Part 12

But there is something stronger than the resolves of the most resolute man, and that is innate disposition, or natural bent, which, try to rid himself of it as he may, _tamen usque recurret_. De Rémusat flattered himself that, in strenuously devoting his faculties to political journalism, in writing leading articles on the current topics of the hour, in examining Parliamentary Bills, and in composing Legislative Reports, he had stifled in himself the original taint of an evil passion for literature. That accidental visit to the Ambigu-Comique, the representation of that inferior and distorted play, stirred in him afresh his native passion. He could not get rid of the figure of that strange personage, at once exalted philosopher and frensied lover, belonging unquestionably to history, yet made, it would seem, expressly for the purposes of romance. On the very morrow of that eventful evening, he might have been seen in the library of the Chamber of Deputies, asking for the volume that contained the correspondence of Abelard and Eloisa. The chamber was not sitting, for it was vacation time; and he carried the book with him to Lafitte, in the Haute Garonne, where he had recently established his household gods. He perused it without delay or intermission; for the man who, taking up the correspondence of the separated lovers of the Paraclete, could lay it down unfinished, may rest assured that he has little genuine interest in the more romantic workings of human nature. But on the 6th of September the Ministry of Casimir-Périer was overthrown, and Count Molé was summoned to form a Cabinet. His Minister of the Interior was M. Gasparin, and De Rémusat was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the same department. Had the career of the new Ministry been a protracted one, it is possible that time would have divorced his attention from Abelard and mediæval philosophy. But in less than a twelvemonth Molé’s Cabinet was overthrown, and the liberated Under-Secretary buried himself once more in the passions and dialectics of the twelfth century. He spent much of the winter of 1837 in studying the period in which the Gallic Socrates—Gallorum Socrates, it was the pleasure of Abelard’s followers to designate him—had lived, triumphed, and suffered; and in the course of the summer of the following year a “Philosophical Drama” on the subject was completed. For nearly forty years it lay in manuscript in the author’s drawer, though he occasionally permitted himself the indulgence of reading portions of it in the intellectual salons of Paris which he frequented. Its success in those select but critical circles was considerable; and it was probably the encouragement thus extended to him that led to his writing _Abélard, sa Vie, sa Philosophie, et sa Theologie_, the best account extant of the great Conceptualist, his metaphysics, and his fate.

The latter work was published as long ago as 1845. Why, then, was the drama kept back? The reason is a curious one. Perhaps in foraging so extensively among the records of the twelfth century, De Rémusat had become impressed with the mediæval motto, “Beware the man of one book.” He was afraid, so his son assures us, to risk his reputation with the public as a statesman and a man of affairs, by appearing before it as the writer of a drama, even a “philosophical” one, on a subject notoriously romantic.

“Il faut bien dire,” says M. Paul De Rémusat, “que la première raison de mon père pour refuser de publier le drame d’Abélard, c’était la pensée que, dans notre pays, les hommes sont d’avance et dès leur début, et qu’il ne voulait point sortir de la situation littéraire et politique où il s’était d’abord placé. Il avait vu trop souvent la défiance accuellir une œuvre nouvelle et étrangère aux premiers essais d’un écrivain. L’idée d’un homme universel, ou seulement doué de talents variés, est rarement acceptée, et ce qu’on gagne en étendu paraît presque toujours perdu en profondeur. L’example de Voltaire, qui était si longtemps discuté et contesté, est plus effrayant pour les audacieux que rassurant pour les timides. Mon père n’espérait pas que l’on fit en sa faveur une exception à la loi commune de la spécialité de l’esprit. Il lui semblait qu’il n’eût acquit en littérature quelque réputation qu’au dépens de son autorité politique.”

