All the infection that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him By inch-meal a disease!
and in the similes of Trinculo:
Yond" same black cloud, yond" huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor.
The _denouement_ itself, brought about by a preposterous piece of machinery, and lost in a whirl of rhetoric, is hardly more than a peg for fine writing.
O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, p.r.o.nounced The name of Prosper; it did ba.s.s my trespa.s.s.
Therefore my son i" th" ooze is bedded, and I"ll seek him deeper than e"er plummet sounded, And with him there lie mudded.
And this gorgeous phantasm of a repentance from the mouth of the pale phantom Alonzo is a fitting climax to the whole fantastic play.
A comparison naturally suggests itself, between what was perhaps the last of Shakespeare"s completed works, and that early drama which first gave undoubted proof that his imagination had taken wings. The points of resemblance between _The Tempest_ and _A Midsummer Night"s Dream_, their common atmosphere of romance and magic, the beautiful absurdities of their intrigues, their studied contrasts of the grotesque with the delicate, the ethereal with the earthly, the charm of their lyrics, the _verve_ of their vulgar comedy--these, of course, are obvious enough; but it is the points of difference which really make the comparison striking. One thing, at any rate, is certain about the wood near Athens--it is full of life. The persons that haunt it--though most of them are hardly more than children, and some of them are fairies, and all of them are too agreeable to be true--are nevertheless substantial creatures, whose loves and jokes and quarrels receive our thorough sympathy; and the air they breathe--the lords and the ladies, no less than the mechanics and the elves--is instinct with an exquisite good-humour, which makes us as happy as the night is long. To turn from Theseus and t.i.tania and Bottom to the Enchanted Island, is to step out of a country lane into a conservatory. The roses and the dandelions have vanished before preposterous cactuses, and fascinating orchids too delicate for the open air; and, in the artificial atmosphere, the gaiety of youth has been replaced by the disillusionment of middle age.
Prospero is the central figure of _The Tempest_; and it has often been wildly a.s.serted that he is a portrait of the author--an embodiment of that spirit of wise benevolence which is supposed to have thrown a halo over Shakespeare"s later life. But, on closer inspection, the portrait seems to be as imaginary as the original. To an irreverent eye, the ex-Duke of Milan would perhaps appear as an unpleasantly crusty personage, in whom a twelve years" monopoly of the conversation had developed an inordinate propensity for talking. These may have been the sentiments of Ariel, safe at the Bermoothes; but to state them is to risk at least ten years in the knotty entrails of an oak, and it is sufficient to point out, that if Prospero is wise, he is also self-opinionated and sour, that his gravity is often another name for pedantic severity, and that there is no character in the play to whom, during some part of it, he is not studiously disagreeable. But his Milanese countrymen are not even disagreeable; they are simply dull.
"This is the silliest stuff that e"er I heard," remarked Hippolyta of Bottom"s amateur theatricals; and one is tempted to wonder what she would have said to the dreary puns and interminable conspiracies of Alonzo, and Gonzalo, and Sebastian, and Antonio, and Adrian, and Francisco, and other shipwrecked n.o.blemen. At all events, there can be little doubt that they would not have had the entree at Athens.
The depth of the gulf between the two plays is, however, best measured by a comparison of Caliban and his masters with Bottom and his companions. The guileless group of English mechanics, whose sports are interrupted by the mischief of Puck, offers a strange contrast to the hideous trio of the "jester," the "drunken butler," and the "savage and deformed slave," whose designs are thwarted by the magic of Ariel.
Bottom was the first of Shakespeare"s masterpieces in characterisation, Caliban was the last: and what a world of bitterness and horror lies between them! The charming c.o.xcomb it is easy to know and love; but the "freckled whelp hag-born" moves us mysteriously to pity and to terror, eluding us for ever in fearful allegories, and strange coils of disgusted laughter and phantasmagorical tears. The physical vigour of the presentment is often so remorseless as to shock us. "I left them,"
says Ariel, speaking of Caliban and his crew:
I" the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell, There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake O"erstunk their feet.
But at other times the great half-human shape seems to swell like the "Pan" of Victor Hugo, into something unimaginably vast.
You taught me language, and my profit on"t Is, I know how to curse.
Is this Caliban addressing Prospero, or Job addressing G.o.d? It may be either; but it is not serene, nor benign, nor pastoral, nor "On the Heights."
1906.
