as with a garment. This light does not resemble that vouchsafed to
+     mortals upon earth, which is rather darkness visible; it is rather
+     a celestial glory than a light--an emanation that penetrates the
+     grossest body with more subtilety than the rays of the sun
+     penetrate the purest crystal, which rather strengthens than dazzles
+     the sight, and diffuses through the soul a serenity which no
+     language can express. By this ethereal essence the blessed are
+     sustained in everlasting life; it pervades them; it is incorporated
+     with them, as food with the mortal body; they see it, they feel it,
+     they breathe it, and it produces in them an inexhaustible source of
+     serenity and joy. It is a fountain of delight, in which they are
+     absorbed as fishes are absorbed in the sea; they wish for nothing,
+     and, having nothing, they possess all things. This celestial light
+     satiates the hunger of the soul; every desire is precluded; and
+     they have a fulness of joy which sets them above all that mortals
+     seek with such restless ardor, to fill the vacuity that aches
+     forever in their breast. All the delightful objects that surround
+     them are disregarded; for their felicity springs up within, and,
+     being perfect, can derive nothing from without. So the gods,
+     satiated with nectar and ambrosia, disdain, as gross and impure,
+     all the dainties of the most luxurious table upon earth. From these
+     seats of tranquillity all evils fly far away; death, disease,
+     poverty, pain, regret, remorse, fear, even hope,--which is
+     sometimes not less painful than fear itself,--animosity, disgust,
+     and resentment can never enter there.
+
+The leaden good sense of Louis XIV. pronounced Fenelon 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 Fenelon'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 moulding the character of a prospective
+ruler of France, was not written by any clergyman of Fenelon's or
+Bossuet's time.
+
+Fenelon 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 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."
+
+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. Fenelon alone is, in quantity as in quality,
+enough, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the
+perverse inclination of the balance.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+MONTESQUIEU.
+
+1689-1755.
+
+
+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 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:--
+
+     This body [the Roman Senate] erected itself into a tribunal for the
+     judgment of all peoples, and at the end of every war it decided
+     upon the punishments and the recompenses which it conceived each to
+     be entitled to. It took away parts of the lands of the conquered
+     states, in order to bestow them upon the allies of Rome, thus
+     accomplishing two objects at once,--attaching to Rome those kings
+     of whom she had little to fear and much to hope, and weakening
+     those of whom she had little to hope and all to fear.
+
+     Allies were employed to make war upon an enemy, but the destroyers
+     were at once destroyed in their turn. Philip was beaten with the
+     half of the AEtolians, who were immediately afterwards annihilated
+     for having joined themselves to Antiochus. Antiochus was beaten
+     with the help of the Rhodians, who, after having received signal
+     rewards, were humiliated forever, under the pretext that they had
+     requested that peace might be made with Perseus.
+
+     When they had many enemies on hand at the same time, they accorded
+     a truce to the weakest, which considered itself happy in obtaining
+     such a respite, counting it for much to be able to secure a
+     postponement of its ruin.
+
+     When they were engaged in a great war, the senate affected to
+     ignore all sorts of injuries, and silently awaited the arrival of
+     the proper time for punishment; when, if it saw that only some
+     individuals were culpable, it refused to punish them, choosing
+     rather to hold the entire nation as criminal, and thus reserve to
+     itself a useful vengeance.
+
+     As they inflicted inconceivable evils upon their enemies, there
+     were not many leagues formed against them; for those who were most
+     distant from danger were not willing to draw nearer to it. The
+     consequence of this was, that they were rarely attacked; whilst, on
+     the other hand, they constantly made war at such time, in such
+     manner, and against such peoples, as suited their convenience; and,
+     among the many nations which they assailed, there were very few
+     that would not have submitted to every species of injury at their
+     hands if they had been willing to leave them in peace.
+
+     It being their custom to speak always as masters, the ambassadors
+     whom they sent to nations which had not yet felt their power were
+     certain to be insulted; and this was an infallible pretext for a
+     new war.
+
+     As they never made peace in good faith, and as, with the design of
+     universal conquest, their treaties were, properly speaking, only
+     suspensions of war, they always put conditions in them which began
+     the ruin of the states which accepted them. They either provided
+     that the garrisons of strong places should be withdrawn, or that
+     the number of troops should be limited, or that the horses or the
+     elephants of the vanquished party should be delivered over to
+     themselves; and if the defeated people was powerful on sea, they
+     compelled it to burn its vessels, and sometimes to remove, and
+     occupy a place of habitation farther inland.
+
+     After having destroyed the armies of a prince, they ruined his
+     finances by excessive taxes, or by the imposition of a tribute
+     under pretext of requiring him to pay the expenses of the war,--a
+     new species of tyranny, which forced the vanquished sovereign to
+     oppress his own subjects, and thus to alienate their affection.
+
+     When they granted peace to a king, they took some of his brothers
+     or children as hostages. This gave them the means of troubling his
+     kingdom at their pleasure. If they held the nearest heir, they
+     intimidated the possessor; if only a prince of a remote degree,
+     they used him to stir up revolts against the legitimate ruler.
+
+     Whenever any people or prince withdrew their obedience from their
+     sovereign, they immediately accorded to them the title of allies of
+     the Roman people, and thus rendered them sacred and inviolable; so
+     that there was no king, however great he might be, who could for a
+     moment be sure of his subjects, or even of his family.
+
+     Although the title of Roman ally was a species of servitude, it
+     was, nevertheless, very much sought after; for the possession of
+     this title made it certain that the recipients of it would receive
+     injuries from the Romans only, and there was ground for the hope
+     that this class of injuries would be rendered less grievous than
+     they would otherwise be.
+
+     Thus, there was no service which nations and kings were not ready
+     to perform, nor any humiliation which they did not submit to, in
+     order to obtain this distinction....
+
+     These customs were not merely some particular facts which happened
+     at hazard. They were permanently established principles, as may be
+     readily seen; for the maxims which the Romans acted upon against
+     the greatest powers were precisely those which they had employed in
+     the beginning of their career against the small cities which
+     surrounded them....
+
+     But nothing served Rome more effectually than the respect which she
+     inspired among all nations. She immediately reduced kings to
+     silence, and rendered them as dumb. With the latter, it was not a
+     mere question of the degree of their power: their very persons were
+     attacked. To risk a war with Rome was to expose themselves to
+     captivity, to death, and to the infamy of a triumph. Thus it was
+     that kings, who lived in pomp and luxury, did not dare to look with
+     steady eyes upon the Roman people, and, losing courage, they hoped,
+     by their patience and their obsequiousness, to obtain some
+     postponement of the calamities with which they were menaced.
+
+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. It acquired great contemporary
+fame, both at home and abroad. It was promptly translated into English,
+the translator earning the merited compliment of the author's own
+hearty approval of his work. Horace Walpole, who was something of a
+Gallomaniac, makes repeated allusion to Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws,"
+in letters of his written at about the time of the appearance of the
+book. But Walpole's admiring allusions themselves contain evidence that
+admiration equal to his own of the work that he praised, was by no means
+universal in England.
+
+The general aspect of the book is that of a composition meant to be
+luminously analyzed and arranged. Divisions and titles abound. There are
+thirty-one "books"; and each book contains, on the average, perhaps
+about the same number of chapters. The library edition, in English,
+consists of two volumes, comprising together some eight hundred open
+pages, in good-sized type. The books and chapters are therefore not
+formidably long. The look of the work is as if it were readable; and its
+character, on the whole, corresponds. It would hardly be French, if such
+were not the case. Except that Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws" is, as we
+have indicated, a highly organized, even an over-organized, book, which,
+by emphasis, Montaigne's "Essays" is not, these two works may be said,
+in their contents, somewhat to resemble each other. Montesquieu is
+nearly as discursive as Montaigne. He wishes to be philosophical, but he
+is not above supplying his reader with interesting historical instances.
+
+We shall not do better, in giving our readers a comprehensive idea of
+Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," than to begin by showing them the titles
+of a number of the books:--
+
+     Book I. Of Laws in General. Book II. Of Laws Directly Derived from
+     the Nature of Government. Book III. Of the Principles of the Three
+     Kinds of Government. Book IV. That the Laws of Education ought to
+     be Relative to the Principles of Government. Book V. That the Laws
+     given by the Legislator ought to be Relative to the Principle of
+     Government. Book VI. Consequences of the Principles of Different
+     Governments with Respect to the Simplicity of Civil and Criminal
+     Laws, the Form of Judgments, and the Inflicting of Punishments.
+     Book VII. Consequences of the Different Principles of the Three
+     Governments with Respect to Sumptuary Laws, Luxury, and the
+     Condition of Women. Book VIII. Of the Corruption of the Principles
+     of the Three Governments. Book XIV. Of Laws as Relative to the
+     Nature of the Climate.
+
+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 three 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 monarchy, _honor_, so
+_fear_ is necessary in a despotic government." The 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.:--
+
+     AN EXCELLENT CUSTOM OF THE SAMNITES.
+
+     The Samnites had a custom which in so small a republic, and
+     especially in their situation, must have been productive of
+     admirable effects. The young people were all convened in one place,
+     and their conduct was examined. He that was declared the best of
+     the whole assembly, had leave given him to take which girl he
+     pleased for his wife; the second best chose after him, and so on.
+     Admirable institution! The only recommendation that young men could
+     have on this occasion, was their virtue, and the service done their
+     country. He who had the greatest share of these endowments, chose
+     which girl he liked out of the whole nation. Love, beauty,
+     chastity, virtue, birth, and even wealth itself, were all, in some
+     measure, the dowry of virtue. A nobler and grander recompense, less
+     chargeable to a petty state, and more capable of influencing both
+     sexes, could scarce be imagined.