These scruples, at least in the case of De Rémusat, seem excessive. The French _bourgeoisie_ have never had that rooted antipathy to men of genius which is characteristic of the middle class in England; and it certainly would not have taken the better part of fifty years to convince them that the author of _Vivian Grey_ had in him the stuff of a practical and hard-headed statesman. Moreover, a philosophical drama, by the very sobriety of its title, protects its author against the charge of excessive literary levity. Finally, the political career of the author of _Abélard_, though not devoid of distinction, was hardly of that commanding sort which might console some men, at its close, for the sacrifice of more congenial tastes and more enduring fame. He became Minister of the Interior, for a brief period, in Thiers’ Cabinet of 1840, and after the Revolution of 1848 he remained a member of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. But the _Coup d’état_ practically put an end to his political prospects. It is true he reappeared, for a short interval, as the _fides Achates_ of Thiers during that statesman’s brief tenure of power after the Franco-German War. But he was too advanced in years, and too completely overshadowed by his conspicuous friend, who concentrated all business and all distinction in his own person, to add anything to his former reputation as a politician. His son observes that, in withholding the publication of his drama upon Abélard, he perhaps remembered one of the most touching observations of his hero, “_Dieu punit en moi la présomption des lettrés_.” I read the moral of De Rémusat’s life differently. The penalty attached to the presumption of men-of-letters he undoubtedly escaped. It was the politician whom Heaven punished, for presuming to think that a man can arrange and map out his career irrespectively of the gifts with which it has endowed him, or that it is permissible, in deference to the prejudices of the vulgar, to protect one’s brow against the imperishable bays of the poet, lest they should be denied the tinsel and quickly-fading wreaths of the popular politician. He lived, we will trust, to estimate the relative value of things more wisely, though he might have learnt, while studying the fate of Abélard, that notoriety, which is the nearest approach to fame to be secured by a politician, is “fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain.” But if he learned the lesson, he learned it in long years of exclusion from worthless power. He returned to his books when universal suffrage, allied with despotism, brought forth that atrocious bastard, Imperial Democracy; and he found in pursuits, his native passion for which he had once been half ashamed to own, something more than compensation for the loss of personal rivalries and sterile debates.

At the same time, let us beware of doing De Rémusat an injustice. That he was one of those men who caress their reputation, and, in doing so, too often mar it, is certain; for we have his own avowal of the infirmity, corroborated by the statements of his son. But, in accounting for the suppression of his drama upon Abélard, we must allow something to genuine and, let me hasten to add, excessive modesty. It is not the voice of the literary coquette, but of the diffident literary workman, that we overhear in these charming sentences, to be found in the preface to his prose labors upon Abélard:

Changeant de but et de travail, je m’occupai alors de mieux connaître l’Abélard de la réalité, d’apprendre sa vie, de pénétrer ses écrits, d’approfondir ses doctrines; et voilà comme s’est fait le livre que je soumets en ce moment au jugement du public. Destiné à servir d’accompagnement et presque de compensation à une tentative hasardeuse, il paraît seul aujour d’hui. Des illusions téméraires sont à demi dissipées; une sage voix que je voudrais écouter toujours, me conseille de renoncer aux fictions passionnées et de dire tristement adieu à la muse qui les inspire.

. . . . . . Abi Quo blandi juvenum te revocant preces.

No doubt a mere literary _succès d’estime_ would not have satisfied one who had been an Under-Secretary of State; and great literary reputations were being made in France at the time this resolution was taken. But De Rémusat goes on to say that he “tenait à expier en quelque sorte une composition d’un genre moins sévère,” and frankly stating that the drama was “une de ces œuvres enfin qui n’ont qu’une excuse possible, celle du talent,” he, with sincere humility, put it back in his drawer.

Was he right? Having read his Philosophical Drama, I am of opinion that he was wrong. It exhibits literary faculty of a high order, and it is deficient in none of those penetrating qualities of intelligence which serve to render the imagination at once free and efficient when engaged in dramatic work. We do not say that it reaches the heaven of invention; and, indeed, its author was inspired by no such soaring ambition. He writes in prose, and prose which, though always classical and often eloquent, never seeks to pass the boundary between prose and poetry invariably respected by the judicious. But he had saturated himself with the atmosphere of the time in which the action of his drama is laid; and he had represented to himself in clear and well-defined outlines the character of his central figure. To do all this is surely to write a work of no little difficulty with no little success.

