How oft, when pressed to marriage, have I said,
Curse on all laws but those which love has made!
But surely it is not likely that such sentiments can impose upon the weakest and most inexperienced minds. It is indeed highly probable that Pope has in some few instances intentionally exaggerated the sentiments and expressions of Eloisa in order to render it impossible for any person of common capacity to be misled by such statements.—Roscoe.
In 1693 there appeared at the Hague a French translation of the Latin letters of Abelard and Heloisa. The work was several times reprinted, and a later editor, M. Du Bois, informs the reader that the translator had taken the liberty to omit, to add, and to transpose at his pleasure. "Some of the thoughts and expressions which are ascribed to Heloisa," continues M. Du Bois, "are so well imagined that if we are disappointed at not finding them in the original, and at her not having said the things she has been made to say, we are agreeably forced to acknowledge that they might have been said by her, and it is impossible not to be grateful to the paraphrast for his boldness." The original correspondence contains some interesting facts, much spurious rhetoric, and many dull pedantic quotations. The work in its integrity was not adapted for popular reading, but as the whole value of the letters depended on their genuineness, they were nearly worthless in their altered form. In 1714 Hughes, the author of the Siege of Damascus, translated the adulterate French concoction, and from the phraseology and substance of Pope's Epistle, it is manifest that he followed the English version of Hughes. Wakefield and Warton have only looked for parallel passages in the Latin, where they will often be sought in vain.
The authenticity of the Latin letters has usually been taken for granted, but I have a strong belief that they are a forgery. The first letter is addressed by Abelard to a friend in misfortune, for the purpose of consoling him with a tale of greater woes. The sequel is not in keeping with the ostensible object. The autobiographical epistle is full of vain-glorious, irrelevant matter, which no one would have recorded whose intention was merely to soothe a sorrow-stricken man. The particulars relative to Abelard's intercourse with Heloisa are worse than gratuitous; they are abominable. The intrigue might be public; he might avow and deplore it; but some reserve was due to decency and his paramour. She was not an anonymous phantom who could not be reached by his revelations. He told her name, and her connections which, according to his narrative, were notorious already, and he was, therefore, forbidden by such honour as even exists among profligates to expose the secret details of her shame. But honour was unknown to him. The veil which rakes who gloated over past misdeeds would have scorned to draw aside was torn away by this pious penitent with treacherous baseness.[567] The disguise is thinly worn. The Abelard of the letter is not the contrite, sorrowing philosopher who is speaking of a gifted woman he had enthusiastically loved, and against whom he had deeply sinned. He is an unimpassioned author who founds a fiction upon a true story, and realising imperfectly the sentiments proper to the situation, relates what he thinks was likely to have happened without perceiving that the confessions would have been infamy in Abelard.
His letter in some unexplained manner got round to Heloisa. She might be expected to be filled with rage and humiliation, and she sends a glowing response to the degrading recital. She outstripped Abelard in shameless frankness. Madame Guizot asserts that "she expresses much more in saying much less, that she recalls, but does not specify,"[568] the truth being that some particulars in her second letter are grosser and more precise than anything which proceeded from the pen of Abelard. The plea that her confessions were made to a husband is no extenuation, since she left his previous revelations unrebuked, and the approval of his disclosures was a licence to show about hers. What is more, her champions discover ample evidence in her letters that they were intended for publication. "Heloisa," says Madame Guizot, "supplies details with the exactness of a dramatic personage obliged to give an account of certain facts to the audience. There are few letters of the period which have not the stamp of a literary composition destined to a public sufficiently large to render it necessary to put them in possession of the circumstances. If any persons are surprised that Heloisa could design the revelations in her first and especially in her second letter, for any eye but that of Abelard, let them read the incidents she could see recounted without offence in the Historia Calamitatum, and they will be convinced of the existence of a state of manners in which elevated and even delicate sentiments in a distinguished and naturally modest woman might be allied to the strangest forms of language."[569] The case is put inaccurately. The "sentiments" are not "delicate;" they are coarser than the language. The reasoning of Madame Guizot is equally defective. An immodest act is declared to be modest because Heloisa had committed a previous act of immodesty. Her toleration of Abelard's grossness is the evidence of her purity in imitating his freedoms. The appeal should have been to independent works of the time, and these are opposed to the theory of Madame Guizot. Language was often plainer than at present, but only creatures of the disgusting type of the Wife of Bath proclaimed the hidden details of their own sexual licentiousness. The reputable classes had risen high above the point at which elemental decency and self-respect become extinct. Heloisa must, indeed, have been a woman of an "unbashful forehead," to use the expression of Shakespeare, if she deliberately placed herself before the public as she appears in the letters. It is far more likely that they are the fabrication of an unconcerned romancer, who speaks in the name of others with a latitude which people, not entirely degraded, would never adopt towards themselves. The suspicion is strengthened when the second party to the correspondence, the chief philosopher of his generation, exhibits the same exceptional depravity of taste. The improbability is great that both should have courted a disgraceful notoriety. The correspondence was coined in one mint; the impress it bears is male, and not female; and we may apply to Heloisa the words of Rosalind,—
I say she never did invent these letters,
This is a man's invention, and his hand.[570]
No portion of them, if they are genuine, can do honour to her memory. The coarse particulars she divulged to the public would prove that she was debased, and any sentiments which might have been creditable in an artless effusion addressed to Abelard lose their value when they are a studied rhetorical manifesto, got up to produce an impression on the world.
