Peter Abélard

by Joseph McCabe

CHAPTER XI

THE LETTERS OF ABÉLARD AND HELOISE

The true interest of the correspondence between the abbot husband and the abbess wife, which resulted from the publication of the ‘Story of my Calamities,’ needs to be pointed out afresh at the beginning of the twentieth century. It has been obscured through the eagerness of historians to indicate parallels and the tendency of poets and romancers to isolate features which appeal to them. During the eighteenth century the famous letters were made familiar to English readers by a number of translations from the French or from the original Latin. Even then there was a tendency to read them apart from the lives of the writers, or at least without an adequate preliminary study of their characters and their fortunes. Those translations are read no longer. Apart from the limited number of readers who have appreciated the excellent French versions of Madame Guizot and M. Gréard, an idea is formed of the letters and their writers from a few ardent fragments, which are misleading in their isolation, and from the transference of the names ‘Abélard’ and ‘Heloise’ to more recent characters of history or romance. The letters must be read anew in the light of our augmented knowledge and of the juster psychological analysis which it has made possible.

There are those whose sole knowledge of Heloise is derived from the reading of Pope’s well-known poem, which is taken to be a metrical exposition of her first letter. With such an impression, and a few broad outlines of the life of the lovers, one is well prepared to accept the assertion of a parallel with the Portuguese Letters and other of the lettres amoureuses which were so dear to the eighteenth century. Probably few who compare Pope with the original, or indeed read him without comparison, will agree with Hallam that he has put ‘the sentiments of a coarse and abandoned woman into her mouth.’ Johnson found ‘no crudeness of sense, no asperity of language’ in Pope’s poem. Yet no one who has carefully read the original will fail to perceive that Pope has given a greatly distorted version of it. French versifiers found it ‘un amusement littéraire et galant,’ as has been said of Bussy-Rabutin’s version, to isolate the element of passion in the finer soul of Heloise, and thus present her as a twelfth-century Marianne Alcoforado. Pope has yielded somewhat to the same spirit. He does indeed introduce the intellectual judgment and the complex ethical feeling of Heloise in his poem, but he alters the proportions of the psychic elements in her letter, and prepares the way for a false estimate. Pope’s Heloise is framed in the eighteenth century as naturally as the real Heloise is in the twelfth. Still, it must be remembered that Pope did not write from the original Latin letters. He evidently used some of the so-called ‘translations,’ but really paraphrases, of his time.[21]

The charge must also be laid, though with less insistence, against the parallels which some writers have discovered, or invented, for Heloise. The most famous are the Portuguese Letters, a series of singularly ardent love-letters from a Portuguese nun to a French noble. The correspondents are said to have been Marianne Alcoforado and M. de Chamilly—to look at whom, said St. Simon, you would never have thought him the soul of the Portuguese Letters. He was neither talented nor handsome, and his liaison with the nun seems to have been no more than the usual temporary incident in a soldier’s life. When he returned to France she wrote the letters which are so frequently associated with those of Heloise. It is an unworthy and a superficial comparison. There is a ground for comparison in the condition of the writer and in the free and vivid expression of a consuming love, but they are separated by profound differences. The Portuguese nun has nothing but her love; her life is being consumed in one flame of passion. Heloise is never so wholly lost in her passion; she can regard it objectively. Even were Abélard other than he was at the time, no one who knows Heloise could conceive her, after her vows, to say, ‘if it were possible for me to get out of this miserable cloister, I should not wait in Portugal for the fulfilment of your promise,’ or imagine her, under any conditions, to talk lightheartedly to her lover of ‘the languid pleasures your French mistresses give you,’ and remind him that he only sought in her ‘un plaisir grossier.’ There is not a word, in any of the Portuguese Letters, of God, of religious vows, of any thought or feeling above the plane of sense, of any appreciation of the literal sacrilege of her position, of anything but a wilful abandonment to a violent passion.