Shortly after quitting Nantes by the post-road that conducts to Poitiers, the traveller passes, before reaching Clisson, a village consisting of one long street, which, if he thinks it worth while to inquire, he will be told is called Le Pallet. No one, however, will concern himself to add that behind the unpretending but venerable church which stands on a slight elevation to the left, above the last cottages in the place, are to be seen some all but submerged walls, and here and there the choked vestiges of an ancient moat. These are all that remain of the castle of Le Pallet, which was levelled with the ground more than four centuries and a half ago, in the course of the wars that succeeded the attack directed by Marguerite de Clisson against John V., Duke of Brittany. Hard by is an insignificant stream, known as the Sanguèze, and which evidently owes its name, like the Italian Sanguinetto that flows into the Lake of Thrasymene, to the blood of battle that is recorded to have once dyed its waters.

In 1079, the Castle of Le Pallet stood intact on its little eminence; and in that year, though on what day of the calendar cannot be said, the famous dialectician, Pierre Abélard, was born within its walls. His father, its lord, was called Bérenger; his mother’s name was Lucie. This much may be asserted, with every probability that it is true; but these bare facts are about all that tradition has preserved, or literary industry unearthed. Bérenger, though inured, like everyone in his position in those warlike times, to the exercise of arms, manifested a predilection for letters rarely encountered in his class, and is said to have intentionally inspired his sons with a love for philosophical studies, not easily reconciled with the performance of knightly duties. There were, at least, three other sons of the marriage, Raoul, Porcaire, and Dagobert, and a daughter, Dényse; and if we may trust the testimony of the first of the Letters which compose the famous correspondence of Eloisa and Abelard, into all Bérenger’s sons alike was inculcated the notion that distinction in knowledge is a worthier object of ambition than the trophies of war. Pierre manifested a much readier disposition than his brothers to accept the paternal estimate of the relative value of courage and culture; and though he was the eldest-born, he waived his rights of inheritance in order more freely to pursue the path indicated by his parent. The story is a strange, not to say an incredible one, for times when the sword was the only true badge of honor; and we are driven to conclude either that Abelard sought to remove from himself the stigma which he would have incurred by such a choice, had he not surrounded it with the halo of filial duty, or that his biographers were determined that dramatic completeness should attend his character from the very outset of his career. His own words are that he deliberately abandoned the court of Mars in order to shelter himself in the lap of Minerva. Probably the only conclusion that can safely be drawn from all the statements respecting his selection is, that he developed at an early age extraordinary talents for the acquisition of learning and the conduct of philosophical discussion, and that he was freely permitted to indulge his bent by parents who had no interest in thwarting him.

It was impossible, however, that he should cultivate his passion for letters and philosophy within the boundaries of Brittany, then, as now, perhaps the least instructed portion of what was not yet territorially known as France. He travelled from place to place in search of persons who taught dialectics, and even thus early he prided himself upon imitating the ancient philosophers to the extent of being a peripatician or vagrant. Among his preceptors at this period, the name of one only is known to us; nor is it possible to say where it was that Abelard reaped the benefit of his teaching. Jean Roscelin, Canon of Compiègne, was already under ecclesiastical ban for his uncompromising Nominalism, when Abelard entered upon his teens, and for a time at least had to take refuge in England. Some have contended that Abelard must have passed a portion of his youth upon our shores; but the supposition is as utterly without proof as the assertion of Otho of Frisingen that Roscelin was Abelard’s first instructor in philosophy. It is more probable that the young catechumen encountered the ostracised teacher in some of those more hidden and remote conferences of learning, to which the hostility of his ecclesiastical superiors had compelled him to limit his philosophical energy.