THE LIVES OF THE POETS[1]
No one needs an excuse for re-opening the _Lives of the Poets_; the book is too delightful. It is not, of course, as delightful as Boswell; but who re-opens Boswell? Boswell is in another category; because, as every one knows, when he has once been opened he can never be shut. But, on its different level, the _Lives_ will always hold a firm and comfortable place in our affections. After Boswell, it is the book which brings us nearer than any other to the mind of Dr. Johnson. That is its primary import. We do not go to it for information or for instruction, or that our tastes may be improved, or that our sympathies may be widened; we go to it to see what Dr. Johnson thought. Doubtless, during the process, we are informed and instructed and improved in various ways; but these benefits are incidental, like the invigoration which comes from a mountain walk. It is not for the sake of the exercise that we set out; but for the sake of the view. The view from the mountain which is Samuel Johnson is so familiar, and has been so constantly a.n.a.lysed and admired, that further description would be superfluous. It is sufficient for us to recognise that he is a mountain, and to pay all the reverence that is due. In one of Emerson"s poems a mountain and a squirrel begin to discuss each other"s merits; and the squirrel comes to the triumphant conclusion that he is very much the better of the two, since he can crack a nut, while the mountain can do no such thing. The parallel is close enough between this impudence and the att.i.tude--implied, if not expressed--of too much modern criticism towards the sort of qualities--the easy, indolent power, the searching sense of actuality, the combined command of sanity and paradox, the immovable independence of thought--which went to the making of the _Lives of the Poets_. There is only, perhaps, one flaw in the a.n.a.logy: that, in this particular instance, the mountain was able to crack nuts a great deal better than any squirrel that ever lived.
That the _Lives_ continue to be read, admired, and edited, is in itself a high proof of the eminence of Johnson"s intellect; because, as serious criticism, they can hardly appear to the modern reader to be very far removed from the futile. Johnson"s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them--except one: they are never right. That is an unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up for it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong so cleverly, that n.o.body minds. When Gray, for instance, points the moral to his poem on Walpole"s cat with a reminder to the fair that all that glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that this is "of no relation to the purpose; if _what glistered_ had been _gold_, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned."
Could anything be more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously true? But then, to use Johnson"s own phrase, could anything be of less "relation to the purpose"? It is his wit--and we are speaking, of course, of wit in its widest sense--that has sanctified Johnson"s peversities and errors, that has embalmed them for ever, and that has put his book, with all its ma.s.s of antiquated doctrine, beyond the reach of time.
For it is not only in particular details that Johnson"s criticism fails to convince us; his entire point of view is patently out of date. Our judgments differ from his, not only because our tastes are different, but because our whole method of judging has changed. Thus, to the historian of letters, the _Lives_ have a special interest, for they afford a standing example of a great dead tradition--a tradition whose characteristics throw more than one curious light upon the literary feelings and ways which have become habitual to ourselves. Perhaps the most striking difference between the critical methods of the eighteenth century and those of the present day, is the difference in sympathy. The most cursory glance at Johnson"s book is enough to show that he judged authors as if they were criminals in the dock, answerable for every infraction of the rules and regulations laid down by the laws of art, which it was his business to administer without fear or favour. Johnson never inquired what poets were trying to do; he merely aimed at discovering whether what they had done complied with the canons of poetry. Such a system of criticism was clearly unexceptionable, upon one condition--that the critic was quite certain what the canons of poetry were; but the moment that it became obvious that the only way of arriving at a conclusion upon the subject was by consulting the poets themselves, the whole situation completely changed. The judge had to bow to the prisoner"s ruling. In other words, the critic discovered that his first duty was, not to criticise, but to understand the object of his criticism. That is the essential distinction between the school of Johnson and the school of Sainte-Beuve. No one can doubt the greater width and profundity of the modern method; but it is not without its drawbacks. An excessive sympathy with one"s author brings its own set of errors: the critic is so happy to explain everything, to show how this was the product of the age, how that was the product of environment, and how the other was the inevitable result of inborn qualities and tastes--that he sometimes forgets to mention whether the work in question has any value. It is then that one cannot help regretting the Johnsonian black cap.
But other defects, besides lack of sympathy, mar the _Lives of the Poets_. One cannot help feeling that no matter how anxious Johnson might have been to enter into the spirit of some of the greatest of the masters with whom he was concerned, he never could have succeeded.
Whatever critical method he might have adopted, he still would have been unable to appreciate certain literary qualities, which, to our minds at any rate, appear to be the most important of all. His opinion of _Lycidas_ is well known: he found that poem "easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting." Of the songs in _Comus_ he remarks: "they are harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers." He could see nothing in the splendour and elevation of Gray, but "glittering acc.u.mulations of ungraceful ornaments." The pa.s.sionate intensity of Donne escaped him altogether; he could only wonder how so ingenious a writer could be so absurd. Such preposterous judgments can only be accounted for by inherent deficiencies of taste; Johnson had no ear, and he had no imagination. These are, indeed, grievous disabilities in a critic. What could have induced such a man, the impatient reader is sometimes tempted to ask, to set himself up as a judge of poetry?