+
+     The Samnites were descended from the Lacedaemonians; and Plato,
+     whose institutes are only an improvement of those of Lycurgus,
+     enacted nearly the same law.
+
+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 Samnite 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 nearly the whole of the philosophy underlying M. Taine's
+essays on the history of literature:--
+
+     OF THE DIFFERENCE OF MEN IN DIFFERENT CLIMATES.
+
+     A cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibres of
+     the body; this increases their elasticity, and favors the return of
+     the blood from the extreme parts to the heart. It contracts those
+     very fibres; consequently it increases also their force. On the
+     contrary, a warm air relaxes and lengthens the extremes of the
+     fibres; of course it diminishes their force and elasticity.
+
+     People are therefore more vigorous in cold climates. Here the
+     action of the heart and the reaction of the extremities of the
+     fibres are better performed, the temperature of the humors is
+     greater, the blood moves freer towards the heart, and reciprocally
+     the heart has more power. This superiority of strength must produce
+     various effects; for instance, a greater boldness,--that is, more
+     courage; a greater sense of superiority,--that is, less desire of
+     revenge; a greater opinion of security,--that is, more frankness,
+     less suspicion, policy and cunning. In short, this must be
+     productive of very different tempers. Put a man into a close, warm
+     place, and, for the reasons above given, he will feel a great
+     faintness. If under this circumstance you propose a bold enterprise
+     to him, I believe you will find him very little disposed towards
+     it; his present weakness will throw him into a despondency; he will
+     be afraid of every thing, being in a state of total incapacity. The
+     inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the
+     people in cold countries are, like young men, brave.
+
+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:"--
+
+     When the Christian religion, two centuries ago, became unhappily
+     divided into Catholic and Protestant, the people of the north
+     embraced the Protestant, and those south adhered still to the
+     Catholic.
+
+     The reason is plain: the people of the north have, and will forever
+     have, a spirit of liberty and independence, which the people of the
+     south have not; and therefore, a religion which has no visible
+     head, is more agreeable to the independency of the climate, than
+     that which has one.
+
+Climate is a "great matter" with Montesquieu. In treating of the subject
+of a state changing its religion, he says:--
+
+     The ancient religion is connected with the constitution of the
+     kingdom, and the new one is not; the former _agrees with the
+     climate_, and very often the new one is opposite to it.
+
+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 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.
+
+The latter part of "The Spirit of Laws" contains discussions exhibiting
+no little research on the part of the author. There is, for one example,
+a discussion of the course of commerce in different ages of the world,
+and of the influences that have wrought from time to time to bring about
+the changes occurring. For another example, there is a discussion of the
+feudal system.
+
+Montesquieu was an admirer of the English constitution. His work,
+perhaps, contains no extended chapters more likely to instruct the
+general reader and to furnish a good idea of the writer's genius and
+method, than the two chapters--chapter six, Book XI., and chapter
+twenty-seven, Book XIX.--in which the English nation and the English
+form of government are sympathetically described. We simply indicate,
+for we have no room to exhibit, these chapters. Voltaire, too, expressed
+Montesquieu's admiration of English liberty and English law.
+
+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 contrast of these two different sets of expressions from his
+pen. In earlier manhood he says:--
+
+     Study has been for me the sovereign remedy for all the
+     dissatisfactions of life, having never had a sense of chagrin that
+     an hour's reading would not dissipate. I wake in the morning with a
+     secret joy to behold the light. I behold the light with a kind of
+     ravishment, and all the rest of the day I am happy.
+
+Within a few years of his death, the brave, cheerful tone had declined
+to this:--
+
+     I am broken down with fatigue; I must repose for the rest of my
+     life.
+
+Then further to this:--
+
+     I have expected to kill myself for the last three months, finishing
+     an addition to my work on the origin and changes of the French
+     civil law. It will take only three hours to read it; but, I assure
+     you, it has been such a labor to me, that my hair has turned white
+     under it all.
+
+Finally it touches nadir:--
+
+     It [his work] has almost cost me my life; I must rest; I can work
+     no more.
+
+     My candles are all burned out; I have set off all my cartridges.
+
+When Montesquieu died, only Diderot, among Parisian men of letters,
+followed him to his tomb.
+
+
+
+
+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 single great
+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 works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven
+volumes (equivalent, probably, in the aggregate, to three 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 "AEneid"--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 to extinguish 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. 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 Shakspeare's or Moliere'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 either the merit 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 coming shortly and easily at a
+knowledge of Voltaire.
+
+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 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:--
+
+     "I have heard great talk of the Senator Pococurante, who lives in
+     that fine house at the Brenta, where they say he entertains
+     foreigners in the most polite manner. They pretend this man is a
+     perfect stranger to uneasiness."--"I should be glad to see so
+     extraordinary a being," said Martin. Candide thereupon sent a
+     messenger to Signor Pococurante, desiring permission to wait on him
+     the next day.
+
+     Candide and his friend Martin went into a gondola on the Brenta,
+     and arrived at the palace of the noble Pococurante: the gardens
+     were laid out in elegant taste, and adorned with fine marble
+     statues; his palace was built after the most approved rules of
+     architecture. The master of the house, who was a man of sixty, and
+     very rich, received our two travellers with great politeness, but
+     without much ceremony, which somewhat disconcerted Candide, but was
+     not at all displeasing to Martin.
+
+     As soon as they were seated, two very pretty girls, neatly dressed,
+     brought in chocolate, which was extremely well frothed. Candide
+     could not help making encomiums upon their beauty and graceful
+     carriage. "The creatures are well enough," said the senator. "I
+     make them my companions, for I am heartily tired of the ladies of
+     the town, their coquetry, their jealousy, their quarrels, their
+     humors, their meannesses, their pride, and their folly. I am weary
+     of making sonnets, or of paying for sonnets to be made, on them;
+     but, after all, these two girls begin to grow very indifferent to
+     me."
+
+     After having refreshed himself, Candide walked into a large
+     gallery, where he was struck with the sight of a fine collection of
+     paintings. "Pray," said Candide, "by what master are the two first
+     of these?"--"They are Raphael's," answered the senator. "I gave a
+     great deal of money for them seven years ago, purely out of
+     curiosity, as they were said to be the finest pieces in Italy: but
+     I cannot say they please me; the coloring is dark and heavy; the
+     figures do not swell nor come out enough; and the drapery is very
+     bad. In short, notwithstanding the encomiums lavished upon them,
+     they are not, in my opinion, a true representation of nature. I
+     approve of no paintings but where I think I behold Nature herself;
+     and there are very few, if any, of that kind to be met with. I have
+     what is called a fine collection, but I take no manner of delight
+     in them."
+
+     While dinner was getting ready, Pococurante ordered a concert.
+     Candide praised the music to the skies. "This noise," said the
+     noble Venetian, "may amuse one for a little time; but if it was to
+     last above half an hour, it would grow tiresome to everybody,
+     though perhaps no one would care to own it. Music is become the art
+     of executing what is difficult; now, whatever is difficult cannot
+     be long pleasing.
+
+     "I believe I might take more pleasure in an opera, if they had not
+     made such a monster of that species of dramatic entertainment as
+     perfectly shocks me; and I am amazed how people can bear to see
+     wretched tragedies set to music, where the scenes are contrived for
+     no other purpose than to lug in, as it were by the ears, three or
+     four ridiculous songs, to give a favorite actress an opportunity of
+     exhibiting her pipe. Let who will or can die away in raptures at
+     the trills of a eunuch quavering the majestic part of Caesar or
+     Cato, and strutting in a foolish manner upon the stage. For my
+     part, I have long ago renounced these paltry entertainments, which
+     constitute the glory of modern Italy, and are so dearly purchased
+     by crowned heads." Candide opposed these sentiments, but he did it
+     in a discreet manner. As for Martin, he was entirely of the old
+     senator's opinion.
+
+     Dinner being served up, they sat down to table, and after a very
+     hearty repast, returned to the library. Candide, observing Homer
+     richly bound, commended the noble Venetian's taste. "This," said
+     he, "is a book that was once the delight of the great Pangloss, the
+     best philosopher in Germany."--"Homer is no favorite of mine,"
+     answered Pococurante very coolly. "I was made to believe once that
+     I took a pleasure in reading him; but his continual repetitions of
+     battles must have all such a resemblance with each other; his gods
+     that are forever in a hurry and bustle, without ever doing any
+     thing; his Helen, that is the cause of the war, and yet hardly acts
+     in the whole performance; his Troy, that holds out so long without
+     being taken; in short, all these things together make the poem very
+     insipid to me. I have asked some learned men whether they are not
+     in reality as much tired as myself with reading this poet. Those
+     who spoke ingenuously assured me that he had made them fall asleep,
+     and yet that they could not well avoid giving him a place in their
+     libraries; but that it was merely as they would do an antique, or
+     those rusty medals which are kept only for curiosity, and are of no
+     manner of use in commerce."
+
+     "But your excellency does not surely form the same opinion of
+     Virgil?" said Candide. "Why, I grant," replied Pococurante, "that
+     the second, third, fourth, and sixth books of his 'AEneid' are
+     excellent; but as for his pious AEneas, his strong Cloanthus, his
+     friendly Achates, his boy Ascanius, his silly King Latinus, his
+     ill-bred Amata, his insipid Lavinia, and some other characters much
+     in the same strain, I think there cannot in nature be any thing
+     more flat and disagreeable. I must confess I prefer Tasso far
+     beyond him; nay, even that sleepy tale-teller Ariosto."