But what was that which Abelard wished to learn and that Roscelin, or any teacher, or, as we should say, Professor of the period, had to communicate? And how was the knowledge, which some sought to impart and many to acquire, conserved? Universities had not yet been called into being; and no great centres of recognized learning drew to themselves the youth or crystallized the opinions of an entire nation. In their stead, and operating as yet as sole substitute, were Episcopal Schools, under the immediate protection and supervision of the Archbishop or Bishop of the diocese; and it depended almost as much on the ambition of a Prelate as upon the importance of his See, whether his School acquired a wide renown, or remained the obscure head-quarters of local instruction. Deriving his faculties from the Bishop, there presided over each Episcopal School a clerical lecturer, or “scholastic”; and all those who attended his classes, or course, were termed his scholars. The success of his teaching and the number of his followers necessarily shed lustre on his episcopal superior and upon the province in which the latter resided; and the emulation which burned among the more intelligent and aspiring members of the Episcopate, in their endeavors to secure for their respective schools Masters of erudition and eloquence, was almost an exact anticipation of the spirit of honorable rivalry that subsists among the Governing Bodies of modern German Universities. Those who favor the doctrine that there is nothing new under the sun, will perhaps be disposed to look backward rather than forward for a parallel to the influence of the Scholastics of the Middle Ages. Hippias, Prodikos, Gorgias, and other less famous men, whose names have been preserved to us by Plato, passed from city to city in ancient Greece, teaching and disputing. Some, we are told, amassed considerable fortunes; while one and all gathered about them the restless brains of their generation, who carried through the land the fame of their doctrines and the brilliance of their rhetoric.

De Rémusat’s drama opens in the cloister of Nôtre-Dame, where a number of scholars are assembled to hear a lecture by Guillaume de Champeaux. The master has not yet arrived; and the first scene is passed in what the undergraduates of the nineteenth century call chaff. Finally, the great lecturer makes his appearance; the scholars crowd around him, and he proceeds to expound his thesis of the reality of Universals, or the substantiality of abstract ideas. In a word, he is the champion of Realism as opposed to Nominalism, and maintains, for example, that Man exists as really and essentially as any individual man, and that Humanity is not a mere name or intellectual abstraction, but just as much an entity as a building composed of so many stones. At the end of his discourse he says, “Are you all satisfied, or is anyone present harassed by doubt? If so, let him speak, and I will answer him.”

Abelard rises. He is unknown equally to master and to scholars, but he soon enchains attention by the vigor of his dialectic. He involves the lecturer in a series of contradictions, and ends by establishing his proposition that Universals are neither realities, nor mere names, but Conceptions, and by winning over the whole class to his views. In vain Guillaume de Champeaux pronounces the word heresy, and points out that Abelard bases his theories on the dangerous foundation of human reason. The remainder of the First Act, which is entitled “La Philosophie,” is devoted to depicting the supremacy gradually obtained by the brilliant young Breton over the students of Nôtre-Dame, until, Guillaume de Champeaux finally abandoned by his scholars, Abelard can exclaim, “_Maintenant l’Ecole de Paris, c’est moi!_”

The Second Act, the scene of which is laid at Laon a year later, is headed “La Théologie”; and in it Abelard acquires over Anselme of Laon, in theological controversy, a victory analogous to that he had previously won over Guillaume de Champeaux in the realm of metaphysics. The audience is the same, for the students of Nôtre-Dame have followed Abelard to Laon; and the same is the weapon with which his triumph is achieved. “When theology,” he exclaims in the course of a warm disputation with Anselme, “is not seconded by dialectic, vainly does it knock at the door of the spirit; it is reason that holds the key, and opens to the truth.” Anselme replies with anathemas. Then Abelard bursts out:—

“You hear him. My friends, he is old and feeble. Be good to him, but lead him away. His advanced age unfits him for these wrestlings with science. Take him into the air. Alas! Saint Matthew was right when he said you may not put new wine into old bottles.”