The answer to the question is to be found in the remarkable change which has come over our entire conception of poetry, since the time when Johnson wrote. It has often been stated that the essential characteristic of that great Romantic Movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century, was the re-introduction of Nature into the domain of poetry. Incidentally, it is curious to observe that nearly every literary revolution has been hailed by its supporters as a return to Nature. No less than the school of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the school of Denham, of Dryden, and of Pope, proclaimed itself as the champion of Nature; and there can be little doubt that Donne himself--the father of all the conceits and elaborations of the seventeenth century--wrote under the impulse of a Naturalistic reaction against the conventional cla.s.sicism of the Renaissance. Precisely the same contradictions took place in France. Nature was the watchword of Malherbe and of Boileau; and it was equally the watchword of Victor Hugo. To judge by the successive proclamations of poets, the development of literature offers a singular paradox. The further it goes back, the more sophisticated it becomes; and it grows more and more natural as it grows distant from the State of Nature. However this may be, it is at least certain that the Romantic revival peculiarly deserves to be called Naturalistic, because it succeeded in bringing into vogue the operations of the external world--"the Vegetable Universe," as Blake called it--as subject-matter for poetry. But it would have done very little, if it had done nothing more than this. Thomson, in the full meridian of the eighteenth century, wrote poems upon the subject of Nature; but it would be foolish to suppose that Wordsworth and Coleridge merely carried on a fashion which Thomson had begun. Nature, with them, was something more than a peg for descriptive and didactic verse; it was the manifestation of the vast and mysterious forces of the world. The publication of _The Ancient Mariner_ is a landmark in the history of letters, not because of its descriptions of natural objects, but because it swept into the poet"s vision a whole new universe of infinite and eternal things; it was the discovery of the Unknown. We are still under the spell of _The Ancient Mariner_; and poetry to us means, primarily, something which suggests, by means of words, mysteries and infinitudes. Thus, music and imagination seem to us the most essential qualities of poetry, because they are the most potent means by which such suggestions may be invoked.
But the eighteenth century knew none of these things. To Lord Chesterfield and to Pope, to Prior and to Horace Walpole, there was nothing at all strange about the world; it was charming, it was disgusting, it was ridiculous, and it was just what one might have expected. In such a world, why should poetry, more than anything else, be mysterious? No! Let it be sensible; that was enough.
The new edition of the _Lives_, which Dr. Birkbeck Hill prepared for publication before his death, and which has been issued by the Clarendon Press, with a brief Memoir of the editor, would probably have astonished Dr. Johnson. But, though the elaborate erudition of the notes and appendices might have surprised him, it would not have put him to shame. One can imagine his growling scorn of the scientific conscientiousness of the present day. And indeed, the three tomes of Dr.
Hill"s edition, with all their solid wealth of information, their voluminous scholarship, their acc.u.mulation of vast research, are a little ponderous and a little ugly; the hand is soon wearied with the weight, and the eye is soon distracted by the varying types, and the compressed columns of the notes, and the paragraphic numerals in the margins. This is the price that must be paid for increased efficiency.
The wise reader will divide his attention between the new business-like edition and one of the charming old ones, in four comfortable volumes, where the text is supreme upon the page, and the paragraphs follow one another at leisurely intervals. The type may be a little faded, and the paper a little yellow; but what of that? It is all quiet and easy; and, as one reads, the brilliant sentences seem to come to one, out of the Past, with the friendliness of a conversation.
1906.
NOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Lives of the English Poets_. By Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1905.]
MADAME DU DEFFAND[2]
When Napoleon was starting for his campaign in Russia, he ordered the proof-sheets of a forthcoming book, about which there had been some disagreement among the censors of the press, to be put into his carriage, so that he might decide for himself what suppressions it might be necessary to make. "Je m"ennuie en route; je lirai ces volumes, et j"ecrirai de Mayence ce qu"il y aura a faire." The volumes thus chosen to beguile the imperial leisure between Paris and Mayence contained the famous correspondence of Madame du Deffand with Horace Walpole. By the Emperor"s command a few excisions were made, and the book--reprinted from Miss Berry"s original edition which had appeared two years earlier in England--was published almost at once. The sensation in Paris was immense; the excitement of the Russian campaign itself was half forgotten; and for some time the blind old inhabitant of the Convent of Saint Joseph held her own as a subject of conversation with the burning of Moscow and the pa.s.sage of the Berezina. We cannot wonder that this was so. In the Parisian drawing-room of those days the letters of Madame du Deffand must have exercised a double fascination--on the one hand as a mine of gossip about numberless persons and events still familiar to many a living memory, and, on the other, as a detailed and brilliant record of a state of society which had already ceased to be actual and become historical. The letters were hardly more than thirty years old; but the world which they depicted in all its intensity and all its singularity--the world of the old regime--had vanished for ever into limbo. Between it and the eager readers of the First Empire a gulf was fixed--a narrow gulf, but a deep one, still hot and sulphurous with the volcanic fires of the Revolution. Since then a century has pa.s.sed; the gulf has widened; and the vision which these curious letters show us to-day seems hardly less remote--from some points of view, indeed, even more--than that which is revealed to us in the Memoirs of Cellini or the correspondence of Cicero. Yet the vision is not simply one of a strange and dead antiquity: there is a personal and human element in the letters which gives them a more poignant interest, and brings them close to ourselves. The soul of man is not subject to the rumour of periods; and these pages, impregnated though they be with the abolished life of the eighteenth century, can never be out of date.
