French Classics Part 20

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 toward 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. The 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 subtilty 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 G.o.ds, 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. p.r.o.nounced 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 molding 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 cla.s.sicism, which in our day we have seen pushed to its extreme in the exaggerations of romanticism. Few wiser words have ever been spoken on the subject of oratory than are to be found in his "Dialogues on Eloquence."

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

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

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

Consent to be humiliated; silence and peace in humiliation are the true good of the soul. One might be tempted to speak humbly, and one might find a thousand fine pretexts for doing so; but it is still better to be silent humbly. The humility which still speaks is still to be suspected; in speaking, self-love consoles itself a little.

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

It has seemed to me that you needed to enlarge your heart in the matter of the defects of others....

Perfection bears with ease the imperfection of others; it becomes all things to all men. One must grow accustomed to the idea of the grossest defects in good souls....

I beg of you more than ever not to spare me in respect of my defects.

Should you believe that you see one that I perhaps have not, that will be no great misfortune. If your hints wound me, that sensitiveness will show me that you have touched the quick; thus you will always have conferred on me a great benefit in disciplining me to be little, and in accustoming me to take reproof. I ought to be more abased that another in proportion as I am more exalted by my position, and as G.o.d requires of me more complete death to all. I need such simplicity, and I hope that, far from weakening, it will strengthen our union of heart.

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

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

It bears the t.i.tle, "The Soul that Loves G.o.d Finds Him Everywhere."

To me remains nor place nor time; My country is in every clime; I can be calm and free from care On any sh.o.r.e, since G.o.d is there.

While place we seek, or place we shun, The soul finds happiness in none; But, with a G.o.d to guide our way, 'Tis equal joy to go or stay.

Could I be cast where thou art not, That were indeed a dreadful lot; But regions none remote I call, Secure of finding G.o.d in all.

Ah, then! to his embrace repair; My soul, thou art no stranger there; There love divine shall be thy guard, And peace and safety thy reward.

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--he was not alone, as the instance of Madame Guyon has just freshly been reminding us--but Fenelon alone were enough, in quality supported by quant.i.ty, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the perverse inclination of the balance.

XIV.

LE SAGE.

1668-1747.

Le Sage was a fruitful father of literary product, but it is as the author of "Gil Blas" that he is ent.i.tled to his place in these pages.

"The Adventures of Gil Blas" justly enjoys the distinction of being among the few works of fiction that are read everywhere, and everywhere acknowledged to be masterpieces in literature. Lapse of time and change of fas.h.i.+on seem not to tend at all toward making "Gil Blas" obsolete.

With every generation of men it takes as it were a fresh lease of inexhaustible immortality.

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

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

But it should at once, and strongly, be said that Le Sage is no cynic.

It is not a sneering, but a smiling, mask that he wears. The smile is of a worldly-wisdom not ill-pleased with itself, and therefore not ill-pleased with the world which it rallies. It is a genial smile. But for all that, if you are yourself at bottom a serious man, you are disturbed at last. You are vexed to find yourself incessantly brought to smile at what you know ought to move your shame, your indignation, or your grief. The moral temper which Le Sage exhibits and which he engenders is not the "enthusiasm of humanity." It is less the temper to help your fellow-men than the temper to profit the most that you can by their weaknesses, by their follies, and even by their crimes. Le Sage's hero, "Gil Blas," goes through a series of "adventures," in which nearly every human sin is committed by him and by his fellows, either unblus.h.i.+ngly, or, if with any show of compunction at all, then with such show of compunction as is almost worse than perfect indifference would be. The book is not in intention immoral, but only unmoral. It may well be questioned whether in effect it be not the more immoral for this very character in it. The abounding gay animal spirits of the narrative go frisking along as if let loose in a lucky world where moral distinctions were things that did not exist; the real world indeed, only with the deepest reality of all left out!

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

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

Of Alain Rene Le Sage, the man, there need little be said. He was a successful writer of comedies for the stage. Of these the most were ephemeral productions. Two, however, and one especially, the "Turcaret,"

have the honor of ranking, in French literature, next to the very highest in their kind, the comedies of Moliere. Never rich, Le Sage was always independent in spirit. The story is told of him that, arriving once unavoidably late at a n.o.ble mansion where he had made an appointment to read one of his own productions, he was reproached by the distinguished hostess for making the company lose an hour in waiting; whereupon he replied: "I give the company a chance to recover their lost hour," and refusing to be placated bowed himself out.

