FOOTNOTES:
[351] His verse tales, even if stories in verse had not by this time fallen out of our proper range, require little notice. The faculty of "telling" did not remain with him here, perhaps because it was prejudicially affected by the "dryness" and unpoetical quality of his poetry, and of the French poetry of the time generally, perhaps for other reasons. At any rate, as compared with La Fontaine or Prior, he hardly counts. Le Mondain, Le Pauvre Diable, etc., are skits or squibs in verse, not tales. The opening one of the usual collection, Ce qui plaît aux Dames,—in itself a flat rehandling of Chaucer and Dryden,—is saved by its charming last line—
Ah! croyez-moi, l'erreur a son mérite,
a rede which he himself might well have recked.
[352] In justice to Voltaire it ought to be remembered that no less great, virtuous, and religious a person than Milton ranked as one of the two objects to which "all mortals most aspire," "to offend your enemies."
[353] It has been noted above (see p. 266, note), how some have directly traced Zadig to the work of a person so much inferior to Hamilton as Gueulette.
[354] Micromégas and one or two other things avowed—in fact, Voltaire, if not "great," was "big" enough to make as a rule little secret of his levies on others; and he had, if not adequate, a considerable, respect for the English Titan.
[355] Cacambo was not a savage, but he had savage or, at least, non-European blood in him.
[356] Not in the Grandisonian sense, thank heaven! But as has been hinted, he is a little of a prig.
[357] He has been allowed a great deal of credit for the Calas and some other similar businesses. It is unlucky that the injustices he combated were somehow always clerical, in this or that fashion.
[358] It was said of them at their appearance "[cet] ouvrage est sans goût, sans finesse, sans invention, un rabâchage de toutes les vieilles polissonneries que l'auteur a débitées sur Moïse, et Jésus-Christ, les prophètes et les apôtres, l'Église, les papes, les cardinaux, les prêtres et les moines; nul intêret, nulle chaleur, nulle vraisemblance, force ordures, une grosse gaieté.... Je n'aime pas la religion: mais je ne la hais pas assez pour trouver cela bon." The authorship, added to the justice of it, makes this one of the most crushing censures ever committed to paper; for the writer was Diderot (Œuvres, Ed. Assézat, vi. 36).
[359] It is a singular coincidence that this was exactly the sum which Johnson mentioned to Boswell as capable of affording decent subsistence in London during the early middle eighteenth century.
[360] Songe de Platon, Bababec et les Fakirs, Aventure de la Mémoire, Les Aveugles Juges des Conteurs, Aventure Indienne, and Voyage de la Raison.
[361] It is only fair to mention in this place, and in justice to a much abused institution, that this Babylonian story is said to be the only thing of its kind and its author that escaped the Roman censorship. If this is true, the unfeathered perroquets were not so spiteful as the feathered ones too often are. Or perhaps each chuckled at the satire on his brethren.
[362] As with other controverted points, not strictly relevant, it is permissible for us to neglect protests about la légende des philosophes and the like. Of course Rousseau was not only, at one time or another, the personal enemy of Voltaire and Diderot—he was, at one time or another, the personal enemy of everybody, including (not at any one but at all times) himself—but held principles very different from theirs. Yet their names will always be found together: and for our object the junction is real.
[363] Not the Abbé, who had been dead for some years, but a Genevese professor who saw a good deal of Jean-Jacques in his later days.
[364] "For short" La Nouvelle Héloïse has been usually adopted. I prefer Julie as actually the first title, and for other reasons with which it is unnecessary to trouble the reader.
[365] She dies after slipping into the lake in a successful attempt to rescue one of her children; but neither is drowned, and she does not succumb rapidly enough for "shock" to account for it, or slowly enough for any other intelligible malady to hold its course.
[366] There is another curious anticipation of Dickens here: for Julie, as Dora does with Agnes, entreats Claire to "fill her vacant place"—though, by the way, not with her husband. And a third parallel, between Saint-Preux and Bradley Headstone, need not be quite farcical.
[367] You may tear out Introductions, if you do it neatly; and this I say, having written many.