A fortunate chance enables us now, for the first time, to appreciate them in their completeness. The late Mrs. Paget Toynbee, while preparing her edition of Horace Walpole"s letters, came upon the trace of the original ma.n.u.scripts, which had long lain hidden in obscurity in a country house in Staffordshire. The publication of these ma.n.u.scripts in full, accompanied by notes and indexes in which Mrs. Toynbee"s well-known accuracy, industry, and tact are everywhere conspicuous, is an event of no small importance to lovers of French literature. A great ma.s.s of new and deeply interesting material makes its appearance. The original edition produced by Miss Berry in 1810, from which all the subsequent editions were reprinted with varying degrees of inaccuracy, turns out to have contained nothing more than a comparatively small fraction of the whole correspondence; of the 838 letters published by Mrs. Toynbee, 485 are entirely new, and of the rest only 52 were printed by Miss Berry in their entirety. Miss Berry"s edition was, in fact, simply a selection, and as a selection it deserves nothing but praise.
It skims the cream of the correspondence; and it faithfully preserves the main outline of the story which the letters reveal. No doubt that was enough for the readers of that generation; indeed, even for the more exacting reader of to-day, there is something a little overwhelming in the closely packed 2000 pages of Mrs. Toynbee"s volumes. Enthusiasm alone will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be rewarded. In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we have now the truth itself--the truth in all its subtle gradations, all its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable obscurities: it is the difference between a clear-cut drawing in black-and-white and a finished painting in oils. Probably Miss Berry"s edition will still be preferred by the ordinary reader who wishes to become acquainted with a celebrated figure in French literature; but Mrs. Toynbee"s will always be indispensable for the historical student, and invaluable for anyone with the leisure, the patience, and the taste for a detailed and elaborate examination of a singular adventure of the heart.
The Marquise du Deffand was perhaps the most typical representative of that phase of civilisation which came into existence in Western Europe during the early years of the eighteenth century, and reached its most concentrated and characteristic form about the year 1750 in the drawing-rooms of Paris. She was supremely a woman of her age; but it is important to notice that her age was the first, and not the second, half of the eighteenth century: it was the age of the Regent Orleans, Fontenelle, and the young Voltaire; not that of Rousseau, the "Encyclopaedia," and the Patriarch of Ferney. It is true that her letters to Walpole, to which her fame is mainly due, were written between 1766 and 1780; but they are the letters of an old woman, and they bear upon every page of them the traces of a mind to which the whole movement of contemporary life was profoundly distasteful. The new forces to which the eighteenth century gave birth in thought, in art, in sentiment, in action--which for us form its peculiar interest and its peculiar glory--were anathema to Madame du Deffand. In her letters to Walpole, whenever she compares the present with the past her bitterness becomes extreme. "J"ai eu autrefois," she writes in 1778, "des plaisirs indicibles aux operas de Quinault et de Lulli, et au jeu de Thevenart et de la Lemaur. Pour aujourd"hui, tout me parait detestable: acteurs, auteurs, musiciens, beaux esprits, philosophes, tout est de mauvais gout, tout est affreux, affreux." That great movement towards intellectual and political emanc.i.p.ation which centred in the "Encyclopaedia" and the _Philosophes_ was the object of her particular detestation. She saw Diderot once--and that was enough for both of them.
She could never understand why it was that M. de Voltaire would persist in wasting his talent for writing over such a dreary subject as religion. Turgot, she confessed, was an honest man, but he was also a "sot animal." His dismissal from office--that fatal act, which made the French Revolution inevitable--delighted her: she concealed her feelings from Walpole, who admired him, but she was outspoken enough to the d.u.c.h.esse de Choiseul. "Le renvoi du Turgot me plait extremement," she wrote; "tout me parait en bon train." And then she added, more prophetically than she knew, "Mais, a.s.surement, nous n"en resterons pas la." No doubt her dislike of the Encyclopaedists and all their works was in part a matter of personal pique--the result of her famous quarrel with Mademoiselle de Lespina.s.se, under whose opposing banner d"Alembert and all the intellectual leaders of Parisian society had unhesitatingly ranged themselves. But that quarrel was itself far more a symptom of a deeply rooted spiritual antipathy than a mere vulgar struggle for influence between two rival _salonnieres_. There are indications that, even before it took place, the elder woman"s friendship for d"Alembert was giving way under the strain of her scorn for his advanced views and her hatred of his proselytising cast of mind. "Il y a de certains articles," she complained to Voltaire in 1763--a year before the final estrangement--"qui sont devenus pour lui affaires de parti, et sur lesquels je ne lui trouve pas le sens commun." The truth is that d"Alembert and his friends were moving, and Madame du Deffand was standing still. Mademoiselle de Lespina.s.se simply precipitated and intensified an inevitable rupture. She was the younger generation knocking at the door.
Madame du Deffand"s generation had, indeed, very little in common with that ardent, hopeful, speculative, sentimental group of friends who met together every evening in the drawing-room of Mademoiselle de Lespina.s.se. Born at the close of the seventeenth century, she had come into the world in the brilliant days of the Regent, whose witty and licentious reign had suddenly dissipated the atmosphere of gloom and bigotry imposed upon society by the moribund Court of Louis XIV. For a fortnight (so she confessed to Walpole) she was actually the Regent"s mistress; and a fortnight, in those days, was a considerable time. Then she became the intimate friend of Madame de Prie--the singular woman who, for a moment, on the Regent"s death, during the government of M. le Duc, controlled the destinies of France, and who committed suicide when that amus.e.m.e.nt was denied her. During her early middle age Madame du Deffand was one of the princ.i.p.al figures in the palace of Sceaux, where the d.u.c.h.esse du Maine, the grand-daughter of the great Conde and the daughter-in-law of Louis XIV., kept up for many years an almost royal state among the most distinguished men and women of the time. It was at Sceaux, with its endless succession of entertainments and conversations--supper-parties and water-parties, concerts and masked b.a.l.l.s, plays in the little theatre and picnics under the great trees of the park--that Madame du Deffand came to her maturity and established her position as one of the leaders of the society in which she moved.