According to the Historia Calamitatum Abelard was the eldest son of a soldier in Brittany. His father, who had a tincture of learning, imbued him with a passion for study. He renounced the weapons of war for those of logic, resigned his paternal inheritance to his brothers, and traversed the kingdom that he might engage in scholastic tournaments at the towns on his road. He arrived at Paris about the year 1100, when he was twenty-one. There he frequented the lectures of William of Champeaux, the most famous dialectician of the day. Soon the pupil questioned the doctrines of his master, and was often victorious in their public disputations. He established a rival school, and the credit of all other teachers was lost in his renown. William of Champeaux, devoured with envy, struggled for years to drive his antagonist from the field. The invincible Abelard never failed to defeat him, and finally reigned without a competitor.
When his supremacy was recognised in the domain of metaphysical logic, he turned his attention to theology, and proceeding to Laon he sat under Anselm, who was esteemed the foremost divine in the church. The author of the letter affirms that his instruction consisted of fine words without matter, smoke without flame, leaves without fruit. Abelard soon relaxed in his attendance, and expressed his surprise to his fellow-students that any aid should be used beyond the text and the gloss in interpreting the Bible. With a derisive laugh they enquired if he would be bold enough, on these terms, to become the expositor. He accepted the challenge, and they thought to baffle him by allotting him the book of Ezekiel. He replied by inviting them to hear his commentary the following morning. They recommended him to take time, and he answered that his habit was to prevail by force of mind, and not by labour. His audience was small the next day, for it was considered ridiculous that a young man, who had hardly looked into the Bible, should extemporise an explanation of its obscurest prophecies. The few who went were fascinated, and their praises caused his lecture-room to be thronged. The old story was re-enacted. The pupil who had vanquished the most celebrated metaphysician of his generation, now at the first onset eclipsed the greatest theologian in Europe. Anselm, like William of Champeaux, was filled with jealousy, and forbade him to continue his disquisitions at Laon.
He returned to Paris, and taught dialectics and divinity with equal distinction. He had money and glory, he says, in profusion; he imagined that he was the only philosopher on earth; and in the words of the letter which bears his name, he was consumed by the fever of pride and luxury. In this state of worldly prosperity he reached his thirty-sixth year, when he formed his connection with Heloisa, who was barely eighteen. His qualifications for amorous intrigue are related by him with just the same boastful assurance with which he describes his dictatorship in the schools. He declares that his youth, his fame, and his handsome person gave him such a superiority over all other men, that no woman could resist him. Whoever she might be she would have thought herself honoured by his love; and the context shows that the love he meant was illicit. The learning of Heloisa obtained her the preference, and he deliberately formed a plan to seduce her. She resided with her uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral at Paris, who doated on money and his niece. Abelard appealed to the double passion. Professing to desire a release from household cares, he offered to board and lodge with the canon on any terms he chose to ask, and to devote his leisure hours to the instruction of Heloisa. Fulbert was delighted. He confided, to use the language of the letter, the tender lamb to the ravenous wolf, and enjoined the tutor to administer corporal punishment when his pupil neglected her studies. The comment of Abelard, or his representative, is extraordinary. He marvels at the simplicity of the canon in entrusting him with an authority which would enable him, if Heloisa resisted his fondness, to subdue her by blows. He thinks Fulbert childishly credulous for not divining that the grand luminary of philosophy and divinity was a wretch of fiendish depravity—a demon who would adopt the brutal expedient of beating an innocent girl into submission to his wicked designs. In his third letter he acknowledges that he had put the method in practice when the temporary scruples of his victim prevailed.