+
+     "May I take the liberty to ask if you do not receive great pleasure
+     from reading Horace?" said Candide. "There are maxims in this
+     writer," replied Pococurante, "from whence a man of the world may
+     reap some benefit; and the short measure of the verse makes them
+     more easily to be retained in the memory. But I see nothing
+     extraordinary in his journey to Brundusium, and his account of his
+     bad dinner; nor in his dirty, low quarrel between one Rupilius,
+     whose words, as he expresses it, were full of poisonous filth; and
+     another, whose language was dipped in vinegar. His indelicate
+     verses against old women and witches have frequently given me great
+     offence; nor can I discover the great merit of his telling his
+     friend Maecenas, that, if he will but rank him in the class of lyric
+     poets, his lofty head shall touch the stars. Ignorant readers are
+     apt to advance every thing by the lump in a writer of reputation.
+     For my part, I read only to please myself. I like nothing but what
+     makes for my purpose." Candide, who had been brought up with a
+     notion of never making use of his own judgment, was astonished at
+     what he heard; but Martin found there was a good deal of reason in
+     the senator's remarks.
+
+     "Oh, here is a Tully!" said Candide; "this great man, I fancy, you
+     are never tired of reading."--"Indeed, I never read him at all,"
+     replied Pococurante. "What a deuce is it to me whether he pleads
+     for Rabirius or Cluentius? I try causes enough myself. I had once
+     some liking to his philosophical works; but when I found he doubted
+     of every thing, I thought I knew as much as himself, and had no
+     need of a guide to learn ignorance."
+
+     "Ha!" cried Martin, "here are fourscore volumes of the 'Memoirs of
+     the Academy of Sciences;' perhaps there may be something curious
+     and valuable in this collection."--"Yes," answered Pococurante; "so
+     there might, if any one of these compilers of this rubbish had only
+     invented the art of pin-making. But all these volumes are filled
+     with mere chimerical systems, without one single article conducive
+     to real utility."
+
+     "I see a prodigious number of plays," said Candide, "in Italian,
+     Spanish, and French."--"Yes," replied the Venetian; "there are, I
+     think, three thousand, and not three dozen of them good for any
+     thing. As to those huge volumes of divinity, and those enormous
+     collections of sermons, they are not all together worth one single
+     page of Seneca; and I fancy you will readily believe that neither
+     myself nor any one else ever looks into them."
+
+     Martin, perceiving some shelves filled with English books, said to
+     the senator, "I fancy that a republican must be highly delighted
+     with those books, which are most of them written with a noble
+     spirit of freedom."--"It is noble to write as we think," said
+     Pococurante; "it is the privilege of humanity. Throughout Italy we
+     write only what we do not think; and the present inhabitants of the
+     country of the Caesars and Antoninuses dare not acquire a single
+     idea without the permission of a father Dominican. I should be
+     enamoured of the spirit of the English nation did it not utterly
+     frustrate the good effects it would produce by passion and the
+     spirit of party."
+
+     Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think
+     that author a great man. "Who!" said Pococurante sharply. "That
+     barbarian, who writes a tedious commentary, in ten books of
+     rambling verse, on the first chapter of Genesis! That slovenly
+     imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation by making the
+     Messiah take a pair of compasses from heaven's armory to plan the
+     world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole
+     universe by his fiat! Can I think you have any esteem for a writer
+     who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer,
+     sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him
+     say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses
+     him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation
+     of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils
+     and angels cannonading each other in heaven! Neither I, nor any
+     other Italian, can possibly take pleasure in such melancholy
+     reveries. But the marriage of Sin and Death, and snakes issuing
+     from the womb of the former, are enough to make any person sick
+     that is not lost to all sense of delicacy. This obscene, whimsical,
+     and disagreeable poem met with the neglect that it deserved at its
+     first publication; and I only treat the author now as he was
+     treated in his own country by his contemporaries."
+
+     Candide was sensibly grieved at this speech, as he had a great
+     respect for Homer, and was very fond of Milton. "Alas!" said he
+     softly to Martin, "I am afraid this man holds our German poets in
+     great contempt."--"There would be no such great harm in that," said
+     Martin.--"Oh, what a surprising man!" said Candide to himself.
+     "What a prodigious genius is this Pococurante! Nothing can please
+     him."
+
+     After finishing their survey of the library they went down into the
+     garden, when Candide commended the several beauties that offered
+     themselves to his view. "I know nothing upon earth laid out in such
+     bad taste," said Pococurante; "every thing about it is childish and
+     trifling; but I shall have another laid out to-morrow upon a nobler
+     plan."
+
+     As soon as our two travellers had taken leave of his excellency,
+     "Well," said Candide to Martin, "I hope you will own that this man
+     is the happiest of all mortals, for he is above every thing he
+     possesses."--"But do you not see," answered Martin, "that he
+     likewise dislikes every thing he possesses? It was an observation
+     of Plato long since, that those are not the best stomachs that
+     reject, without distinction, all sorts of aliments."--"True," said
+     Candide; "but still, there must certainly be a pleasure in
+     criticising every thing, and in perceiving faults where others
+     think they see beauties."--"That is," replied Martin, "there is a
+     pleasure in having no pleasure."--"Well, well," said Candide, "I
+     find that I shall be the only happy man at last, when I am blessed
+     with the sight of my dear Cunegund."--"It is good to hope," said
+     Martin.
+
+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 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 Pococurante is the immortal type of men that
+have worn out their capacity of fresh sensation and enjoyment.
+
+It was a happy editorial thought of Mr. Henry Morley, in his cheap
+library, now issuing, of standard books for the people, to bind up
+Johnson's "Rasselas" in one volume with Voltaire's "Candide." The two
+stories, nearly contemporaneous in their production, offer a stimulating
+contrast in treatment, at the hands of two sharply contrasted writers,
+of much the same subject,--the unsatisfactoriness of the world.
+
+Mr. John Morley, a very different writer and a very different man from
+his namesake just mentioned, has an elaborate monograph on Voltaire in a
+volume perhaps twice as large as the present. This work claims the
+attention of all students desirous of exhaustive acquaintance with its
+subject. Mr. John Morley 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. It is only in his
+two volumes on "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists," that Mr. Morley finds
+himself able to write without reserve in full moral accord with the men
+whom he describes. Of course, in all these books the biographer and
+critic feels, as Englishman, obliged to concede much to his English
+audience, in the way of condemning impurities in his authors. The
+concession thus made is made with great adroitness of manner, the
+writer's aim evidently being to imply that his infidels and atheists, if
+they are somewhat vicious in taste, had the countenance of good
+Christian example or parallel for all the lapses they show. Mr. Morley
+wishes to be fair, but his atheist zeal overcomes him. This is
+especially evident in his work on "Diderot and the Encyclopaedists,"
+where his propagandist desire to clear the character of his hero bribes
+him once and again to unconscious false dealing. In his "Voltaire," and
+in his "Rousseau," Mr. Morley is so lofty in tone, expressing himself
+against the moral obliquities of the men with whom he is dealing, that
+often you feel the ethic atmosphere of the books to be pure and bracing,
+almost beyond the standard of biblical and Christian. But in his
+"Diderot and the Encyclopaedists," such fine severity is conspicuously
+absent. Mr. Morley is so deeply convinced that atheism is what we all
+most need just now, that when he has--not halting mere infidels, like
+Voltaire and Rousseau--but good thorough-going atheists, like Diderot
+and his fellows, to exhibit, he can hardly bring himself to injure their
+exemplary influence with his readers, by allowing to exist any damaging
+flaws in their character.
+
+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, 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, "_Ecrasez l'Infame_," is
+interpreted and applied. He did not mean Jesus Christ by _l'Infame_; 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, "_Ecrasez l'Infame_," "_Ecrasons l'Infame_,"--"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 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
+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 theatre_, 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 theatre. 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."
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+ROUSSEAU.
+
+1712-1778.
+
+
+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.
+
+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:--
+
+     I purpose an undertaking that never had an example, and whose
+     execution never will have an imitator. I would exhibit to my
+     fellows a man in all the truth of nature, and that man--myself.
+
+     Myself alone. I know my own heart, and I am acquainted with men. I
+     am made unlike any one I have ever seen,--I dare believe unlike any
+     living being. If no better than, I am at least different from,
+     others. Whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mould
+     wherein I was cast, can be determined only after having read me.
+
+     Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I will come, with this
+     book in my hand, and present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I
+     will boldly proclaim: Thus have I acted, thus have I thought, such
+     was I. With equal frankness have I disclosed the good and the evil.
+     I have omitted nothing bad, added nothing good; and if I have
+     happened to make use of some unimportant ornament, it has, in every
+     case, been simply for the purpose of filling up a void occasioned
+     by my lack of memory. I may have taken for granted as true what I
+     knew to be possible, never what I knew to be false. Such as I was,
+     I have exhibited myself,--despicable and vile, when so; virtuous,
+     generous, sublime, when so. I have unveiled my interior being, such
+     as Thou, Eternal Existence, hast beheld it. Assemble around me the
+     numberless throng of my fellow-mortals; let them listen to my
+     confessions, let them blush at my depravities, let them shrink
+     appalled at my miseries. Let each of them, in his turn, with equal
+     sincerity, lay bare his heart at the foot of thy throne, and then
+     let a single one tell thee, if he dare, _I was better than that
+     man_.
+
+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 pretence 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:--
+
+     I was born at Geneva, in 1712, of Isaac Rousseau and Susannah
+     Bernard, citizens.... I came into the world weak and sickly. I cost
+     my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes.