The nature of that society is plainly enough revealed in the letters and the memoirs that have come down to us. The days of formal pomp and vast representation had ended for ever when the "Grand Monarque" was no longer to be seen strutting, in periwig and red-heeled shoes, down the glittering gallery of Versailles; the intimacy and seclusion of modern life had not yet begun. It was an intermediate period, and the comparatively small group formed by the elite of the rich, refined, and intelligent cla.s.ses led an existence in which the elements of publicity and privacy were curiously combined. Never, certainly, before or since, have any set of persons lived so absolutely and unreservedly with and for their friends as these high ladies and gentlemen of the middle years of the eighteenth century. The circle of one"s friends was, in those days, the framework of one"s whole being; within which was to be found all that life had to offer, and outside of which no interest, however fruitful, no pa.s.sion, however profound, no art, however soaring, was of the slightest account. Thus while in one sense the ideal of such a society was an eminently selfish one, it is none the less true that there have been very few societies indeed in which the ordinary forms of personal selfishness have played so small a part. The selfishness of the eighteenth century was a communal selfishness. Each individual was expected to practise, and did in fact practise to a consummate degree, those difficult arts which make the wheels of human intercourse run smoothly--the arts of tact and temper, of frankness and sympathy, of delicate compliment and exquisite self-abnegation--with the result that a condition of living was produced which, in all its superficial and obvious qualities, was one of unparalleled amenity. Indeed, those persons who were privileged to enjoy it showed their appreciation of it in an unequivocal way--by the tenacity with which they clung to the scene of such delights and graces. They refused to grow old; they almost refused to die. Time himself seems to have joined their circle, to have been infected with their politeness, and to have absolved them, to the furthest possible point, from the operation of his laws. Voltaire, d"Argental, Moncrif, Henault, Madame d"Egmont, Madame du Deffand herself--all were born within a few years of each other, and all lived to be well over eighty, with the full zest of their activities unimpaired. Pont-de-Veyle, it is true, died young--at the age of seventy-seven. Another contemporary, Richelieu, who was famous for his adventures while Louis XIV. was still on the throne, lived till within a year of the opening of the States-General. More typical still of this singular and fortunate generation was Fontenelle, who, one morning in his hundredth year, quietly observed that he felt a difficulty in existing, and forthwith, even more quietly, ceased to do so.
Yet, though the wheels of life rolled round with such an alluring smoothness, they did not roll of themselves; the skill and care of trained mechanicians were needed to keep them going; and the task was no light one. Even Fontenelle himself, fitted as he was for it by being blessed (as one of his friends observed) with two brains and no heart, realised to the full the hard conditions of social happiness. "Il y a peu de choses," he wrote, "aussi difficiles et aussi dangereuses que le commerce des hommes." The sentence, true for all ages, was particularly true for his own. The graceful, easy motions of that gay company were those of dancers balanced on skates, gliding, twirling, interlacing, over the thinnest ice. Those drawing-rooms, those little circles, so charming with the familiarity of their privacy, were themselves the rigorous abodes of the deadliest kind of public opinion--the kind that lives and glitters in a score of penetrating eyes. They required in their votaries the absolute submission that reigns in religious orders--the willing sacrifice of the entire life. The intimacy of personal pa.s.sion, the intensity of high endeavour--these things must be left behind and utterly cast away by all who would enter that narrow sanctuary. Friendship might be allowed there, and flirtation disguised as love; but the overweening and devouring influence of love itself should never be admitted to destroy the calm of daily intercourse and absorb into a single channel attentions due to all. Politics were to be tolerated, so long as they remained a game; so soon as they grew serious and envisaged the public good, they became insufferable. As for literature and art, though they might be excellent as subjects for recreation and good talk, what could be more preposterous than to treat such trifles as if they had a value of their own? Only one thing; and that was to indulge, in the day-dreams of religion or philosophy, the inward ardours of the soul. Indeed, the scepticism of that generation was the most uncompromising that the world has known; for it did not even trouble to deny: it simply ignored. It presented a blank wall of perfect indifference alike to the mysteries of the universe and to the solutions of them. Madame du Deffand gave early proof that she shared to the full this propensity of her age. While still a young girl in a convent school, she had shrugged her shoulders when the nuns began to instruct her in the articles of their faith. The matter was considered serious, and the great Ma.s.sillon, then at the height of his fame as a preacher and a healer of souls, was sent for to deal with the youthful heretic. She was not impressed by his arguments. In his person the generous fervour and the ma.s.sive piety of an age that could still believe felt the icy and disintegrating touch of a new and strange indifference. "Mais qu"elle est jolie!" he murmured as he came away. The Abbess ran forward to ask what holy books he recommended. "Give her a threepenny Catechism," was Ma.s.sillon"s reply. He had seen that the case was hopeless.
