During the frenzy of his passion Abelard was indifferent to literary glory. His lectures were a burthen to him, and he only cared to compose amatory songs, which he informs his friend are still popular in numerous countries. Heloisa says in her reply that, as the greater part of these poems celebrated their love, her name became famous, and the jealousy of the women was roused. This is one of the many improbabilities of the story. At the exact period that Abelard, by his own acknowledgment, was anxious to conceal his passion from Fulbert, he published it in popular ballads to the world. The inconsistency is too glaring. A second statement is more consonant with human nature. The nerveless lectures, and preoccupied air of Abelard betrayed his infatuation to his disciples. They divined the truth; the intrigue was noised abroad, and the rumour at last got round to Fulbert. Abelard asserts that he and his concubine were overwhelmed with anguish and shame on their detection; Heloisa that her amour was the envy of princesses and queens. The apocryphal writer, after the manner of his tribe, overlooked these discrepancies.
When the first shock of disgrace was past, the lovers disregarded appearances, and carried on their intercourse without disguise. The poor canon was nearly mad between grief and rage, and Abelard to appease him led Heloisa to the altar, on the understanding that their union should be kept a secret; but the relations of the bride broke their promise, and proclaimed that she was married. She protested it was false, and Fulbert, exasperated by her denial, treated her harshly. Her husband removed her to the abbey of Argenteuil, near Paris, that she might be safe from persecution. Her friends conjectured that his object was to get rid of her, and in revenge for his former treachery and present heartlessness, Fulbert bribed some miscreants to mutilate him when he was asleep. Overwhelmed with mortification, he resolved to hide his head in a convent, and selected St. Denis. His jealousy would not suffer him to leave Heloisa free, and before he bound himself by an irrevocable vow he obliged her to take the veil.
The monks in Abelard's new retreat led the dissolute life in which he himself had indulged up to the moment of his disaster. He provoked their hostility by his remonstrances, and to get rid of him they joined in the entreaties of his disciples that he would leave his cell, and resume his lectures. The concourse of hearers was so great that the district where he set up his chair could not afford them food and lodging. The popularity of his teaching is attested by independent evidence, although his extant treatises are bald in style, prolix and cloudy in exposition, abstruse and barren in substance. But manuscripts were scarce; the multitude were chiefly dependent upon oral instruction; literature was almost unknown, and the subtleties of a meagre metaphysical system applied to theology, had a charm for active intellects when theology, logic, and metaphysics had undivided possession of the schools. Controversy lent its powerful aid, animating the dry bones with the fiery life of human passion. The superiority of Abelard in the verbal strife was due to the comparative feebleness of his adversaries, and not to the absolute greatness of his acute, but narrow and unprolific mind. "How is it," said a nobleman to Lely, "that you are so celebrated, when you know, as well as I do, that you are no painter?" "True," replied Lely, "but I am the best you have."
The revival of Abelard's popularity was attended by the old results. Rival schools were deserted, envy, malice, and hatred were inflamed. Applying his metaphysical logic to the doctrines of the Bible he produced a treatise on the Trinity, which he asserts solved every difficulty; and the more transcendent was the mystery, the greater, he says, was the admiration at the acuteness of his solution. But it was by altering the dogma that he brought it down to the level of human reason, and a council at Soissons accused him of heresy. If the letter is to be credited, his antagonists paid him the compliment of refusing to hear his defence, on the plea that his arguments would confound the united world. The assembly voted him guilty, and the troubles which grew out of his condemnation ended in his withdrawing to an uninhabited district on the banks of the river Ardusson, where he constructed an oratory of reeds and mud. Admiring crowds pursued him into his desolate retreat. Sleeping in rude huts, and subsisting on bread and herbs, they abjured the physical luxuries of existence for the mental feast of listening to the arid speculations in vogue. His auditors replaced his oratory by a larger building of wood and stone, which might serve for a lecture-room, and he named it the Paraclete, or the Comforter, because Providence had sent him consolation to the spot whither he had fled in despair. He, or his personator on his behalf, cannot suppress the usual vaunts. His body, he says, was concealed by his seclusion, but he filled the universe by his word and his renown. His enemies were enraged, and groaned inwardly, "Behold the world is gone after him, and our persecution has increased his glory." He admits that the sentiment did not fall from their lips, and it is merely the form in which his vanity embodied their feelings. The celebrated St. Bernard entered the lists against him, and Abelard began to be deserted by his adherents. He completely lost heart, and when the monks of a remote abbey on the coast of Brittany appointed him their head, he was glad to embrace a banishment which removed him from the midst of his increasing foes. New enmities awaited him. As at St. Denis, he soon became odious to his brethren by reproving their laxity. Their vindictive rage knew no bounds. They poisoned his food, but he forbore to taste it. They poisoned the chalice at the altar, but he did not drink of it. They suborned a servant to poison his victuals when he was on a visit to his brother, and again he happened not to eat of the dish, while a monk who partook of it died on the spot. Wherever he went they posted hired assassins on the road, and for some untold reason he always escaped. He procured the expulsion of the most desperate of his bloodthirsty children, and when the remainder were about to stab him he eluded their daggers. The sword, when he wrote, was still hanging over his head, and he passed his days in almost breathless fear. The early novelist who composed the apocryphal correspondence had the art to leave him in this critical situation. But the Abelard of the autobiography is a repulsive hero of romance, since even the penitent is boastful, coarse, and callous.