+
+     I never learned how my father supported his loss, but I know that
+     he remained ever after inconsolable.... When he used to say to me,
+     "Jean Jacques, let us speak of your mother," my usual reply was,
+     "Well, father, we'll cry, then," a reply which would instantly
+     bring the tears to his eyes. "Ah!" he would exclaim with agitation,
+     "give me her back, console me for her loss, fill up the void she
+     has left in my soul. Could I love thee thus wert thou but _my_
+     son?" Forty years after having lost her he expired in the arms of a
+     second wife, but with the name of the first on his lips, and her
+     image engraven on his heart.
+
+     Such were the authors of my being. Of all the gifts Heaven had
+     allotted them, a feeling heart was the only one I had inherited.
+     While, however, this had been the source of their happiness, it
+     became the spring of all my misfortunes.
+
+"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; but heart's blood was the ink in
+which almost every word of Rousseau's was written. This was the spring
+of his marvellous power. Rousseau:--
+
+     My mother had left a number of romances. These father and I betook
+     us to reading during the evenings. At first the sole object was, by
+     means of entertaining books, to improve me in reading; but, ere
+     long, the charm became so potent, that we read turn about without
+     intermission, and passed whole nights in this employment. Never
+     could we break up till the end of the volume. At times my father,
+     hearing the swallows of a morning, would exclaim, quite ashamed of
+     himself, "Come, let's to bed; I'm more of a child than you are!"
+
+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:--
+
+     I soon acquired, by this dangerous course, not only an extreme
+     facility in reading and understanding, but, for my age, a quite
+     unprecedented acquaintance with the passions. I had not the
+     slightest conception of things themselves, at a time when the whole
+     round of sentiments was already perfectly familiar to me. I had
+     apprehended nothing--I had felt all.
+
+Some hint now of other books read by the boy:--
+
+     With the summer of 1719 the romance-reading terminated.... "The
+     History of the Church and Empire" by Lesueur, Bossuet's
+     "Dissertation on Universal History," Plutarch's "Lives," Nani's
+     "History of Venice," Ovid's "Metamorphoses," "La Bruyere,"
+     Fontenelle's "Worlds," his "Dialogues of the Dead," and a few
+     volumes of Moliere, were transported into my father's shop; and I
+     read them to him every day during his work. For this employment I
+     acquired a rare, and, for my age, perhaps unprecedented, taste.
+     Plutarch especially became my favorite reading. The pleasure which
+     I found in incessantly reperusing him, cured me in some measure of
+     the romance madness; and I soon came to prefer Agesilaus, Brutus,
+     and Aristides, to Orondates, Artemenes, and Juba. From these
+     interesting studies, joined to the conversations to which they gave
+     rise with my father, resulted that free, republican spirit, that
+     haughty and untamable character, fretful of restraint or
+     subjection, which has tormented me my life long, and that in
+     situations the least suitable for giving it play. Incessantly
+     occupied with Rome and Athens, living, so to speak, with their
+     great men, born myself the citizen of a republic [Geneva], the son
+     of a father with whom patriotism was the ruling passion, I caught
+     the flame from him--I imagined myself a Greek or a Roman, and
+     became the personage whose life I was reading.
+
+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 thus in part was formed the dreamer of
+the "Emile" 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:--
+
+     I had a brother, my elder by seven years.... He fell into the ways
+     of debauchery, even before he was old enough to be really a
+     libertine.... I remember once when my father was chastising him
+     severely and in anger, that I impetuously threw myself between
+     them, clasping him tightly. I thus covered him with my body,
+     receiving the blows that were aimed at him; and I held out so
+     persistently in this position, that whether softened by my cries
+     and tears, or fearing that I should get the worst of it, my father
+     was forced to forgive him. In the end my brother turned out so bad
+     that he ran away and disappeared altogether.
+
+It is pathetic--Rousseau's attempted contrast following, between the
+paternal neglect of his older brother and the paternal indulgence of
+himself:--
+
+     If this poor lad was carelessly brought up, it was quite otherwise
+     with his brother.... My desires were so little excited, and so
+     little crossed, that it never came into my head to have any. I can
+     solemnly aver, that, till the time when I was bound to a master, I
+     never knew what it was to have a whim.
+
+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!
+The "Confessions" truly say:--
+
+     Thus commenced the formation or the manifestation in me of that
+     heart at once so haughty and so tender, of that effeminate and yet
+     unconquerable character which, ever vacillating between courage and
+     weakness, between virtue and yielding to temptation, has all along
+     set me in contradiction to myself, and has resulted in my failing
+     both of abstinence and enjoyment, both of prudence and pleasure.
+
+The half-orphan becomes orphan entire, not by the death, but by the
+withdrawing, of the father. That father, having been accused of a
+misdemeanor, "preferred," Rousseau somewhat vaguely says, "to quit
+Geneva for the remainder of his life, rather than give up a point
+wherein honor and liberty appeared to him compromised." Jean Jacques was
+sent to board with a parson, who taught him Latin, and, along with
+Latin, supplied, Rousseau scornfully says, "all the accompanying mass of
+paltry rubbish styled education." He adds:--
+
+     The country was so entirely new to me, that I could never grow
+     weary in my enjoyment of it; and I acquired so strong a liking for
+     it, that it has never become extinguished.
+
+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:--
+
+     I learned to covet in silence, to dissemble, to dissimulate, to
+     lie, and at last to steal,--a propensity for which I had never
+     hitherto had the slightest inclination, and of which I have never
+     since been able quite to cure myself....
+
+     My first theft was the result of complaisance, but it opened the
+     door to others which had not so laudable a motive.
+
+     My master had a journeyman named M. Verrat.... [He] took it into
+     his head to rob his mother of some of her early asparagus and sell
+     it, converting the proceeds into some extra good breakfasts. As he
+     did not wish to expose himself, and not being very nimble, he
+     selected me for this expedition.... Long did I stickle, but he
+     persisted. I never could resist kindness, so I consented. I went
+     every morning to the garden, gathered the best of the asparagus,
+     and took it to "the Molard," where some good creature, perceiving
+     that I had just been stealing it, would insinuate that little fact,
+     so as to get it the cheaper. In my terror I took whatever she chose
+     to give me, and carried it to M. Verrat.
+
+     This little domestic arrangement continued for several days before
+     it came into my head to rob the robber, and tithe M. Verrat for the
+     proceeds of the asparagus.... I thus learned that to steal was,
+     after all, not so very terrible a thing as I had conceived; and ere
+     long I turned this discovery to so good an account, that nothing I
+     had an inclination for could safely be left within my reach....
+
+     And now, before giving myself over to the fatality of my destiny,
+     let me, for a moment, contemplate what would naturally have been my
+     lot had I fallen into the hands of a better master. Nothing was
+     more agreeable to my tastes, nor better calculated to render me
+     happy, than the calm and obscure condition of a good artisan, more
+     especially in certain lines, such as that of an engraver at
+     Geneva.... In my native country, in the bosom of my religion, of my
+     family, and my friends, I should have led a life gentle and
+     uncheckered as became my character, in the uniformity of a pleasing
+     occupation and among connections dear to my heart. I should have
+     been a good Christian, a good citizen, a good father, a good
+     friend, a good artisan, and a good man in every respect. I should
+     have loved my station; it may be I should have been an honor to it:
+     and after having passed an obscure and simple, though even and
+     happy, life, I should peacefully have departed in the bosom of my
+     kindred. Soon, it may be, forgotten, I should at least have been
+     regretted as long as the remembrance of me survived.
+
+     Instead of this... what a picture am I about to draw!
+
+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. (Apprentice Jean Jacques has left his
+master, and entered on a vagabond life.) This lady is a character very
+difficult for us Protestant Americans in our contrasted society to
+conceive as real or as possible. She kept a house of, what shall we call
+it? detention, for souls doubtfully in the way of being reclaimed from
+Protestant error into the bosom of the Roman-Catholic Church. She was
+herself a Roman-Catholic convert from Protestantism. She 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 loathness
+of self-respect to prevent his detailing the absurd adventures with
+which he diverted himself on the way. For example:--
+
+     Not a country-seat could I see, either to the right or left,
+     without going after the adventure which I was certain awaited me.
+     I could not muster courage to enter the mansion, nor even to knock,
+     for I was excessively timid; but I sang beneath the most inviting
+     window, very much astonished to find, after wasting my breath, that
+     neither lady nor miss made her appearance, attracted by the beauty
+     of my voice, or the spice of my songs,--seeing that I knew some
+     capital ones that my comrades had taught me, and which I sang in
+     the most admirable manner.
+
+Rousseau describes the emotions he experienced in his first meeting with
+Madame de Warens:--
+
+     I had pictured to myself a grim old devotee--M. de Pontverre's
+     "worthy lady" could, in my opinion, be none other. But lo, a
+     countenance beaming with charms, beautiful, mild blue eyes, a
+     complexion of dazzling fairness, the outline of an enchanting neck!
+     Nothing escaped the rapid glance of the young proselyte; for that
+     instant I was hers, sure that a religion preached by such
+     missionaries could not fail to lead to paradise!