An innate scepticism, a profound levity, an antipathy to enthusiasm that wavered between laughter and disgust, combined with an unswerving devotion to the exacting and arduous ideals of social intercourse--such were the characteristics of the brilliant group of men and women who had spent their youth at the Court of the Regent, and dallied out their middle age down the long avenues of Sceaux. About the middle of the century the d.u.c.h.esse du Maine died, and Madame du Deffand established herself in Paris at the Convent of Saint Joseph in a set of rooms which still showed traces--in the emblazoned arms over the great mantelpiece--of the occupation of Madame de Montespan. A few years later a physical affliction overtook her: at the age of fifty-seven she became totally blind; and this misfortune placed her, almost without a transition, among the ranks of the old. For the rest of her life she hardly moved from her drawing-room, which speedily became the most celebrated in Europe. The thirty years of her reign there fall into two distinct and almost equal parts. The first, during which d"Alembert was pre-eminent, came to an end with the violent expulsion of Mademoiselle de Lespina.s.se. During the second, which lasted for the rest of her life, her salon, purged of the Encyclopaedists, took on a more decidedly worldly tone; and the influence of Horace Walpole was supreme.
It is this final period of Madame du Deffand"s life that is reflected so minutely in the famous correspondence which the labours of Mrs. Toynbee have now presented to us for the first time in its entirety. Her letters to Walpole form in effect a continuous journal covering the s.p.a.ce of fifteen years (1766-1780). They allow us, on the one hand, to trace through all its developments the progress of an extraordinary pa.s.sion, and on the other to examine, as it were under the microscope of perhaps the bitterest perspicacity on record, the last phase of a doomed society. For the circle which came together in her drawing-room during those years had the hand of death upon it. The future lay elsewhere; it was simply the past that survived there--in the rich trappings of fashion and wit and elaborate gaiety--but still irrevocably the past.
The radiant creatures of Sceaux had fallen into the yellow leaf. We see them in these letters, a collection of elderly persons trying hard to amuse themselves, and not succeeding very well. Pont-de-Veyle, the youthful septuagenarian, did perhaps succeed; for he never noticed what a bore he was becoming with his perpetual cough, and continued to go the rounds with indefatigable animation, until one day his cough was heard no more. Henault--once notorious for his dinner-parties, and for having written an historical treatise--which, it is true, was worthless, but he had written it--Henault was beginning to dodder, and Voltaire, grinning in Ferney, had already dubbed him "notre delabre President." Various dowagers were engaged upon various vanities. The Marquise de Boufflers was gambling herself to ruin; the Comtesse de Boufflers was wringing out the last drops of her reputation as the mistress of a Royal Prince; the Marechale de Mirepoix was involved in shady politics; the Marechale de Luxembourg was obliterating a highly dubious past by a scrupulous attention to "bon ton," of which, at last, she became the arbitress: "Quel ton! Quel effroyable ton!" she is said to have exclaimed after a shuddering glance at the Bible; "ah, Madame, quel dommage que le Saint Esprit eut aussi peu de gout!" Then there was the floating company of foreign diplomats, some of whom were invariably to be found at Madame du Deffand"s: Caraccioli, for instance, the Neapolitan Amba.s.sador--"je perds les trois quarts de ce qu"il dit," she wrote, "mais comme il en dit beaucoup, on peut supporter cette perte"; and Bernstorff, the Danish envoy, who became the fashion, was lauded to the skies for his wit and fine manners, until, says the malicious lady, "a travers tous ces eloges, je m"avisai de l"appeler Puffendorf," and Puffendorf the poor man remained for evermore. Besides the diplomats, nearly every foreign traveller of distinction found his way to the renowned _salon_; Englishmen were particularly frequent visitors; and among the familiar figures of whom we catch more than one glimpse in the letters to Walpole are Burke, Fox, and Gibbon. Sometimes influential parents in England obtained leave for their young sons to be admitted into the centre of Parisian refinement. The English cub, fresh from Eton, was introduced by his tutor into the red and yellow drawing-room, where the great circle of a dozen or more elderly important persons, glittering in jewels and orders, pompous in powder and rouge, ranged in rigid order round the fireplace, followed with the precision of a perfect orchestra the leading word or smile or nod of an ancient Sibyl, who seemed to survey the company with her eyes shut, from a vast chair by the wall. It is easy to imagine the scene, in all its terrifying politeness. Madame du Deffand could not tolerate young people; she declared that she did not know what to say to them; and they, no doubt, were in precisely the same difficulty. To an English youth, unfamiliar with the language and shy as only English youths can be, a conversation with that redoubtable old lady must have been a grim ordeal indeed. One can almost hear the stumbling, pointless observations, almost see the imploring looks cast, from among the infinitely attentive company, towards the tutor, and the pink ears growing still more pink. But such awkward moments were rare.