His words are received with acclamation; and the overthrow of Anselme de Laon, in spite of his friendship with Saint Bernard, is as complete as the dethronement of Guillaume de Champeaux. In an incredibly short space of time, Abelard has seen the fulfilment of his most ambitious dreams, and he finds himself surrounded by a band of scholars who regard him as the oracle of his age. Yet in the midst of these astounding triumphs, he experiences “a mixture of impatience and weakness, of ardor and weariness,” and thus soliloquizes:—

“My fondest hopes have been surpassed. Withal a secret disquietude, the source of which escapes me, leaves me dissatisfied. I feel agitated, fatigued, worn out. Everything with me has succeeded; nothing is wanting to me that I can name, and yet I am not happy. A vague sense of irritation, which I cannot overcome, prevents me from delighting in anything; this life of struggle is arid and devouring, and in the glowing eyes of my scholars I often discern more joy than I can attain by all the efforts of my intellect.”

It is not difficult to surmise the disease from which Abelard was suffering. It was

The dreary desert of the mind, The waste of feelings unemployed;

and it is just as easy to guess the cure that is forthcoming. The Third Act is called “L’Amour,” and we find Abelard installed, for so many hours a day, in the house of Fulbert, Canon of Nôtre Dame—for the scene has again shifted to Paris—indoctrinating his erudite niece Eloisa into all the learning of the time. In De Rémusat’s drama she is represented as already in love, if not with the person, with the renown of Abelard; and before his second visit she thus communes with her thoughts:—

He is coming. I cannot read, except with him. I understand nothing, except through him. Before he came I fancied I knew something, appreciated the ancients, and felt what is beautiful. I was a child feeding upon memory; that is all. It is he, he alone, who has revealed to me the secret of things, who has shown me the essence of my thoughts, who has initiated me into the mysteries of the spirit.

He arrives, and the lesson begins. She is all attention. But Abelard wanders from the theme. He would fain, he says, tear himself from the crowd, and study with her. “We would read, we would work together—or rather, for what avails this study that consumes the soul—we would enjoy tranquillity, long walks, a bright sun, a beautiful country, a boat upon the river, or the fire-side, even as we are now. Should we not be happy?” Her answers do not satisfy him, for they are modest and measured. “You do not understand me,” he exclaims, with impatience, and she begs to be forgiven for being so inapt a scholar. No, it is not that. They resume the lesson, but this time it is the _Heroides_ of Ovid that lie before them. Together they read _Hero to Leander_, and _Leander to Hero_, those two exquisite Love Letters, which will always make Ovid a contemporary. “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse,” says Dante, in that unmatched description of the _Tempo de’ dolci sospiri_, and _Di dubbiosi desiri_; and what happened to Francesca dà Polenta and Paolo Malatesta when reading

Di Lancilotto, come amor lo strinse,

happened equally to Abelard and Eloisa when reading the imaginary correspondence of Hero and Leander. “O, tu es si belle!” “C’est toi qui es beau.” “Beau de notre amour.”

Very French, no doubt. But it is done with considerable skill, and occupies almost as many pages as I have devoted to its words. Love scenes cannot be compressed. They are, of necessity, long, except to those who figure in them. Whether this was the portion of his philosophical drama which the serious statesman was fond of reading aloud in the intellectual _salons_ of Paris, I cannot say. But, if it was, I suspect that some of the more staid matrons among his audience repeated the words put by the author into the mouth of his heroine, “C’est comme la vapeur de l’encens, cela enivre.”

Meanwhile, Abelard neglects his public duties, and his attachment to one fair student becomes the subject of speculation and banter among his scholars. By degrees the weakness of the great Scholastic is bruited in the streets, and ballads are sung at night in the public places associating his name with the niece of Fulbert. One of these Abelard himself overhears. Here is one strophe with its refrain:—

C’est l’histoire singulière A se raconter le soir, Du maître et l’ecolière, De l’amour et du savoir.

Fillettes, fillettes, Trop lire est mauvais. Cueillez des violettes Au prè Saint-Gervais.