+
+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:--
+
+     My father was not only an honorable man, but a person of the most
+     reliable probity, and endowed with one of those powerful minds that
+     perform deeds of loftiest heroism. I may add, he was a good father,
+     especially to me. Tenderly did he love me, but he loved his
+     pleasures also; and, since our living apart, other ties had, in a
+     measure, weakened his paternal affection. He had married again, at
+     Nyon; and though his wife was no longer of an age to present me
+     with brothers, yet she had connections; another family-circle was
+     thus formed, other objects engrossed his attention, and the new
+     domestic relations no longer so frequently brought back the
+     remembrance of me. My father was growing old, and had nothing on
+     which to rely for the support of his declining years. My brother
+     and I had something coming to us from my mother's fortune; the
+     interest of this my father was to receive during our absence. This
+     consideration did not present itself to him directly, nor did it
+     stand in the way of his doing his duty; it had, however, a silent,
+     and to himself imperceptible, influence, and at times slackened his
+     zeal, which, unacted upon by this, would have been carried much
+     farther. This, I think, was the reason, that, having traced me as
+     far as Annecy, he did not follow me to Chamberi, where he was
+     morally certain of overtaking me. This will also explain why, in
+     visiting him many times after my flight, I received from him on
+     every occasion a father's kindness, though unaccompanied by any
+     very pressing efforts to retain me.
+
+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:--
+
+     This conduct on the part of a father of whose affection and virtue
+     I have had so many proofs, has given rise within me to reflections
+     on my own character which have not a little contributed to maintain
+     my heart uncorrupted. I have derived therefrom this great maxim of
+     morality, perhaps the only one of any use in practice; namely, to
+     avoid such situations as put our duty in antagonism with our
+     interest, or disclose our own advantage in the misfortunes of
+     another, certain that in such circumstances, however sincere the
+     love of virtue we bring with us, it will sooner or later, and
+     whether we perceive it or not, become weakened, and we shall come
+     to be unjust and culpable in our acts without having ceased to be
+     upright and blameless in our intentions.
+
+The fruitful maxim thus deduced by Rousseau, he thinks he tried
+faithfully to put in practice. With apparent perfect assurance
+concerning himself, he says:--
+
+     I have sincerely desired to do what was right. I have, with all the
+     energy of my character, shunned situations which set my interest in
+     opposition to the interest of another, thus inspiring me with a
+     secret though involuntary desire prejudicial to that man.
+
+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 this 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:--
+
+     From the first day, the most affectionate familiarity sprang up
+     between us, and that to the same degree in which it continued
+     during all the rest of her life. _Petit_--Child--was my name,
+     _Maman_--Mamma--hers; and _Petit_ and _Maman_ we remained, even
+     when the course of time had all but effaced the difference of our
+     ages. These two names seem to me marvellously well to express our
+     tone towards each other, the simplicity of our manners, and, more
+     than all, the relation of our hearts. She was to me the tenderest
+     of mothers, never seeking her own pleasure, but ever my welfare;
+     and if the senses had any thing to do with my attachment for her,
+     it was not to change its nature, but only to render it more
+     exquisite, and intoxicate me with the charm of having a young and
+     pretty mamma whom it was delightful for me to caress. I say quite
+     literally, to caress; for it never entered into her head to deny me
+     the tenderest maternal kisses and endearments, nor into my heart to
+     abuse them. Some may say that, in the end, quite other relations
+     subsisted between us. I grant it; but have patience,--I cannot tell
+     every thing at once.
+
+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 he forsook her.
+Rousseau's whole life was a series of self-indulgences, grovelling,
+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:--
+
+     I remember, particularly, having passed a delicious night without
+     the city on a road that skirted the Rhone or the Saone, for I
+     cannot remember which. On the other side were terraced gardens. It
+     had been a very warm day; the evening was charming; the dew
+     moistened the faded grass; a calm night, without a breeze; the air
+     was cool without being cold; the sun in setting had left crimson
+     vapors in the sky, which tinged the water with its roseate hue,
+     while the trees along the terrace were filled with nightingales
+     gushing out melodious answers to each other's song. I walked along
+     in a species of ecstasy, giving up heart and senses to the
+     enjoyment of the scene, only slightly sighing with regret at
+     enjoying it alone. Absorbed in my sweet reverie, I prolonged my
+     walk far into the night, without perceiving that I was wearied out.
+     At length I discovered it. I lay voluptuously down on the tablet of
+     a sort of niche or false door sunk in the terrace wall. The canopy
+     of my couch was formed by the over-arching boughs of the trees; a
+     nightingale sat exactly above me; its song lulled me to sleep; my
+     slumber was sweet, and my awaking still more so. It was broad day;
+     my eyes, on opening, fell on the water, the verdure, and the
+     admirable landscape spread out before me. I arose and shook off
+     dull sleep; and, growing hungry, I gayly directed my steps towards
+     the city, bent on transforming two _pieces de six blancs_ that I
+     had left, into a good breakfast. I was so cheerful that I went
+     singing along the whole way.
+
+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:--
+
+     One day, among others, having purposely turned aside to get a
+     closer view of a spot that appeared worthy of all admiration, I
+     grew so delighted with it, and wandered round it so often, that I
+     at length lost myself completely. After several hours of useless
+     walking, weary and faint with hunger and thirst, I entered a
+     peasant's hut which did not present a very promising appearance,
+     but it was the only one I saw around. I conceived it to be here as
+     at Geneva and throughout Switzerland, where all the inhabitants in
+     easy circumstances are in the situation to exercise hospitality. I
+     entreated the man to get me some dinner, offering to pay for it. He
+     presented me with some skimmed milk and coarse barley bread,
+     observing that that was all he had. I drank the milk with delight,
+     and ate the bread, chaff and all; but this was not very restorative
+     to a man exhausted with fatigue. The peasant, who was watching me
+     narrowly, judged of the truth of my story by the sincerity of my
+     appetite. All of a sudden, after having said that he saw perfectly
+     well that I was a good and true young fellow that did not come to
+     betray him, he opened a little trap-door by the side of his
+     kitchen, went down and returned a moment afterwards with a good
+     brown loaf of pure wheat, the remains of a toothsome ham, and a
+     bottle of wine, the sight of which rejoiced my heart more than all
+     the rest. To these he added a good thick omelette, and I made such
+     a dinner as none but a walker ever enjoyed. When it came to pay,
+     lo! his disquietude and fears again seized him; he would none of my
+     money, and rejected it with extraordinary manifestations of
+     disquiet. The funniest part of the matter was, that I could not
+     conceive what he was afraid of. At length, with fear and trembling,
+     he pronounced those terrible words, _Commissioners_ and
+     _Cellar-rats_. He gave me to understand that he concealed his wine
+     because of the excise, and his bread on account of the tax, and
+     that he was a lost man if they got the slightest inkling that he
+     was not dying of hunger. Every thing he said to me touching this
+     matter, whereof, indeed, I had not the slightest idea, produced an
+     impression on me that can never be effaced. It became the germ of
+     that inextinguishable hatred that afterwards sprang up in my heart
+     against the vexations to which these poor people are subject, and
+     against their oppressors. This man, though in easy circumstances,
+     dared not eat the bread he had gained by the sweat of his brow, and
+     could escape ruin only by presenting the appearance of the same
+     misery that reigned around him.
+
+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 we
+emphatically call character was sadly wanting in Rousseau--how sadly,
+witness such an acted piece of mad folly as the following:--
+
+     I, without knowing aught of the matter,... gave myself out for a
+     [musical] composer. Nor was this all: having been presented to M.
+     de Freytorens, law-professor, who loved music, and gave concerts at
+     his house, nothing would do but I must give him a sample of my
+     talent; so I set about composing a piece for his concert quite as
+     boldly as though I had really been an adept in the science. I had
+     the constancy to work for fifteen days on this fine affair, to copy
+     it fair, write out the different parts, and distribute them with as
+     much assurance as though it had been a masterpiece of harmony.
+     Then, what will scarcely be believed, but which yet is gospel
+     truth, worthily to crown this sublime production, I tacked to the
+     end thereof a pretty minuet which was then having a run on the
+     streets.... I gave it as my own just as resolutely as though I had
+     been speaking to inhabitants of the moon.
+
+     They assembled to perform my piece. I explain to each the nature of
+     the movement, the style of execution, and the relations of the
+     parts--I was very full of business. For five or six minutes they
+     were tuning; to me each minute seemed an age. At length, all being
+     ready, I rap with a handsome paper _baton_ on the leader's desk the
+     five or six beats of the "_Make ready_." Silence is made--I gravely
+     set to beating time--they commence! No, never since French operas
+     began, was there such a _charivari_ heard. Whatever they might have
+     thought of my pretended talent, the effect was worse than they
+     could possibly have imagined. The musicians choked with laughter;
+     the auditors opened their eyes, and would fain have closed their
+     ears. But that was an impossibility. My tormenting set of
+     symphonists, who seemed rather to enjoy the fun, scraped away with
+     a din sufficient to crack the tympanum of one born deaf. I had the
+     firmness to go right ahead, however, sweating, it is true, at every
+     pore, but held back by shame; not daring to retreat, and glued to
+     the spot. For my consolation I heard the company whispering to each
+     other, quite loud enough for it to reach my ear: "It is not
+     bearable!" said one. "What music gone mad!" cried another. "What a
+     devilish din!" added a third. Poor Jean Jacques, little dreamed
+     you, in that cruel moment, that one day before the King of France
+     and all the court, thy sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and
+     applause, and that in all the boxes around thee the loveliest
+     ladies would burst forth with, "What charming sounds! what
+     enchanting music! every strain reaches the heart!"
+
+     But what restored every one to good humor was the minuet. Scarcely
+     had they played a few measures than I heard bursts of laughter
+     break out on all hands. Every one congratulated me on my fine
+     musical taste; they assured me that this minuet would make me
+     spoken about, and that I merited the loudest praises. I need not
+     attempt depicting my agony, nor own that I well deserved it.