As a rule the days flowed on in easy monotony--or rather, not the days, but the nights. For Madame du Deffand rarely rose till five o"clock in the evening; at six she began her reception; and at nine or half-past the central moment of the twenty-four hours arrived--the moment of supper. Upon this event the whole of her existence hinged. Supper, she used to say, was one of the four ends of man, and what the other three were she could never remember. She lived up to her dictum. She had an income of 1400 a year, and of this she spent more than half--720--on food. These figures should be largely increased to give them their modern values; but, economise as she might, she found that she could only just manage to rub along. Her parties varied considerably in size; sometimes only four or five persons sat down to supper--sometimes twenty or thirty. No doubt they were elaborate meals. In a moment of economy we find the hospitable lady making pious resolutions: she would no longer give "des repas"--only ordinary suppers for six people at the most, at which there should be served nothing more than two entrees, one roast, two sweets, and--mysterious addition--"la piece du milieu." This was certainly moderate for those days (Monsieur de Jonsac rarely provided fewer than fourteen entrees), but such resolutions did not last long. A week later she would suddenly begin to issue invitations wildly, and, day after day, her tables would be loaded with provisions for thirty guests. But she did not always have supper at home. From time to time she sallied forth in her vast coach and rattled through the streets of Paris to one of her still extant dowagers--a Marechale, or a d.u.c.h.esse--or the more and more "delabre President." There the same company awaited her as that which met in her own house; it was simply a change of decorations; often enough for weeks together she had supper every night with the same half-dozen persons. The entertainment, apart from the supper itself, hardly varied. Occasionally there was a little music, more often there were cards and gambling. Madame du Deffand disliked gambling, but she loathed going to bed, and, if it came to a choice between the two, she did not hesitate: once, at the age of seventy-three, she sat up till seven o"clock in the morning playing vingt-et-un with Charles Fox. But distractions of that kind were merely incidental to the grand business of the night--the conversation. In the circle that, after an eight hours" sitting, broke up reluctantly at two or three every morning to meet again that same evening at six, talk continually flowed. For those strange creatures it seemed to form the very substance of life itself. It was the underlying essence, the circ.u.mambient ether, in which alone the pulsations of existence had their being; it was the one eternal reality; men might come and men might go, but talk went on for ever. It is difficult, especially for those born under the Saturnine influence of an English sky, quite to realise the nature of such conversation. Brilliant, charming, easy-flowing, gay and rapid it must have been; never profound, never intimate, never thrilling; but also never emphatic, never affected, never languishing, and never dull. Madame du Deffand herself had a most vigorous flow of language. "ecoutez! ecoutez!" Walpole used constantly to exclaim, trying to get in his points; but in vain; the sparkling cataract swept on unheeding. And indeed to listen was the wiser part--to drink in deliciously the animation of those quick, illimitable, exquisitely articulated syllables, to surrender one"s whole soul to the pure and penetrating precision of those phrases, to follow without a breath the happy swiftness of that fine-spun thread of thought. Then at moments her wit crystallised; the cataract threw off a shower of radiant jewels, which one caught as one might. Some of these have come down to us. Her remark on Montesquieu"s great book--"C"est de l"esprit sur les lois"--is an almost final criticism. Her famous "mot de Saint Denis," so dear to the heart of Voltaire, deserves to be once more recorded. A garrulous and credulous Cardinal was describing the martyrdom of Saint Denis the Areopagite: when his head was cut off, he took it up and carried it in his hands. That, said the Cardinal, was well known; what was not well known was the extraordinary fact that he walked with his head under his arm all the way from Montmartre to the Church of Saint Denis--a distance of six miles. "Ah, Monseigneur!" said Madame du Deffand, "dans une telle situation, il n"y a que le premier pas qui coute." At two o"clock the brilliance began to flag; the guests began to go; the dreadful moment was approaching. If Madame de Gramont happened to be there, there was still some hope, for Madame de Gramont abhorred going to bed almost as much as Madame du Deffand. Or there was just a chance that the Duc de Choiseul might come in at the last moment, and stay on for a couple of hours. But at length it was impossible to hesitate any longer; the chariot was at the door. She swept off, but it was still early; it was only half-past three; and the coachman was ordered to drive about the Boulevards for an hour before going home.
