Part 16
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 specters, 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 nectar'd 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 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 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 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 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."
Disappearing space warns us that we must perforce let pass 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 illustrate the rare culture of heart, the deep spiritual wisdom, the perfect urbanity in manner, reconciled with the perfect frankness in fact, and the circumfluent 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 God 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 associate 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 illustrious 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 God 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 title, "The Soul that Loves God 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 shore, since God is there.
While place we seek, or place we shun, The soul finds happiness in none; But, with a God 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 God 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 quantity, 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 entitled 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 fashion 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 constitutes already, embraced within the compass 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 noble human character, some truly noble 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 antithesis 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 unblushingly, 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 noble 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 passages, both deservedly famous, which will admirably exemplify Le Sage at his best; one of these is the immortal episode concerning the illustrious 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; assuring 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 quantity 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 fashion; 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 assistant, 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."