But though he walked homeward with that sense of dissatisfaction which is generally experienced by persons of education and sensibility after a visit to the modern theatre, the play continued to haunt him. With its subject he must have been already thoroughly familiar, for are not Eloisa and Abelard the most celebrated lovers in history? But though at college he had been distinguished by the elegance of his lyrics, De Rémusat had attained the meridian of life without acquiring, or even attempting to acquire, a distinct reputation as a man of letters. Like most of the aspiring spirits of his time, he had betaken himself to political journalism, trusting that it would conduct to parliamentary honors, and obtain for him a share in the direction of affairs of State. At first a somewhat docile pupil of Guizot, by the time the famous Globe was started he had shaken himself entirely free from the influence of that doctrinaire statesman, and he shortly became one of its most indefatigable contributors. How successfully he had employed his pen may be surmised from the fact that his name appears in the list of signatures to the famous Protest against the Ordonnances of Polignac, which caused the Revolution of July. The first Parliament summoned after the accession of Louis Philippe found him, at the age of thirty-three, Member for Muret a constituency in the Haute Garonne which he continued to represent till the Revolution of 1848. Justifiably ambitious of power, that he might advance the cause of Constitutional Government, he abstained from associating his reputation with non-political compositions; and this sternly practical resolve seemed, through long persistence, at length to have weaned him from all interest in the more subtle workings of the intellect.
But there is something stronger than the resolves of the most resolute man, and that is innate disposition, or natural bent, which, try to rid himself of it as he may, tamen usque recurret. De Rémusat flattered himself that, in strenuously devoting his faculties to political journalism, in writing leading articles on the current topics of the hour, in examining Parliamentary Bills, and in composing Legislative Reports, he had stifled in himself the original taint of an evil passion for literature. That accidental visit to the Ambigu-Comique, the representation of that inferior and distorted play, stirred in him afresh his native passion. He could not get rid of the figure of that strange personage, at once exalted philosopher and frensied lover, belonging unquestionably to history, yet made, it would seem, expressly for the purposes of romance. On the very morrow of that eventful evening, he might have been seen in the library of the Chamber of Deputies, asking for the volume that contained the correspondence of Abelard and Eloisa. The chamber was not sitting, for it was vacation time; and he carried the book with him to Lafitte, in the Haute Garonne, where he had recently established his household gods. He perused it without delay or intermission; for the man who, taking up the correspondence of the separated lovers of the Paraclete, could lay it down unfinished, may rest assured that he has little genuine interest in the more romantic workings of human nature. But on the 6th of September the Ministry of Casimir-Périer was overthrown, and Count Molé was summoned to form a Cabinet. His Minister of the Interior was M. Gasparin, and De Rémusat was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the same department. Had the career of the new Ministry been a protracted one, it is possible that time would have divorced his attention from Abelard and mediæval philosophy. But in less than a twelvemonth Molé’s Cabinet was overthrown, and the liberated Under-Secretary buried himself once more in the passions and dialectics of the twelfth century. He spent much of the winter of 1837 in studying the period in which the Gallic Socrates—Gallorum Socrates, it was the pleasure of Abelard’s followers to designate him—had lived, triumphed, and suffered; and in the course of the summer of the following year a “Philosophical Drama” on the subject was completed. For nearly forty years it lay in manuscript in the author’s drawer, though he occasionally permitted himself the indulgence of reading portions of it in the intellectual salons of Paris which he frequented. Its success in those select but critical circles was considerable; and it was probably the encouragement thus extended to him that led to his writing Abélard, sa Vie, sa Philosophie, et sa Theologie, the best account extant of the great Conceptualist, his metaphysics, and his fate.
The latter work was published as long ago as 1845. Why, then, was the drama kept back? The reason is a curious one. Perhaps in foraging so extensively among the records of the twelfth century, De Rémusat had become impressed with the mediæval motto, “Beware the man of one book.” He was afraid, so his son assures us, to risk his reputation with the public as a statesman and a man of affairs, by appearing before it as the writer of a drama, even a “philosophical” one, on a subject notoriously romantic.