There are the same defects, though they are less obtrusive, in the parallel which Rousseau claimed in giving the title of the Nouvelle Heloïse to his Savoyard letters. The accidental resemblance of the religious costume is wanting here, but, on the other hand, there is a greater show of character. Rousseau has confused the Heloise of 1117 and the abbess of the letters. From another point of view, one would like to know what Bussy-Rabutin or Colardeau would have thought of the Nouvelle Heloïse as the expression of an absorbing passion. Rousseau, who held that the Portuguese Letters had been written by a man, was of the singular opinion that no woman could describe, or even feel, love. The letters of his Julie are pale fires beside the first and second letters of Heloise.[22]

In direct opposition to the writers who find parallels for the correspondence of abbess and abbot we have a few critics who deny or doubt the authenticity of the letters. It is significant that the recent and critical German biographers of Abélard do not even mention these doubts. They have, in truth, the slenderest of foundations. Lalanne, who has endeavoured to spread this heresy in faithful France, can say little more than that he cannot reconcile the tone of the letters with the age and condition of the writers; he also says that Abélard would be hardly likely to preserve such letters had he received them from his wife. Orelli has tried to sow similar doubts in the apparently more promising soil of German culture, but with no greater success. If it seems incredible that Heloise should have penned the letters which bear her name, how shall we qualify the supposition that there lived, some time within the following century, a genius capable of creating them, yet utterly unknown to his contemporaries? If they are the work of some admirer of Abélard, as Orelli thinks, they reveal a higher literary competency than Rousseau shows in his Nouvelle Heloïse. We are asked to reject a wonder in the name of a greater wonder. Moreover, an admirer of Abélard would not have written the letters which bear his name in a style that has won for him anything but the admiration of posterity. And it is quite impossible to admit one series of the letters without the other.

Setting apart the letters of Abélard, which it is idle to question in themselves, it must be admitted that there are features in the letters of Heloise which are startling to the modern mind. These are the features on which her romantic admirers have concentrated; they will appear in due course. But when one evades the pressure of modern associations, and considers the correspondence in its twelfth-century setting, there is no inherent improbability in it. Rather the reverse. As to the publication of letters in which husband and wife had written the most sacred confidences, we need not suppose, as M. Gréard does, that Heloise ever intended such a result, or built up her notes into letters for that purpose. Nothing compels us to think that they were brought together until years after the writers had been laid in a common tomb. There are obvious interpolations, it is true, but we shall only increase the difficulty—nay, we shall create a difficulty—if we look upon the most extraordinary passages in the letters as coming from any other source than the heart of an impassioned lover.

As regards what a logician would call the external difficulty—that we cannot trace the letters further back than the middle of the thirteenth century—it need not discompose us. The conditions which make a negative argument of that character valid are not present here. Abélard had been condemned and his party scattered. There are no writers to whom we should look for allusions to the letters before Guillaume de Lorris and Jehan le Meung manifestly introduce them in the Roman de la Rose. Indeed this circumstance, and the fact that the oldest manuscript we have dates from one hundred years after the death of Heloise, incline one to think that she wished the treasure to be preserved in a reverent privacy.

To give any large proportion of the letters here would be impossible, yet we must give such extracts from them as may serve in the task of reconstructing character. It was an age when the practice, if not the art, of letter-writing greatly flourished. St. Bernard’s letters form a portly and a remarkable volume. The chroniclers of the time have preserved an immense number of the Latin epistles which busy couriers bore over the land. One is prepared, therefore, to find much formality, much attention to the rules and the conventional graces of the epistolary art, even in the letters of Heloise. The strong, impetuous spirit does at times break forth, in splendid violence, from its self-imposed restraint, but we have, on the whole, something very unlike the utter and unthinking outpouring of an ebullient passion which is found in the letters of the Portuguese nun. Arguments are rounded with quotations from classic writers; dialectical forms are introduced here and there; a care for literary manner and construction of the Latin periods is manifested. Bayle says her Latin is ‘too frequently pedantic and subtile.’ It is, at all events, much superior to the average Latinity of the time, though, as in the case of Abélard, the characteristic defects of this are not entirely avoided.