[368] Also Rousseau, without meaning it, has made him by no means a fool. When, on learning from his wife and daughter that Saint-Preux had been officiating as "coach," he asked if this genius was a gentleman, and on hearing that he was not, replied, "What have you paid him, then?" it was not, as the novelist and his hero took it, in their vanity, to be, mere insolence of caste. M. d'Étange knew perfectly well that though he could not trust a French gentleman with his wife, there was not nearly so much danger with his daughter—while a roturier was not only entitled to be paid, and might accept pay without derogation, but was not unlikely, as the old North Country saying goes, to take it in malt if he did not receive it in meal.
[369] I observe that I have not yet fulfilled the promise of saying something of Wolmar, but the less said of him the better. He belongs wholly to that latter portion which has been wished away; he is a respectable Deist—than which it is essentially impossible, one would suppose, for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy alike to imagine anything more uninteresting; and his behaviour to Saint-Preux appears to me to be simply nauseous. He cannot, like Rowena, "forgive as a Christian," because he is not one, and any other form of forgiveness or even of tolerance is, in the circumstances, disgusting. But it was Rousseau's way to be disgusting sometimes.
[370] We have spoken of his attempt at the fairy tale; qui Gomersal non odit in English verse, amet Le Lévite d'Ephraïm in French prose, etc. etc.
[371] He did not even, as Rousseau did with his human offspring, habitually take them to the Foundling Hospital—that is to say, in the case of literature, the anonymous press. He left them in MS., gave them away, and in some cases behaved to them in such an incomprehensible fashion that one wonders how they ever came to light.
[372] Carlyle's Essay and Lord Morley of Blackburn's book are excepted. But Carlyle had not the whole before him, and Lord Morley was principally dealing with the Encyclopédie.
[373] Especially as Génin, like Carlyle, did not know all. There is, I believe, a later selection, but I have not seen it.
[374] Even the long, odd, and sometimes tedious Rêve de D'Alembert, which Carlyle thought "we could have done without," but which others have extolled, has vivid narrative touches, though one is not much surprised at Mlle. de Lespinasse having been by no means grateful for the part assigned to her.
[375] The cleansing effect of war is an old cliché. It has been curiously illustrated in this case: for the first proof of the present passage reached me on the very same day with the news of the expulsion of the Germans from the village of Puisieux. So the name got "red-washed" from its old reproach.
[376] There really are touches of resemblance in it to Browning, especially in things like Mr. Sludge the Medium.
[377] The corporal's wound in the knee.
[378] Of course, there are exceptions, and with one of the chief of them, Xavier de Maistre, we may have, before long, to deal.
[379] His longest, most avowed, and most famous, the Paradoxe sur le Comédien, has been worthily Englished by Mr. Walter H. Pollock.
[380] Its heroine, Suzanne Simonin, was, as far as the attempt to relieve herself of her vows went, a real person; and a benevolent nobleman, the Marquis de Croixmare, actually interested himself in this attempt—which failed. But Diderot and his evil angel Grimm got up sham letters between themselves and her patron, which are usually printed with the book.
[381] Mon père, je suis damnée ... the opening words, and the only ones given, of the confession of the half-mad abbess.
[382] Evangelical Protestantism has more than once adopted the principle that the Devil should not be allowed to have all the best tunes: and I remember in my youth an English religious novel of ultra-anti-Roman purpose, which, though, of course, dropping the "scabrousness," had, as I long afterwards recognised when I came to read La Religieuse, almost certainly borrowed a good deal from our most unsaintly Denis of Langres.
[383] She seems to have been, in many ways, far too good for her society, and altogether a lady.—The opinions of the late M. Brunetière and mine on French literature were often very different—though he was good enough not to disapprove of some of my work on it. But with the terms of his expression of mere opinion one had seldom to quarrel. I must, however, take exception to his attribution of grossièreté to La Religieuse. Diderot, as has been fully admitted, was too often grossier: sometimes when it was almost irrelevant to the subject. But here, "scabrous" as the subject might be, the treatment is scrupulously not coarse. Nor do I think, after intimate and long familiarity with the whole of his work, that he was ever a faux bonhomme.
[384] They have hardly had a fair opportunity of comparison with Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique; but they can stand it.
[385] Unless Dulaurens' not quite stupid, but formless and discreditable, Compère Mathieu be excepted.
[386] In consequence of which Mr. Ruskin's favourite publisher, the late Mr. George Allen, asked the present writer, some twenty years ago, to revise and "introduce" the old translation of his Contes Moraux. The volume had, at least, the advantage of very charming illustrations by Miss Chris. Hammond.
