Lulli, who died a few years before, did public penance, like La Fontaine, but with an after-thought worthy of the cunning Florentine. He burned, at the request of his confessor, the music of a new unperformed opera. A prince having asked him, a few days after, how he could be so silly as to destroy charming music at the desire of a drivelling jansenist, he replied, "Hush, hush, monseigneur; I knew what I did; I have another copy." He, however, had a relapse, did penance in sackcloth and ashes, and died, with a halter round his neck, singing the hymn, "Sinner, thou must die," with tears of remorse and agony.
La Fontaine died in 1695, and in the seventy-fourth year of his age. Upon undressing his body, after death, it was found that he mortified himself in a shirt of sackcloth. The apartment in which he lived and died, at the house of madame d'Hervart, was visited as an interesting object for several years after.
The chief fault of La Fontaine is that he had but one tone. Madame de Sévigné, who judged men of genius with the presumption of a court lady dictating to her coterie, pronounces him wretched when he is anything but a fabulist. "I should like," said she, in one of her letters, "to attempt a fable, for the express purpose of showing La Fontaine the misery of forcing one's talent out of its sphere; and what bad music is produced by the foolish wish to sing in every tone."
La Fontaine had one tone in which he was pre-eminent; but sang in more than one without producing bad music. The poem of "Adonis" has great beauty. It should be regarded, he says, only as an idyl; and it will, undoubtedly, be found one of the most beautiful of that class. But it had the further merit of being the first accomplished specimen of heroic verse in France; for Boileau had not yet given his "Lutrin." The mythological tale of "Psyche and Cupid," in which prose and verse alternate and relieve each other, continues to be read, notwithstanding the modern unpopularity of the divinities of the Pantheon. He is indebted to Apuleius, but only for the fable and main incident: the episodes, description, and manner of narrating ("manière de conter," as he calls it), are his own. The celebrated and forgotten romance of "Astrea" was one of the books which La Fontaine read with pleasure; and he is said to have derived from it that tone of pastoral sentiment and imagery which is one of the charms of "Psyche" and of some of his other pieces. It is probable, however, that he is under lighter obligations both to Apuleius and the "Astrea" than to the duchess of Bouillon, to whom he dedicated his tale. Living at the time in her intimate society, it was composed by him, under her inspiration, in that style of gaiety, tenderness, gallantry, and refinement, which he has combined with so much of simplicity and fancy. The faults of this mythological, or, according to some, allegorical tale, as it is treated by La Fontaine, are its description of Versailles, some fatiguing digressions, and a certain indolent voluptuary languor. The result is, occasionally, that most fatal of all wants—the want of interest.
La Fontaine's dramatic pieces have a manifest affinity to his genius, but none whatever to the genius of the drama. Some of his elegies, compliments, anacreontics, and other lesser pieces, are worthy of him; others so indifferent as to render their genuineness doubtful. His poem on St. Malch was approved by the lyric poet Rousseau; and this is its highest distinction. His poem on Jesuit's Bark is universally condemned.
It is only in his fables and tales that one is to look for the supremacy of La Fontaine. As a fabulist he has surpassed all who preceded him, and has never been approached by his successors. It is charged upon him that he invented nothing; that he but translated, imitated, or versified Æsop, Phædrus, Petronius, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Machiavelli, the hundred novels of Cinthio, the Heptameron of the queen of Navarre, &c.; but it is justly replied, that this proceeded only from his humble estimate of himself, joined with his indolence. "His considering himself," says Fontenelle, "inferior to Æsop and Phædrus was only another instance of his anomalous stupidity." "It is untrue," says La Harpe, "that La Fontaine invented nothing; he invented his style." The question could not be placed in a happier and truer light. La Fontaine, from humility and indolence, took the materials which others had supplied to his hand; but by his manner of using them, by the magic of his original and unrivalled style, made them his own. So complete is his mastery over them, and so entirely is the merit his, that the palpable difference, in the original, between the genuine tales of Æsop and the forgeries of the Greek monk Planudes, vanish beneath his touch.
France has produced a host of writers of fables and apologues since his time, but none worthy of being named with him. England has produced much fewer fabulists, yet is justly proud of Gay. He had a striking resemblance to La Fontaine in personal character. Pope's verse, in the epitaph on him,
"In wit a man, simplicity a child,"
would seem to have been expressly written for La Fontaine. As poets or fabulists they differ widely and essentially. Gay's fables are the nearest in merit; but, instead of resemblance, they present the opposition of wit, satire, and party spirit, in a neat and pointed style, to La Fontaine's universal and ingenious moral, picturesque simplicity, and easy graceful negligence.
An anonymous volume of English fables, imitated from La Fontaine, appeared in 1820. It is attributed to a practised and distinguished writer both in prose and verse[51]; and might pass for a most successful version, if the original were not directly and unluckily contrasted with it in the opposite page. The reader will be more informed by comparing a short extract from each than by pages of dissertation.