The abbey of Argenteuil, where Heloisa was prioress, was a dependency of the abbey of St. Denis. The parent monastery reclaimed the building and turned out Heloisa and the nuns. Abelard invited them to meet him at the Paraclete, and he established them in the oratory and its appurtenances, which had remained unoccupied since he settled in Brittany. He took frequent journeys from his abbey to instruct and console them, till finding that his visits gave rise to scandal, he went no more. Heloisa had not seen him or heard from him for a considerable period, when his letter to the unknown friend fell by accident into her hands, and she immediately replied to it. Her character, whether drawn by herself or some fabricator who wrote in her name, comes out clearly in the correspondence. Abelard states that she laboured to dissuade him from marriage when he informed her of his promise to Fulbert after the detection of the intrigue. She said that it would be dishonourable for a philosopher, whom nature had created for the world, to be enslaved to a woman, and submitted to the ignominious yoke of matrimony. She said that his renown would be diminished, that his future career would be checked, that the church would be injured, and that she could have no pride in a union which would degrade both of them by tarnishing his glory. In her answer she confirms his representations; and adds, that if the name of wife was holier, she held that of mistress, concubine, or harlot, to be sweeter, not only for the reasons which Abelard had recapitulated, but because she hoped that the less she made herself the more she would rise in his favour. Dean Milman is in error when he asserts that she "resisted the marriage in an absolute, unrivalled spirit of devotion, so wonderful that we forget to reprove."[571] She did not overlook her personal interests, but believed that the concubine would enjoy more love and consideration than the wife. The theory of her willingness to be sacrificed that her admirer might be elevated has arisen from the inference, contradicted by her language, that she felt the disgrace of her illicit connection. Nothing could be more remote from her thoughts. She was proud of the distinction.
At the date of her letters Heloisa had been leading for years a monastic life, which she embraced against her will at the command of her husband. She had not been refined by misfortune, time, and religion. She continued to bewail her sensual deprivations, and the picture she draws of her subjection to her voluptuous imagination, exceeds anything which could have been expected from the most dissolute libertine. But none of these things repel the partisans of historic romance, and the frail unhappy woman seduced by Abelard is held up as a signal example of feminine excellence. "This noble creature," says M. Cousin, "loved as Saint Theresa, and sometimes wrote as Seneca."[572] "Her contemporaries," says M. Rémusat, "placed her above all women, and I do not know that posterity has belied her contemporaries"[573] "France," says M. Henri Martin, "has always felt the grandeur of Heloisa, and the just instinct of the public has numbered the mistress of Abelard among our national glories."[574] Her admirers would be puzzled to explain in what her pre-eminence consists. Her devotion to her lover is a quality which she shares with myriads of women, bad as well as good, and her distinctive moral traits are those in which she differs from the majority of her sex by being vastly worse instead of better. A modern Heloisa who pursued the same conduct and avowed the same principles and passions would be branded with infamy.
The Epistle of Pope purports to be Heloisa's reply to Abelard's letter to his friend; but the poet has blended in his composition whatever topics were suited to his purpose, and ascribed sentiments to the wife which he had copied from the husband. There is nothing in the work to indicate that the author had read the Latin text, since he always adheres to the English rendering of the corrupted French version. Bishop Horne held that the original prose was finer than Pope's verse.[575] I cannot assent to this judgment. The poem has the superiority in every particular—in the beauty of the language, in the picturesqueness of the descriptions, in the fervour of the contrasted passions, in the animation of the transitions, in the solemnity of the accompaniments, and above all, in the pathos. The singularity of Horne's estimate may be explained by his imperfect recollection of the productions he criticised. To the allegation of Sir John Hawkins, that matrimony was depreciated and concubinage justified in the poetical epistle, he replies, that the censure "is founded on a false fact, because Abelard was married." The observation is a proof that Horne had forgotten the argument in favour of concubinage which occurs alike in the English verse and the Latin prose. Hallam accuses Pope of having "done great injustice to Eloisa by putting the sentiments of a coarse and abandoned woman into her mouth." But the licentious doctrines which Pope utters in her name are in the original Latin, except that when she asserts that love is inconsistent with marriage, she speaks of her individual case, and does not avowedly lay down a general maxim. Nor can Pope be charged with misrepresentation because the language in which he expresses her sensual cravings is not always borrowed from her pretended confessions. As he has not exaggerated the dominion of her appetite, nor the plainness with which she avows it, he cannot be said to have degraded the copy below the model by an occasional variation in the forms of speech. In fact the increased fervour he has imparted to her religious aspirations renders his portrait the more elevated of the two. The censure to which he lies open is not for deviating from his text but for following it too faithfully.
