Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at Château-Thierry, in Champagne. His early education was sadly neglected. At twenty years of age he was still phenomenally ignorant. About this time, being now better situated, he developed a taste for the classics and for poetry. With La Fontaine the man, it is the sadly familiar French story of debauchee manners in life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation. As the world goes, La Fontaine was a “good fellow,” never lacking friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any sterling worth of character felt in him as by an exhaustless, easy-going good-nature that, despite his social insipidity, made La Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait in his character would be perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude, no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring personal regard. The mirror of bonhomie (easy-hearted good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine’s case. On his amiable side—a full hemisphere or more of the man—it sums him up completely. Twenty years long this mirror of bonhomie was domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the celebrated Madame de la Sablière. There was truth as well as humor implied in what she said one day: “I have sent away all my domestics; I have kept only my dog, my cat, and La Fontaine.”
But La Fontaine had that in him which kept the friendship of serious men. Molière, a grave, even melancholy spirit, however gay in his comedies; Boileau and Racine, decorous both of them, at least in manners, constituted, together with La Fontaine, a kind of private “Academy,” existing on a diminutive scale, which was not without its important influence on French letters. La Fontaine seems to have been a sort of Goldsmith in this club of wits, the butt of many pleasantries from his colleagues, called out by his habit of absent-mindedness. St. Augustine was one night the subject of an elaborate eulogy, which La Fontaine lost the benefit of, through a reverie of his own indulged meantime on a quite different character. Catching, however, at the name, La Fontaine, as he came to himself for a moment, betrayed the secret of his absent thought by asking, “Do you think St. Augustine had as much wit as Rabelais?” “Take care, Monsieur La Fontaine: you have put one of your stockings on wrong side out”—he had actually done so—was the only answer vouchsafed to his question. The speaker in this case was a doctor of the Sorbonne (brother to Boileau), present as guest. The story is told of La Fontaine, that egged on to groundless jealousy of his wife—a wife whom he never really loved, and whom he soon would finally abandon,—he challenged a military friend of his to combat with swords. The friend was amazed, and, amazed, reluctantly fought with La Fontaine, whom he easily put at his mercy. “Now, what is this for?” he demanded. “The public says you visit my house for my wife’s sake, not for mine,” said La Fontaine. “Then I never will come again.” “Far from it,” responds La Fontaine, seizing his friend’s hand. “I have satisfied the public. Now you must come to my house every day, or I will fight you again.” The two went back in company, and breakfasted together in mutual good humor.
A trait or two more and there will have been enough of the man La Fontaine. It is said that when, on the death of Madame de la Sablière, La Fontaine was homeless, he was met on the street by a friend, who exclaimed, “I was looking for you; come to my house, and live with me!” “I was on the way there,” La Fontaine characteristically replied. At seventy, La Fontaine went through a process of “conversion,” so called, in which he professed repentance of his sins. On the genuineness of this inward experience of La Fontaine, it is not for a fellow-creature of his, especially at this distance of time, to pronounce. When he died, at seventy-three, Fénelon could say of him (in Latin), “La Fontaine is no more! He is no more; and with him have gone the playful jokes, the merry laugh, the artless graces, and the sweet Muses!” La Fontaine’s earliest works were “Contes,” so styled; that is, tales, or romances. These are in character such that the subsequent happy change in manners, if not in morals, has made them unreadable, for their indecency. We need concern ourselves only with the Fables, for it is on these that La Fontaine’s fame securely rests. The basis of story in them was not generally original with La Fontaine. He took whatever fittest came to his hand. With much modesty he attributed all to Æsop and Phædrus. But invention of his own is not altogether wanting to his books of fables. Still, it is chiefly the consummate artful artlessness of the form that constitutes the individual merit of La Fontaine’s productions. With something, too, of the air of real poetry, he has undoubtedly invested his verse.
We give, first, the brief fable which is said to have been the prime favorite of the author himself. It is the fable of “The Oak and the Reed.” Of this fable French critics have not scrupled to speak in terms of almost the very highest praise. Chamfort says, “Let one consider, that, within the limit of thirty lines, La Fontaine, doing nothing but yield himself to the current of his story, has taken on every tone, that of poetry the most graceful, that of poetry the most lofty, and one will not hesitate to affirm, that, at the epoch at which this fable appeared, there was nothing comparable to it in the French language.” There are, to speak precisely, thirty-two lines in the fable. In this one case let us try representing La Fontaine’s compression by our English form. For the rest of our specimens, after a single further exception, introduced, we confess, partly because it could be given in a graceful version by Bryant, we shall use Elizur Wright’s translation—a meritorious one, still master of the field which, about fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here expands La Fontaine’s thirty-two verses to it forty-four. The additions are not ill-done, but they encumber somewhat the Attic neatness and simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines—lines of six feet—obligatory in French verse. He rhymes irregularly, at choice, and makes his verses long or short, as pleases him. The closing verse of the present piece is, in accordance with the intended majesty of the representation, an Alexandrine:
| The Oak one day said to the Reed, “Justly might you dame Nature blame. A wren’s weight would bow down your frame; The lightest wind that chance may make Dimple the surface of the lake Your head bends low indeed, The while, like Caucasus, my front To meet the branding sun is wont, Nay, more, to take the tempest’s brunt. A blast you feel, I feel a breeze. Had you been born beneath my roof, Wide-spread, of leafage weather-proof, Less had you known your life to tease; I should have sheltered you from storm. But oftenest you rear your form On the moist limits of the realm of wind. Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned.” “Your pity,” answers him the Reed, “Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain; I more than you may winds disdain. I bend, and break not. You, indeed, Against their dreadful strokes till now Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow: But wait we for the end.” Scarce had he spoke, When fiercely from the far horizon broke The wildest of the children, fullest fraught With terror, that till then the North had brought. The tree holds good; the reed it bends. The wind redoubled might expends, And so well works that from his bed Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead. |
Here is that fable of La Fontaine’s graced by the hand of Bryant upon it as translator. It is entitled “Love and Folly:”
In the fable of the “Rat Retired from the World,” La Fontaine rallies the monks. With French finesse he hits his mark by expressly avoiding it. “What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No, but a Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always ready with his help to the needful!”