+
+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 a later 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):--
+
+     I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my
+     genius, and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in
+     my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of
+     thinking.... It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for 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 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 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 that 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
+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 sombre, in
+spirit, but "beautiful exceedingly," in form of expression. Such works
+as the "Rene" of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French
+literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau's "Walks." We
+introduce two specimen extracts. The shadow of Rousseau's monomania will
+be felt thick upon them:--
+
+     It is now fifteen years since I have been in this strange
+     situation, which yet appears to me like a dream; ever imagining
+     that, disturbed by indigestion, I sleep uneasily, but shall soon
+     awake, freed from my troubles, but surrounded by my friends....
+
+     How could I possibly foresee the destiny that awaited me?... Could
+     I, if in my right senses, suppose that one day, the man I was, and
+     yet remain, should be taken, without any kind of doubt, for a
+     monster, a poisoner, an assassin, the horror of the human race, the
+     sport of the rabble, my only salutation to be spit upon, and that a
+     whole generation would unanimously amuse themselves in burying me
+     alive? When this strange revolution first happened, taken by
+     unawares, I was overwhelmed with astonishment; my agitation, my
+     indignation, plunged me into a delirium, which ten years have
+     scarcely been able to calm: during this interval, falling from
+     error to error, from fault to fault, and folly to folly, I have, by
+     my imprudence, furnished the contrivers of my fate with
+     instruments, which they have artfully employed to fix it without
+     resource....
+
+     * * *
+
+     Every future occurrence will be immaterial to me; I have in the
+     world neither relative, friend, nor brother; I am on the earth as
+     if I had fallen into some unknown planet; if I contemplate any
+     thing around me, it is only distressing, heart-rending objects;
+     every thing I cast my eyes on conveys some new subject either of
+     indignation or affliction; I will endeavor henceforward to banish
+     from my mind all painful ideas which unavailingly distress me.
+     Alone for the rest of my life, I must only look for consolation,
+     hope, or peace in my own breast; and neither ought nor will,
+     henceforward, think of any thing but myself. It is in this state
+     that I return to the continuation of that severe and just
+     examination which formerly I called my Confessions; I consecrate my
+     latter days to the study of myself, and to the preparation of that
+     account which I must shortly render up of my actions. I resign my
+     thoughts entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my own soul;
+     that being the only consolation that man cannot deprive me of. If
+     by dint of reflection on my internal propensities, I can attain to
+     putting them in better order, and correcting the evil that remains
+     in me, these meditations will not be utterly useless; and though I
+     am accounted worthless on earth, shall not cast away my latter
+     days. The leisure of my daily walks has frequently been filled with
+     charming contemplations, which I regret having forgot; but I will
+     write down those that occur in future; then, every time I read them
+     over, I shall forget my misfortunes, disgraces, and persecutors,
+     in recollecting and contemplating the integrity of my own heart.
+
+Rousseau'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
+"Emile." 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:--
+
+     I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures
+     strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its
+     influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with
+     all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they,
+     compared with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so
+     simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible
+     that the Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be
+     himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an
+     enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in
+     his manners! What an affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What
+     sublimity in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses!
+     What presence of mind, what subtilety, what truth, in his replies!
+     How great the command over his passions! Where is the man, where
+     the philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness and
+     without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man
+     loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest reward
+     of virtue, he described exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the
+     resemblance was so striking that all the Fathers perceived it.
+
+     What prepossession, what blindness, must it be to compare the son
+     of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion
+     there is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy,
+     easily supported his character to the last; and if his death,
+     however easy, had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted
+     whether Socrates, with all his wisdom, was any thing more than a
+     vain sophist. He invented, it is said, the theory of morals.
+     Others, however, had before put them in practice; he had only to
+     say what they had done, and reduce their examples to precepts.
+     Aristides had been _just_ before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas
+     gave up his life for his country before Socrates declared
+     patriotism to be a duty; the Spartans were a sober people before
+     Socrates recommended sobriety; before he had even defined virtue,
+     Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where could Jesus learn, among
+     his compatriots, that pure and sublime morality of which he only
+     has given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made
+     known amidst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the
+     most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on the earth.
+     The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing with his friends,
+     appears the most agreeable that could be wished for; that of Jesus,
+     expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed
+     by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared.
+     Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the
+     weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of
+     excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if
+     the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and
+     death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic
+     history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks
+     of fiction; on the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody
+     presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ.
+     Such a supposition, in fact, only shifts the difficulty without
+     removing it; it is more inconceivable that a number of persons
+     should agree to write such a history, than that one only should
+     furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the
+     diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the gospel, the
+     marks of whose truth are so striking and inimitable that the
+     inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero.
+
+So far in eloquent ascription of incomparable excellence to the Bible
+and to the Founder of Christianity. But then immediately Rousseau's
+Curate proceeds:--
+
+     And yet, with all this, the same gospel abounds with incredible
+     relations, with circumstances repugnant to reason, and which it is
+     impossible for a man of sense either to conceive or admit.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS.
+
+
+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 Encyclopaedists. 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 Encyclopaedists 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 encyclopaedia. 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 encyclopaedist 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 Encyclopaedists 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 implication, awaiting the unwary
+feet of the reader. 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
+Encyclopaedists 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 Encyclopaedists 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
+Encyclopaedists 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 "Encyclopaedia" 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 encyclopaedist, and a
+captain of encyclopaedists. 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 any thing 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 over-earnest man; abundant physical health,--gifts such
+as these made up the manifold equipment of Diderot for rowing and
+steering the gigantic enterprise of the "Encyclopaedia" 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 but Diderot could have achieved the "Encyclopaedia." 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 "Encyclopaedia" 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 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 "Encyclopaedia." 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 "Encyclopaedia,"--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 "Encyclopaedia," 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 "Encyclopaedia" 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 theatre.
+This brought out Rousseau in an eloquent harangue against the theatre as
+exerting influence to debauch public morals. D'Alembert, in the contest,
+did not carry off the honors of the day. D'Alembert's "Eloges," 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 "Encyclopaedia;" but Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot,
+Helvetius, Duclos, Condillac, Buffon, Grimm, D'Holbach, with many others
+whom we must not stay even to mention, contributed to the work.
+
+The influence of the "Encyclopaedia," great during its day, is by no
+means yet exhausted. But it is an influence indirectly exerted, for the
+"Encyclopaedia" 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 Encyclopaedists, 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.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+EPILOGUE.
+
+
+In looking backward over the preceding pages, we think of many things
+which we should like still to say. Of these many things, we limit
+ourselves to saying here, as briefly as we can, some four or five only.
+
+To begin with, in nearly every successive case, we have found ourselves
+lamenting afresh that, from the authors to be represented, the
+representative extracts must needs be so few and so short. We have,
+therefore, sincerely begrudged to ourselves every line of room that we
+felt obliged to occupy with matter, preparatory, explanatory, or
+critical, of our own. Whatever success we may have achieved in
+fulfilling our purpose, our purpose has been to say ourselves barely so
+much as was indispensable in order finally to convey, upon the whole, to
+our readers, within the allotted space, the justest and the fullest
+impression of the selected authors, through the medium of their own
+quoted words.
+
+In the second place, it was with great regret that we yielded to the
+necessity of omitting entirely, or dismissing with scant mention, such
+literary names, for example, as Boileau, of the age of Louis Quatorze,
+and, a little later than he, Fontenelle, spanning with his century of
+years the space from 1657 to 1757,--these, and, belonging to the period
+that ushered in the Revolution, Bernardin St. Pierre, the teller of the
+tale of "Paul and Virginia," with also that hero of a hundred romantic
+adventures, Beaumarchais, half Themistocles, half Alcibiades, the author
+of "The Barber of Seville." The line had to be drawn somewhere; and,
+whether wisely or not, at least thoughtfully, we drew it to run as it
+does.
+
+A third, and a yet graver, occasion of regret was that we must stop
+short on the threshold, without crossing it, of the nineteenth-century
+literature of France. With so many shining names seen just ahead of us,
+beacon-like, to invite our advance, we felt it as a real self-denial to
+stay our steps at that point. We hope still to deal with Chateaubriand,
+Madame de Stael, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo,
+and perhaps others, in a future volume.
+
+Our eye is caught with the antithetical terms, "classicism" and
+"romanticism," occurring here and there; and the observation is forced
+upon us, that these terms, in their mutual relation, are nowhere by us
+defined. The truth is, they scarcely, as thus used, admit of hard and
+fast definition. It is in a somewhat loose conventional sense of each
+term, that, in late literary language, they are set off, one over
+against the other. They name two different, but by no means necessarily
+antagonistic, forces or tendencies in literature. Classicism stands for
+what you might call the established order, against which romanticism is
+a revolt. Paradoxical though it be to say so, both the established
+order, and the revolt against it, are good things. The established
+order, which was never really any thing more or less than the dominance
+in literature of rules and standards derived through criticism from the
+acknowledged best models, especially the ancient, tended at last to
+cramp and stifle the life which it should, of course, only serve to
+shape and conform. The mould, always too narrow perhaps, but at any rate
+grown too rigid, needed itself to be fashioned anew. Fresh life, a full
+measure, would do this. Such is the true mission of romanticism,--not to
+break the mould that classicism sought to impose on literary production,
+but to expand that mould, make it more pliant, more free. A mould, for
+things living and growing, should be plastic in the passive, as well as
+in the active, sense of that word,--should accept form, as well as give
+form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not
+when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when it
+shall have made classicism over, after the law of a larger life. To risk
+a concrete illustration--among our American poets, Bryant, in the
+perfectly self-consistent unity of his whole intellectual development,
+may be said to represent classicism; while in Lowell, as Lowell appears
+in the later, more protracted, phase of his genius, romanticism is
+represented. The "Thanatopsis" of Bryant and the "Cathedral" of Lowell
+may stand for individual examples respectively of the classic and the
+romantic styles in poetry. Compare these two productions, and in the
+difference between the chaste, well-pruned severity of the one, and the
+indulged, perhaps stimulated, luxuriance of the other, you will feel the
+difference between classicism and romanticism. But Victor Hugo is the
+great recent romanticist; and when, hereafter, we come to speak somewhat
+at large of him, it will be seasonable to enter more fully into the
+question of these two tendencies in literature.