"The Epistle of Heloisa," says Wordsworth, "may be considered as a species of monodrama," and he classes it under the head of dramatic poetry. The painter of an ideal countenance omits the subordinate details which do not contribute to the special expression he desires to convey. By isolating he intensifies it. The holy calm of Raphael's Madonnas would be marred by the introduction of all those minutiæ in the living face which are not concerned in the dominant sentiment. A monodramatic poem which turns upon a single conflict of feeling possesses a kindred advantage. The one absorbing struggle has undivided sway, and there is nothing to distract attention from the pervading emotion. This unity of purpose was present to Pope's mind with absolute distinctness, and he has executed his conception with wonderful force. The combat between Heloisa's earthly inclinations and heavenly convictions, the impetuosity with which she passes from one to the other, the tempest in her soul whichever mood prevails, deep alternately calling to deep, are depicted with concentrated energy, and continuous pathos. Her glowing thoughts are vehement without exaggeration, and the natural outbursts are untainted by spurious artifice.
"Mr. Pope's Eloisa to Abelard is," says Mason, "such a chef-d'œuvre that nothing of the kind can be relished after it. Yet it is not the story itself, nor the sympathy it excites in us, as Dr. Johnson would have us think, that constitutes the principal merit in that incomparable poem. It is the happy use he has made of the monastic gloom of the Paraclete, and of what I will call papistical machinery, which gives it its capital charm, so that I am almost inclined to wonder (if I could wonder at any of that writer's criticisms) that he did not take notice of this beauty, as his own superstitious turn certainly must have given him more than a sufficient relish for it."[577] The buildings and scenery, solemn and sombre, undoubtedly heighten the effect. There is an impressive harmony between the over-cast mind of Heloisa, and the objects around her, which deepens the sadness. But the comment of Mason is unfounded. Johnson did "notice" the "beauty" derived from the gloom of the convent, while the assertion that this is the "principal merit" of the poem is an extravagant subordination of the human interest, which is the main subject of the Epistle, to the comparatively brief though exquisite description of the local accompaniments. Mason disliked and dreaded Johnson, and avenged himself when Johnson was dead, by feeble expressions of contempt.
The Rape of the Lock and the Epistle to Eloisa stand alone in Pope's works. He produced nothing else which resembled them. They have the merit of being master-pieces in opposite styles. The first is remarkable for its delicious fancy and sportive satire; the second for its fervid passion and tender melancholy. Two poems of such rare and such different excellence would alone entitle Pope to his fame. Like most great authors he published not a little which is mediocre, but he is to be estimated by the qualities in which he soared above the herd, and not by the lower range of mind he possessed in common with inferior men. The Rape of the Lock is a higher effort of genius than the Epistle. Pope's adaptation of his aery, refulgent sylphs to the ephemeral trivialities of fashionable life, the admirable art with which he fitted his fairy machinery to the follies and common-places of a giddy London day, the poetic grace which he threw around his sarcastic narrative, and which unites with it as naturally as does the rose with its thorny stem, are all unborrowed beauties, and consummate in their kind. The story and sentiments of Heloisa were prepared to his hand, and the power is limited to the strength and sweetness of his language and versification, and to the vigour with which he appropriated and expanded a single leading idea. His imagination was not prolific, and his thoughts seldom sprung from within. Sir William Napier said to Moore, "You are a poet by force of will; Byron by force of nature," which Moore acknowledged to be true. Pope, like Moore, was a poet because from his childhood he had assiduously cultivated poetry. The bulk of his works are either direct translations, or freer renderings under the name of imitations, and putting aside the Rape of the Lock, and parts of his satires, the materials of his original pieces, such as the Essay on Criticism, and Essay on Man, are mostly taken from other authors. The thoughts in the Epistle of Eloisa are not more his own than his critical rules, and ethical philosophy, but the passionate emotions are more poetical, and the execution more finished. Of Pope's better qualities the chief appears to have been a certain tenderness of heart, and this enabled him to enter into the feelings of Heloisa. He employed all the resources of his choicest verse to perfect the picture, and though the details he transferred from the letters deprived him of the credit of invention, the supposed historic truth of the representation increased the effect. The difference between legitimate and worthless imitation could not be more forcibly illustrated than by comparing the tame landscape, and affected love-babble of his Pastorals with the local descriptions and impassioned strains in his Epistle of Eloisa.