It was, after all, only natural that she should put off going to bed, for she rarely slept for more than two or three hours. The greater part of that empty time, during which conversation was impossible, she devoted to her books. But she hardly ever found anything to read that she really enjoyed. Of the two thousand volumes she possessed--all bound alike, and stamped on the back with her device of a cat--she had only read four or five hundred; the rest were impossible. She perpetually complained to Walpole of the extreme dearth of reading matter. In nothing, indeed, is the contrast more marked between that age and ours than in the quant.i.ty of books available for the ordinary reader. How the eighteenth century would envy us our innumerable novels, our biographies, our books of travel, all our easy approaches to knowledge and entertainment, our translations, our cheap reprints! In those days, even for a reader of catholic tastes, there was really very little to read. And, of course, Madame du Deffand"s tastes were far from catholic--they were fastidious to the last degree. She considered that Racine alone of writers had reached perfection, and that only once--in _Athalie_. Corneille carried her away for moments, but on the whole he was barbarous. She highly admired "quelques centaines de vers de M. de Voltaire." She thought Richardson and Fielding excellent, and she was enraptured by the style--but only by the style--of _Gil Blas_. And that was all. Everything else appeared to her either affected or pedantic or insipid. Walpole recommended to her a History of Malta; she tried it, but she soon gave it up--it mentioned the Crusades. She began Gibbon, but she found him superficial. She tried Buffon, but he was "d"une monotonie insupportable; il sait bien ce qu"il sait, mais il ne s"occupe que des betes; il faut l"etre un peu soi-meme pour se devouer a une telle occupation." She got hold of the memoirs of Saint-Simon in ma.n.u.script, and these amused her enormously; but she was so disgusted by the style that she was very nearly sick. At last, in despair, she embarked on a prose translation of Shakespeare. The result was unexpected; she was positively pleased. _Coriola.n.u.s_, it is true, "me semble, sauf votre respect, epouvantable, et n"a pas le sens commun"; and "pour _La Tempete_, je ne suis pas touchee de ce genre." But she was impressed by _Oth.e.l.lo_; she was interested by _Macbeth_; and she admired _Julius Caesar_, in spite of its bad taste. At _King Lear_, indeed, she had to draw the line. "Ah, mon Dieu! Quelle piece! Reellement la trouvez-vous belle? Elle me noircit l"ame a un point que je ne puis exprimer; c"est un amas de toutes les horreurs infernales." Her reader was an old soldier from the Invalides, who came round every morning early, and took up his position by her bedside. She lay back among the cushions, listening, for long hours. Was there ever a more incongruous company, a queerer trysting-place, for Goneril and Desdemona, Ariel and Lady Macbeth?
Often, even before the arrival of the old pensioner, she was at work dictating a letter, usually to Horace Walpole, occasionally to Madame de Choiseul or Voltaire. Her letters to Voltaire are enchanting; his replies are no less so; and it is much to be regretted that the whole correspondence has never been collected together in chronological order, and published as a separate book. The slim volume would be, of its kind, quite perfect. There was no love lost between the two old friends; they could not understand each other; Voltaire, alone of his generation, had thrown himself into the very vanguard of thought; to Madame du Deffand progress had no meaning, and thought itself was hardly more than an unpleasant necessity. She distrusted him profoundly, and he returned the compliment. Yet neither could do without the other: through her, he kept in touch with one of the most influential circles in Paris; and even she could not be insensible to the glory of corresponding with such a man.
Besides, in spite of all their differences, they admired each other genuinely, and they were held together by the habit of a long familiarity. The result was a marvellous display of epistolary art. If they had liked each other any better, they never would have troubled to write so well. They were on their best behaviour--exquisitely courteous and yet punctiliously at ease, like dancers in a minuet. His cajoleries are infinite; his deft sentences, mingling flattery with reflection, have almost the quality of a caress. She replies in the tone of a worshipper, glancing lightly at a hundred subjects, purring out her "Monsieur de Voltaire," and seeking his advice on literature and life.
He rejoins in that wonderful strain of epicurean stoicism of which he alone possessed the secret: and so the letters go on. Sometimes one just catches the glimpse of a claw beneath the soft pad, a grimace under the smile of elegance; and one remembers with a shock that, after all, one is reading the correspondence of a monkey and a cat.
Madame du Deffand"s style reflects, perhaps even more completely than that of Voltaire himself, the common-sense of the eighteenth century.
Its precision is absolute. It is like a line drawn in one stroke by a master, with the prompt exact.i.tude of an unerring subtlety. There is no breadth in it--no sense of colour and the concrete ma.s.s of things. One cannot wonder, as one reads her, that she hardly regretted her blindness. What did she lose by it? Certainly not
The sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer"s rose;
for what did she care for such particulars when her eyes were at their clearest? Her perception was intellectual; and to the penetrating glances of her mental vision the objects of the sensual world were mere irrelevance. The kind of writing produced by such a quality of mind may seem thin and barren to those accustomed to the wealth and variety of the Romantic school. Yet it will repay attention. The vocabulary is very small; but every word is the right one; this old lady of high society, who had never given a thought to her style, who wrote--and spelt--by the light of nature, was a past mistress of that most difficult of literary accomplishments--"l"art de dire en un mot tout ce qu"un mot peut dire."
The object of all art is to make suggestions. The romantic artist attains that end by using a mult.i.tude of different stimuli, by calling up image after image, recollection after recollection, until the reader"s mind is filled and held by a vivid and palpable evocation; the cla.s.sic works by the contrary method of a fine economy, and, ignoring everything but what is essential, trusts, by means of the exact propriety of his presentation, to produce the required effect. Madame du Deffand carries the cla.s.sical ideal to its furthest point. She never strikes more than once, and she always. .h.i.ts the nail on the head. Such is her skill that she sometimes seems to beat the Romantics even on their own ground: her reticences make a deeper impression than all the dottings of their i"s. The following pa.s.sage from a letter to Walpole is characteristic: