"He! bon jour, monsieur du Corbeau:
Que vous êtes joli! que vous me semblez beau!
Sans mentir, si votre ramage,
Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le phœnix des hôtes de ces bois."
"When thus he began: 'Ah! sir Ralph, a good morning:
How charming you look! how tasteful your dress!
Those bright glossy plumes, your fine person adorning,
Produce an effect which I cannot express.
Colours glaring and gaudy were never my choice;
When I view them disgust is my only sensation;
If you join to that plumage a mellow-toned voice,
You're the phœnix, I vow, of the feathered creation.'"
This citation is made, not to censure the English version, but to prove the unattainable charm of La Fontaine's manner,—that manner or style which he invented; his close adherence to truth and nature; the art with which he veils the wildest improbabilities under a probable, consistent, or humorous air; his power of combining levity of tone with depth of observation, and the utmost simplicity with the utmost finesse. It is known that La Fontaine observed the characters, habits, attitudes, and expression of the brute creation with a view to his fables. Whilst he endows his brute heroes with speech and thought, one never loses the image of their kind;—whilst the flatterer gulls his dupe, and even when he concludes with giving him the moral by way of compensation, one never loses sight of the fox and raven: but under the touch of the translator, and indeed of all other fabulists but La Fontaine, they receive the human form with the human attributes.
La Fontaine's fables are reputed perfect in every sense, poetical and moral. Two faults are imputed to his tales; the one venial and even questionable, the other most serious, and past all doubt. His narration, it is said, is sometimes careless and diffuse. This has offended the fastidious technical taste of some of his countrymen; but to others his easy, indolent, copious, rambling effusion is an additional charm. The second fault of his tales, their licentiousness, is unpardonable. He imbibed it, most probably, from the perusal and imitation of Rabelais, Clement Marot, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, and confounded it with their gaiety. But, in adopting the freedom of their pleasantries, he has discarded their grossness. His indecorous allusions are conveyed with infinite finesse and ingenuity of expression, and he must be acquitted of all intention to corrupt—of the consciousness even of a corrupting tendency. No inference unfavourable to him is to be drawn from their condemnation and prohibition at the request of the sorbonne. The sin of his tales, and that which he was called on to expiate, was not their immorality, but the liberties which, like his models, he took occasionally with monks, nuns, and confessors. It is but justice to him to state his own vindication. He urged the example of the ancients; and the necessity of a certain tone of gaiety and freedom in familiar tales, without which they would want their essential grace and charm. "He who would reduce," says he, "Ariosto and Boccaccio to the modesty of Virgil would assuredly not be thanked for his pains—(ne ferait assurément rien qui vaille)." An enervating tender melancholy is, he says, much more injurious. His only object, he protests, was to procure the reader a passing smile; and, for his part, he could not comprehend how the reading of his tales should have a bad effect upon others when the composition had none upon him."
But can it be true, or possible, that this enchanting fabulist was not merely subject to absences and musings, but the dullest of mortals in conversation;—his thoughts and expressions alike clumsy and confused? Two, the most positive testimonies, will suffice, out of many. The daughter of Racine, who had seen him frequently at her father's table, described him as "slovenly, stupid, and talking of nothing but Plato." La Bruyère obviously meant the following character for him:—"A man appears—clumsy, heavy, stupid. He cannot talk, or even tell what he has just seen. If he sits down to write, he produces the model of tales. He endows with speech brutes, trees, stones,—all to which nature has denied speech; and all is levity, elegance, beauty, nature, in his works."[52] These testimonies, though so positive, are far from conclusive. The lady had no taste for Plato, and La Bruyère's style of portraiture, always overcharged, seems particularly so in this instance, where his object was contrast and effect. La Fontaine may have fallen into reveries and solecisms in the company of his friends; he may have been silent and dull at the table of a financier, where he was among strangers to be stared at; but his society would not have been sought and prized, not only by the Molières, Boileaus, and Racines, but by the Condés, Contis, and Villars, and in the distinguished circles of mesdames de Bouillon, Mazarin, and La Sablière were the charm of his writings wholly wanting in his conversation. His writings would have been admired, and their author neglected, as in the case of Corneille, were his conversation equally common-place and uninteresting. La Fontaine probably was dull to those who neither understood nor were understood by him. He was La Fontaine, the charming fabulist, only when the subjects and the society interested him; and those around him could, by mutual intelligence, bring his genius into play. Goldsmith, in the same manner, was depreciated by persons who did not understand him. Topham Beauclerk, a man of wit and fashion about town, thought his conversation absurd and dull; but Edmund Burke found in it the poet and observer of mankind. The admiration of Horace and Varus, and the society of Mæcenas and Augustus, did not protect Virgil's simplicity of character from being sneered at by the court satirists and petits-maîtres of his time. The well-known description of him by Horace is not without resemblance to La Fontaine's character.
La Fontaine was buried in the cemetery of St. Joseph, at Paris, by the side of Molière, who had died many years before. Boileau and Racine survived him. His best epitaph is the following, written by himself: it records his character with equal fidelity and humour.
"Jean s'en alla comme il était venu,
Mangant son fonds aprez son revenu,
Croyant le bien chose peu nécessaire.
Quant à son temps bien le sçut dépenser,
Deux parts en fit dont il soluoit passer—
L'une à dormir, et l'autre à ne rien faire."
[47]Molière, says Cailhava, in his "Art de la Comédie," indignant at the false taste of the court and the public, puts into the mouth of a courtier, in his "Misanthrope," a sonnet of Cotin, the most fashionable poet of the day, and a member of the academy. Bad taste was so accredited with the public, that the audience, on the first night of performance, applauded this nonsense to the echo, in perfect good faith. Molière expected and only waited this effect to "pulverise" the sonnet and its admirers by the relentless and excellent criticism which he puts into the mouth of his misanthrope, Alceste.
[48]Vie de La Fontaine, par Walknaer.