+
+We cannot consent to have said here our very last word, without
+emphasizing once again our sense of the really extraordinary
+pervasiveness in French literature of that element in it which one does
+not like to name, even to condemn it,--we mean its impurity. The
+influence of French literary models, very strong among us just now, must
+not be permitted insensibly to pervert our own cleaner and sweeter
+national habit and taste in this matter. But we, all of us together,
+need to be both vigilant and firm; for the beginnings of corruption here
+are very insidious. Let us never grow ashamed of our saving Saxon
+shamefacedness. They may nickname it prudery, if they will; but let us,
+American and English, for our part, always take pride in such prudery.
+
+
+
+
+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, ue, a peculiar vowel sound, having no equivalent
+in English.]
+
+[Transcriber's note on diacritical marks used:
+
+[)] indicates that a concave line appears over the letter in the original.
+
+[=] indicates that a straight line appears over the letter in the original.
+
+[^] indicates that a caret appears over the letter in the original.
+
+A word surrounded with equal signs (=) indicates that the word was
+in bold-type in the original.]
+
+
+Ab'e-lard (1079-1142), 6.
+
+Academy, French, 10, 12, 75, 156, 287.
+
+AEs'chy-lus, 94, 152, 166, 168.
+
+AE'sop, 85.
+
+Al-ci-bi'a-des, 289.
+
+Alembert. _See_ D'Alembert.
+
+Al-ex-an'der (the Great), 5, 131.
+
+Al-ex-an'drine, 5, 86, 153.
+
+Am-y-ot' (ae-me-o'), Jacques (1513-1593), 8.
+
+An'ge-lo, Michel, 156.
+
+Ariosto, 245, 247.
+
+Ar'is-tot-le, 50.
+
+Ar-nauld' (ar-n[=o]'), Antoine (1612-1694), 119.
+
+Ar'thur (King), 5.
+
+Au'gus-t[=i]ne, St., Latin Christian Father, 83.
+
+Au'gus'tus (the Emperor), 131.
+
+
+Ba'con, Francis, 48, 63.
+
+Ba'ker, Jehu, 226.
+
+B[=a]'laam, 154.
+
+B[)a]l'zac, Jean Louis Guez de (1594-1654), 10, 11.
+
+Beau-mar-chais', de (b[=o]-mar-sh[=a]'), Pierre Augustin Caron
+(1732-1799), 287, 289.
+
+Benedictines, 29.
+
+Boi-leau'-Des-pre-aux' (bwae-l[=o]'-d[=a]-pr[=a]-o'), Nicolas
+(1636-1711), 9, 12, 14, 83, 84, 167, 168, 171, 289.
+
+Bolton, A. S., 69.
+
+=BOS-SU-ET='(bo-sue-[=a]'), Jacques Benigne (1627-1704), 11, 12, 77, 127,
+166, 170, 182-188, 205, 206, 224, 225.
+
+=BOUR-DA-LOUE=', Louis (1632-1704), 3, 12, 77, 143, 148, 182, 185, 188,
+189-197, 198, 201, 202.
+
+Brook Farm, 38.
+
+Bry'ant, William Cullen, 290, 291.
+
+Buckle, Henry Thomas, 234.
+
+Buffon (buef-foN'), Georges Louis Leclerc de (1707-1788), 287.
+
+Bur'gun-dy, Duke of (1682-1712), 177, 207, 208, 209, 214, 216.
+
+Burke, Edmund, 48, 75.
+
+Bussy (bues-se'), Count, 135.
+
+By'ron, Lord, 48.
+
+
+Caesar, Julius, 56, 131.
+
+Calas (cae-lae'), Jean, 253.
+
+Calvin, John (1509-1564), 7.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, 251, 255.
+
+Catherine (Empress of Russia), 285.
+
+Cham-fort' (shaeN-for'), Sebastien Roch Nicolas (1741-1794), 85.
+
+_Chanson _(shaeN-soN'), 5.
+
+Char-le-magne' (shar-le-m[=a]n'), 5.
+
+Charles I. (of England), 170, 185.
+
+Charles IX. (of France), 63.
+
+Cha-teau-bri-and' (shae-t[=o]-bre-aeN'), Francois Auguste de (1768-1848),
+3, 13, 14, 206, 277, 289.
+
+Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 20.
+
+"Classicism," 10, 14, 224, 289, 290.
+
+Claude, Jean (1619-1687), 182.
+
+Coleridge, S. T., 7, 34, 43.
+
+Comines (k[=o]-meen'), Philippe de (1445-1509), 7, 25, 28.
+
+Conde (koN-d[=a]'), Prince of, "The Great Conde" (1621-1686), 144.
+
+Condillac (koNde-yaek'), Etienne Bonnot de (1715-1780), 287.
+
+Condorcet (koN-dor-s[=a]'), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat de
+(1743-1794), 128.
+
+=CORNEILLE= (kor-n[=a]l'), Pierre (1606-1684), 2, 11, 12, 16, 78, 79, 80,
+151-166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 182, 183, 239.
+
+Cotin (ko-t[)a]N'), Abbe, 100.
+
+Cotton, Charles (1630-1687), 44, 48.
+
+Cousin (koo-z[)a]N'), Victor (1792-1867), 128.
+
+
+D'Alembert (dae-laeN-ber'), Jean le Rond (1717-1783), 13, 251, 286, 287.
+
+Dante, 50, 93, 94, 114.
+
+David (King), 198.
+
+Descartes (d[=a]-kaert'), Rene (1596-1650), 11, 12, 104, 115.
+
+D'Holbach (d[=o]l-baek'), Paul Henri Thyry (1723-1789), 287.
+
+Dickens, Charles, 35, 149.
+
+Diderot (de-dr[=o]'), Denis (1713-1784), 13, 237, 250, 284, 285, 286,
+287.
+
+Dryden, John, 48, 166.
+
+Duclos (due-kl[=o]'), Charles Pineau (1704-1772), 287.
+
+
+"_Ecrasez l'Infame_," 252.
+
+Edinburgh Review, 140.
+
+Edward (the Black Prince), 21-25.
+
+Edwards, President, 194.
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 49, 51, 52, 61.
+
+Encyclopaedia Britannica, 18.
+
+=ENCYCLOPAEDISTS=, 13, 218, 249, 250, 282-288.
+
+Epictetus, 65.
+
+Epicurus, 50.
+
+Erasmus, 43, 126.
+
+Euripides, 153, 166, 171.
+
+
+_Fabliaux_ (fab'le-[=o]'), 6.
+
+Faugere (f[=o]-zher'), Arnaud Prosper (1810- ), 128.
+
+=FENELON= (f[=a]n-loN'), Francois de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715), 12,
+85, 177, 178, 181, 205-224.
+
+Flechier (fl[=a]-she-[=a]'), Esprit (1632-1710), 182.
+
+Foix (fwae), Count de, 26, 27.
+
+Fontenelle (foNt-n[)e]l'), Bernard le Bovier (1657-1757), 289.
+
+Franciscans, 29.
+
+Frederick (the Great), 254.
+
+Friar John, 40.
+
+=FROISSART= (frwae-sar'), Jean (1337-1410?), 7, 18-28.
+
+
+Gaillard (g[)a]-yar'), Gabriel Henri (1726-1806), 155.
+
+Gar-gant'ua, 29, 36, 37, 39.
+
+Gibbon, Edward, 153.
+
+Goldsmith, Oliver, 83, 225.
+
+Grignan (green-yaeN'), Madame de, 138.
+
+Grimm, Friedrich Melchior (1723-1807), 287.
+
+Gulliver's Travels, 37.
+
+Guyon ([=g]e-yoN'), Madame (1648-1717), 210.
+
+
+Hallam, Henry, 18, 34.
+
+Havet (ae-va') (editor of Pascal's works), 128, 129.
+
+Hawkesworth, Dr., 222.
+
+Hazlitt, W. Carew, 48.
+
+Helvetius ([=e]l-v[=a]-se-uess'), Claude Adrien (1715-1771), 287.
+
+Henriette, Princess, 170.
+
+Henry of Navarre, 63.
+
+Herod (King), 198.
+
+Herodotus, 7, 18.
+
+Holbach. _See_ D'Holbach.
+
+Homer, 244.
+
+Hooker ("The judicious"), 205.
+
+Horace, 245.
+
+Hugo (ue-go'), Victor. _See_ Victor Hugo.
+
+Hume, David, 48, 276.
+
+
+Isaiah (the prophet), 94.
+
+Israel, 154.
+
+
+James (King), 210.
+
+Job, 94, 210.
+
+John (the Baptist), 198.
+
+John (King), 21, 22.
+
+Johnes, Thomas, 19.
+
+Johnson, Samuel, 160, 249.
+
+Joinville (zhw[)a]N-vel'), Jean de (1224?-1319?), 7.
+
+Julian (the Apostate), 178.
+
+
+Kant, Emmanuel, 42.
+
+Knox, John, 198.
+
+
+La Boetie (lae b[=o]-[)a]-t[=e]'), Etienne (1530-1563), 58, 59.