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

First we introduce Doctor Sangrado.

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

I therefore went in search of Dr. Sangrado, and brought him to the house.... The licentiate having promised to obey him in all things, Sangrado sent me for a surgeon, whom he named, and ordered him to take from my master six good porringers of blood, as the first effort, in order to supply the want of perspiration. Then he said to the surgeon: "Master Martin Omnez, return in three hours and take as much more; and repeat the same evacuation to-morrow. It is a gross error to think that blood is necessary for the preservation of life; a patient cannot be blooded too much; for as he is obliged to perform no considerable motion or exercise, but just only to breathe, he has no more occasion for blood than a man who is asleep--life, in both, consisting in the pulse and respiration only." The doctor having ordered frequent and copious evacuations of this kind, he told us that we must make the canon drink warm water incessantly; a.s.suring us that water, drank in abundance, was the true specific in all distempers whatever.... We set about warming water with all despatch; and as the physician had recommended to us, above all things, not to be too sparing of it, we made my master drink for the first dose two or three pints, at as many draughts. An hour after we repeated it, and returning to the charge, from time to time, overwhelmed his stomach with a deluge of water, the surgeon seconding us, on the other hand, by the quant.i.ty of blood which he drew from him. In less than two days the old canon was reduced to extremity.

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

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

He allowed us, by way of recompense, to drink as much water as we could swallow: far from restricting us in this particular, he would sometimes say, "Drink, my children; health consists in the suppleness and humectation of the parts: drink water in great abundance: it is an universal menstruum that dissolves all kinds of salt. When the course of the blood is too languid, this accelerates its motion; and when too rapid, checks its impetuosity".... "If thou feelest in thyself," said he to me, "any reluctance to simple element, there are innocent aids in plenty that will support thy stomach against the insipid taste of water; sage, for example, and balm will give it an admirable flavor; and an infusion of corn-poppy, gillyflower, and rosemary, will render it still more delicious."

Notwithstanding all he could say in praise of water, and the excellent beverages he taught me to compose, I drank of it with such moderation, that perceiving my temperance, he said: "Why, truly, Gil Blas, I am not at all surprised that thou dost not enjoy good health. Thou dost not drink enough, my friend. Water taken in small quant.i.ties serves only to disentangle the particles of the bile, and give them more activity; whereas they should be drowned in a copious dilution: don't be afraid, my child, that abundance of water will weaken and relax thy stomach: lay aside that panic fear which perhaps thou entertainest of plentiful drinking."

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

"I have a regard for thee, and without further delay will make thy fortune.... I spare thee the trouble of studying pharmacy, anatomy, botany, and physic: know, my friend, all that is required is to bleed the patients and make them drink warm water. This is the secret of curing all the distempers incident to man".... I a.s.sured him that I would follow his maxims as long as I lived, even if they should be contrary to those of Hippocrates. But this a.s.surance was not altogether sincere; for I disapproved of his opinion with regard to water, and resolved to drink wine every day, when I went out to visit my patients.

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

Let Gil Blas pursue the narrative:

"Thou hast done well, Gil Blas," said Dr. Sangrado, "in defending the honor of our remedies against that little abortion of the faculty. He affirms, then, that aqueous draughts are improper for the dropsy!

Ignorant wretch! I maintain, I do, that a dropsical patient cannot drink too much."... He perceived that I drank more water that evening than usual, the wine having made me very thirsty, ... and said, with a smile, "I see, Gil Blas, thou hast no longer an aversion to water.

Heaven be praised! thou drinkest it now like nectar."... "Sir," I replied, "there is a time for all things: I would not at present give a pint of water for an hogshead of wine." The doctor, charmed with this answer, did not neglect such a fair opportunity of extolling the excellence of water.... "There are still a few," he exclaimed, "who, like thou and I, drink nothing but water; and, who, as a preservative from, or cure of all distempers, trust to hot water unboiled: for I have observed that boiled water is more heavy and less agreeable to the stomach."