“Il faut bien dire,” says M. Paul De Rémusat, “que la première raison de mon père pour refuser de publier le drame d’Abélard, c’était la pensée que, dans notre pays, les hommes sont d’avance et dès leur début, et qu’il ne voulait point sortir de la situation littéraire et politique où il s’était d’abord placé. Il avait vu trop souvent la défiance accuellir une œuvre nouvelle et étrangère aux premiers essais d’un écrivain. L’idée d’un homme universel, ou seulement doué de talents variés, est rarement acceptée, et ce qu’on gagne en étendu paraît presque toujours perdu en profondeur. L’example de Voltaire, qui était si longtemps discuté et contesté, est plus effrayant pour les audacieux que rassurant pour les timides. Mon père n’espérait pas que l’on fit en sa faveur une exception à la loi commune de la spécialité de l’esprit. Il lui semblait qu’il n’eût acquit en littérature quelque réputation qu’au dépens de son autorité politique.”
These scruples, at least in the case of De Rémusat, seem excessive. The French bourgeoisie have never had that rooted antipathy to men of genius which is characteristic of the middle class in England; and it certainly would not have taken the better part of fifty years to convince them that the author of Vivian Grey had in him the stuff of a practical and hard-headed statesman. Moreover, a philosophical drama, by the very sobriety of its title, protects its author against the charge of excessive literary levity. Finally, the political career of the author of Abélard, though not devoid of distinction, was hardly of that commanding sort which might console some men, at its close, for the sacrifice of more congenial tastes and more enduring fame. He became Minister of the Interior, for a brief period, in Thiers’ Cabinet of 1840, and after the Revolution of 1848 he remained a member of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. But the Coup d’état practically put an end to his political prospects. It is true he reappeared, for a short interval, as the fides Achates of Thiers during that statesman’s brief tenure of power after the Franco-German War. But he was too advanced in years, and too completely overshadowed by his conspicuous friend, who concentrated all business and all distinction in his own person, to add anything to his former reputation as a politician. His son observes that, in withholding the publication of his drama upon Abélard, he perhaps remembered one of the most touching observations of his hero, “Dieu punit en moi la présomption des lettrés.” I read the moral of De Rémusat’s life differently. The penalty attached to the presumption of men-of-letters he undoubtedly escaped. It was the politician whom Heaven punished, for presuming to think that a man can arrange and map out his career irrespectively of the gifts with which it has endowed him, or that it is permissible, in deference to the prejudices of the vulgar, to protect one’s brow against the imperishable bays of the poet, lest they should be denied the tinsel and quickly-fading wreaths of the popular politician. He lived, we will trust, to estimate the relative value of things more wisely, though he might have learnt, while studying the fate of Abélard, that notoriety, which is the nearest approach to fame to be secured by a politician, is “fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain.” But if he learned the lesson, he learned it in long years of exclusion from worthless power. He returned to his books when universal suffrage, allied with despotism, brought forth that atrocious bastard, Imperial Democracy; and he found in pursuits, his native passion for which he had once been half ashamed to own, something more than compensation for the loss of personal rivalries and sterile debates.
At the same time, let us beware of doing De Rémusat an injustice. That he was one of those men who caress their reputation, and, in doing so, too often mar it, is certain; for we have his own avowal of the infirmity, corroborated by the statements of his son. But, in accounting for the suppression of his drama upon Abélard, we must allow something to genuine and, let me hasten to add, excessive modesty. It is not the voice of the literary coquette, but of the diffident literary workman, that we overhear in these charming sentences, to be found in the preface to his prose labors upon Abélard:
Changeant de but et de travail, je m’occupai alors de mieux connaître l’Abélard de la réalité, d’apprendre sa vie, de pénétrer ses écrits, d’approfondir ses doctrines; et voilà comme s’est fait le livre que je soumets en ce moment au jugement du public. Destiné à servir d’accompagnement et presque de compensation à une tentative hasardeuse, il paraît seul aujour d’hui. Des illusions téméraires sont à demi dissipées; une sage voix que je voudrais écouter toujours, me conseille de renoncer aux fictions passionnées et de dire tristement adieu à la muse qui les inspire.
. . . . . . Abi
Quo blandi juvenum te revocant preces.
No doubt a mere literary succès d’estime would not have satisfied one who had been an Under-Secretary of State; and great literary reputations were being made in France at the time this resolution was taken. But De Rémusat goes on to say that he “tenait à expier en quelque sorte une composition d’un genre moins sévère,” and frankly stating that the drama was “une de ces œuvres enfin qui n’ont qu’une excuse possible, celle du talent,” he, with sincere humility, put it back in his drawer.