+
+=LA BRUYERE= (lae brue-e-y [^e]r'), Jean (1646?-1696), 12, 75-81, 153.
+
+=LA FONTAINE= (lae foN-t[=a]n'), Jean de (1621-1695), 12, 81-92.
+
+Lamartine (lae-mar-t[=e]n'), Alphonse Marie Louis de (1780-1869), 14, 206, 289.
+
+_Langue d'oc_, 4.
+
+_Langue d'oil_, 4.
+
+Lanier, Sidney (1842-1881), 25.
+
+=LA ROCHEFOUCAULD= (lae r[=o]sh-foo-k[=o]'), Francois, Duc de (1613-1680),
+12, 48, 66-75, 131, 147, 148.
+
+Longfellow, Henry W., 50.
+
+Louis IX. (1215-1270) (St. Louis), 6, 7.
+
+Louis XI. (1423-1483), 7.
+
+Louis XIII. (1601-1643), 10, 95.
+
+Louis XIV. (1638-1715) (Quatorze), 10, 12, 113, 135, 136, 169, 172, 176,
+181, 184, 189, 190, 198, 199, 200, 207, 208, 213, 217-219, 223, 255.
+
+Louis XV. (1710-1774), 199, 214, 254.
+
+Louvois (loo-vwae'), Marquis de, 142.
+
+Lowell, James Russell, 291.
+
+Lucan, 151, 153, 240.
+
+Lucretius, 94, 166.
+
+Luther, Martin, 7, 40.
+
+
+Maintenon (m[)a]N-teh-noN'), Madame de (1635-1719), 172, 181, 210, 211.
+
+Malherbe (mael-[^e]rb'), Francois (1555-1628), 9, 10, 14.
+
+Martin (mar-t[)a]N'), Henri (1810- ), 183.
+
+Mary, Queen of Scots, 8, 198.
+
+=MASSILLON= (maes-se-yoN'), Jean Baptiste (1663-1742), 3, 12, 148, 182,
+185, 188, 197-205.
+
+M'Crie, Thomas, 119.
+
+Michael (the Archangel), 205.
+
+Milton, John, 92, 182, 206, 247.
+
+=MOLIERE= (mo-le-er') (real name, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673), 12,
+16, 83, 92-114, 127, 154, 165, 167, 169, 240.
+
+Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 151.
+
+=MONTAIGNE= (mon-t[=a]n'), Michel Eyquem de (1533-1592), 2, 7, 8, 44-65,
+67, 75, 131, 230, 234, 257, 268.
+
+Montespan (moN-t[)e]ss-paeN'), Madame de (1641-1707), 138, 139, 140.
+
+=MONTESQUIEU=, de (moN-t[)e]s-k[^e]-uh'), Charles de Secondat (1689-1755),
+13, 218, 225-237.
+
+Morley, Henry, 249.
+
+Morley, John, 249, 251, 285.
+
+Motteux, Peter Anthony (1660-1718), 30.
+
+Musset (mue-s[=a]') (1810-1857), Alfred de, 289.
+
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte, 13, 166.
+
+Nathan (the prophet), 198.
+
+Newton, Sir Isaac, 115.
+
+Nicole (ne-k[)o]l'), Pierre (1625-1695), 3, 143, 147, 168.
+
+
+"Obscurantism" (disposition, in the sphere of the intellect, to love
+darkness rather than light), 252.
+
+
+Pan-tag'-ru-el, 29, 40, 41, 42.
+
+Panurge (pae-nuerzh'), 40, 41, 42.
+
+=PASCAL=, Blaise (1623-1662), 3, 12, 48, 62, 65, 80, 115-133, 193.
+
+Pascal, Jacqueline, 116.
+
+Pelisson (p[)e]l-[=e]-soN'), 149.
+
+Petrarch, Francesco, 20.
+
+Phaedrus, 85.
+
+Plato, 50, 51, 59.
+
+Pleiades (pl[=e]'ya-d[=e]z), 8, 10, 13.
+
+Plutarch, 8, 48, 56.
+
+Po-co-cu'rant-ism, 248.
+
+Pompadour, Madame de, 254.
+
+Pompey, 56.
+
+Pope, Alexander, 48, 166.
+
+Poquelin (po-ke-l[)a]N'). _See_ Moliere, 94, 95.
+
+Port Royal, 119, 127, 128, 147, 168.
+
+Pradon (prae-doN'), 171.
+
+_Provencal_ (pro-vaeN-sal), 4.
+
+Ptolemy Philadelphus, 8.
+
+
+Quentin Durward, 7.
+
+
+=RABELAIS= (r[)a]-bl[=a]'), Francois (1495?-1553?), 3, 7, 28-43, 60, 65,
+83, 146.
+
+=RACINE= (rae-seen'), Jean (1639-1699), 12, 78, 79, 80, 83, 151, 152, 153,
+166-181, 205.
+
+Rambouillet (raeN-boo-y[=a]'), Hotel de, 10, 11, 12, 100, 105, 155, 156,
+183.
+
+Raphael (archangel), 205.
+
+Recamier (r[=a]-kae-me-[=a]'), Madame (1777-1849), 11.
+
+Richard, the Lion-hearted, 117.
+
+Richelieu (r[=e]sh-le-uh'), Cardinal, 10, 12, 95, 154, 156.
+
+_Roman_ (ro-maeN'), 5.
+
+"Romanticism," 224, 289, 290.
+
+"Romanticists," 14.
+
+Ronsard (roN-sar'), Pierre de (1524-1585), 8, 9.
+
+Ronsardism, 14.
+
+Rousseau (roo-s[=o]'), Jean Baptiste (1670-1741), 255.
+
+=ROUSSEAU=, Jean Jacques (1712-1778), 3, 13, 14, 48, 206, 218, 249, 250,
+251, 255-281, 287.
+
+Ruskin, John, 73.
+
+Rutebeuf (rue-te-buf') (_b._ 1230), _trouvere,_ 6.
+
+
+Sabliere (sae-bli-er'), Madame de la, 83, 84.
+
+Saci (sae-se'), M. de, 65.
+
+Saintsbury, George, 17, 58.
+
+Sainte-Beuve (s[)a]Nt-buv'), Charles Augustin (1804-1869), 9, 14, 189,
+193, 199, 235, 289.
+
+Sal'a-din (Saracen antagonist of Richard the Lion-hearted), 117.
+
+_Salon_ (sae-loN'), 11.
+
+Sand (saeNd), George (Madame Dudevant, 1804-1876), 3, 14.
+
+Saurin (s[=o]-r[)a]N'), Jacques (1677-1730), 182.
+
+"Savoyard Curate's Confession," 279.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, 7, 19, 25, 105.
+
+Selden, John ("The learned"), 205.
+
+Seneca, 48, 50.
+
+SEVIGNE (s[=a]-v[=e]n-y[=a]'), Madame de, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
+(1626-1696), 11, 105, 134-151, 170.
+
+Shakspeare, 16, 48, 63, 92, 94, 114, 160, 240.
+
+Socrates (contrasted by Rousseau with Jesus), 280, 281.
+
+Sophocles, 153, 166, 168.
+
+Stael-Holstein (stae-[)e]l' ol-st[)a]N'), Anne Louise Grermanie de
+(1766-1817), 13, 289.
+
+Stanislaus (King of Poland), 285.
+
+St. John, Bayle, 56, 58, 59.
+
+St. Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de (1737-1814), 289.
+
+St. Simon (s[=e]-moN'), Louis de Rouvroi, Duc de (1675-1755), 208, 209.
+
+Swift, Dean, 37.
+
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 94.
+
+
+Tacitus, 7.
+
+Taine, H. (1828-), 233.
+
+Tartuffe (tar-tuef'), 106-114, 147.
+
+Tasso, 245, 247.
+
+Theleme (t[=a]-l[)e]m'), 38, 40.
+
+Themistocles, 289.
+
+Thibaud (t[=e]-b[=o]'), _troubadour_ (1201-1253), 6.
+
+Trajan, 254.
+
+_Troubadour_, 4.
+
+_Trouvere_ (troo-ver'), 5, 6.
+
+Tully (Cicero), 246.
+
+Turgot (tuer-g[=o]'), Anne RobertJacques (1727-1781), 287.
+
+
+Urquhart, Sir Thomas, 30.
+
+
+Van Laun, H., 17.
+
+Vatel, 143, 144, 145.
+
+Vauvenargues (v[=o]-ve-narg'), Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de (1715-1747),
+79, 80, 81.
+
+Vercingetorix, 226.
+
+Victor Hugo (1802-1885), 14, 16, 94, 289, 291.
+
+Villehardouin (v[=e]l-ar-doo-[)a]N'), Geoffrey (1165?-1213?), 7.
+
+Villemain (v[=e]l-m[)a]N'), Abel Francois (1790-1870), 118.
+
+Virgil, 5, 9, 81, 166, 172, 245.
+
+Voiture (vwae-tuer'), Vincent (1598-1648), 11.
+
+=VOLTAIRE= (vol-ter'), Francois Marie Arouet de (1694-1778), 2, 13, 38,
+48, 68, 80, 127, 152, 153, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 204, 218, 234,
+235, 238-255, 285, 286, 287.
+
+
+Wall, C. H., 106.
+
+Walpole, Horace, 151, 230.
+
+Warens (vae-raeN'), Madame de, 264, 265, 268, 269, 275.
+
+Webster, Daniel, 188.
+
+Wright, Elizur, 86.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Classic French Course in English, by
+William Cleaver Wilkinson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLASSIC FRENCH COURSE IN ENGLISH ***
+
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