[387] They were even worse than Leigh Hunt's in the strictly English counterpart torture-house for the victims of tyranny—consisting, for instance, in the supply of so good a dinner, at His Most Christian Majesty's expense, for the prisoner's servant, that the prisoner ate it himself, and had afterwards, on the principles of rigid virtue and distributive justice, to resign, to the minion who accompanied him, his own still better one which came later, also supplied by the tyrant.
[388] One expects something of value from the part-contemporary, part-successor of the novelists from Lesage to Rousseau. But where it is not mere blether about virtue and vice, and le cœur humain and so on, it has some of the worst faults of eighteenth-century criticism. He thinks it would have been more "moral" if Mme. de Clèves had actually succumbed as a punishment for her self-reliance (certainly one of the most remarkable topsyturvifications of morality ever crotcheted); is, of course, infinitely shocked at being asked and induced to "interest himself in a prostitute and a card-sharper" by Manon Lescaut; and, equally of course, extols Richardson, though it is fair to say that he speaks well of Tom Jones.
[389] See next chapter.
[390] I wonder whether any one else has noticed that Thackeray, in the very agreeable illustration to one of not quite his greatest "letterpress" things, A New Naval Drama (Oxford Ed. vol. viii. p. 421), makes the press-gang weep ostentatiously in the picture, though not in the text, where they only wave their cutlasses. It may be merely a coincidence: but it may not.
[391] There are reasons for thinking that Marmontel was deliberately "antidoting the fanfreluches" of the older tale-teller.
[392] In the original, suiting the rest of the setting, it is rideaux.
[393] "Explanations" is quite admirable, and, I think, neither borrowed from, nor, which is more surprising, by others.
[394] She declares that she has never actually "stooped to folly"; but admits that on more than one occasion it was only an accidental interruption which "luckily" (heureusement) saved her.
[395] It is necessary to retain the French here: for our "likes" is ambiguous.
[396] Cf. the stories, contradictory of each other, as to our brown-coated philosopher's appearance in France. (Boswell, p. 322, Globe ed.)
[397] Cf. again the bestowal of this title by Horace Walpole, in his later days, on Edward Jerningham, playwright, poetaster, and petit maître, who, unluckily for himself, lived into the more roughly satirical times of the Revolutionary War.
[398] "The sylphishness of Le Mari Sylphe is only an ingenious and defensible fraud; and the philtre-flasks of Alcidonis are little more than "properties.""
[399] Here is a specimen of his largest and most ambitious production, the Études de la Nature. "La femelle du tigre, exhalant l'odeur du carnage, fait retentir les solitudes de l'Afrique de ses miaulements affreux, et paraît remplie d'attraits à ses cruels amants." By an odd chance, I once saw a real scene contrasting remarkably with Saint-Pierre's sentimental melodrama. It was in the Clifton Zoological Gardens, which, as possibly some readers may know, were at one time regarded as particularly home-like by the larger carnivora. It was a very fine day, and an equally fine young tigress was endeavouring to attract the attention of her cruel lover. She rolled delicately about, like a very large, very pretty, and exceptionally graceful cat; she made fantastic gestures with her paws and tail; and she purred literally "as gently as any sucking dove"—roucoulement was the only word for it. But her "lover," though he certainly looked "cruel" and as if he would very much like to eat me, appeared totally indifferent to her attractions.
[400] So, also, when one is told that he called his son Paul and his daughter Virginie, it is cheerful to remember, with a pleasant sense of contrast, Scott's good-humoured contempt for the tourists who wanted to know whether Abbotsford was to be called Tullyveolan or Tillietudlem.
[401] As the story is not now, I believe, the universal school-book it once was, something more than mere allusion may be desirable. The ship in which Virginie is returning to the Isle of France gets into shallows during a hurricane, and is being beaten to pieces close to land. One stalwart sailor, stripped to swim for his life, approaches Virginie, imploring her to strip likewise and let him try to pilot her through the surf. But she (like the lady in the coach, at an early part of Joseph Andrews) won't so much as look at a naked man, clasps her arms round her own garments, and is very deservedly drowned. The sailor, to one's great relief, is not.
[402] Julie herself is an intense type rather than individual.
[403] I have not thought it necessary, except in regard to those of them who have been touched in treating of the Cabinet des Fées, to speak at any length of the minor tale-tellers of the century. They are sometimes not bad reading; but as a whole minor in almost all senses.