Studies in European literature

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Lit" iSS OO. 3

I

A^~^~^~^~^^

Harvard College
Library

FROH TBB BEQUEST OF

SAMUEL SHAPLEIGH

CLASS OF 1T1«
LiBsuun or H*itji>d Coumok

1

ii

f

Studies in European Literature

Taylorian Lectures

1889-1899

t

HEKRT FBOWDE

PUBLUHBB TO THB XPKmBBATTT OF OXFOBD

LOinX)N, EOmBUBOH

NEW TOSK

u

studies in P^uropoan Litorature

being the

Tayloi'iun fifctiiros

delivered by

S.MalIann€ W. Pater E-Dowden W.M-Rpseetti

T. W. Rollestos A. Morel-Fatlo H. Brown P. Bonlget

C. H. Herfoid H. Bntler Clarke W. P. Ker

Oxford

At the Ciarcmlon I're88

mdcccc

A

<^^<\^ COL

JAN 31 1901

BRA

OXFOKO: BOBACB BAST

wmnma, to tbb umtbbsitt

"y

ii'

J the foundation of an Annual Lecture at the
Taylor Institution on some subject of Foreign
Literature provision was made for publication.
The present volume^ containing all the Lectures
hitherto delivered, vnll, it is hoped, contribute
to further the study of foreign letters beyond as
well as in the University.
The Curators of the Taylor Institution wish to
express their hearty gratitude to those scholars
who have, by accepting the post of Lecturer,
enabled them to carry out with success the
design they had in view.

Oxford, 1900.

.

CONTENTS

PAGE

LiTEBABY GbITICISM IN FbANCE , I

Professor Dowden [November 20, 1889]

Pbospeb Mj^bim^e 31

WcUter H. Pater, M^. [November 17, 1890]

Leopabdi 55

W. M. Rassetti [November 24, 1891]

Lessing and MoDEBir Gebman Litebatube . 93

7*. W, RolUston [November 29, 1892]

La Musique et lbs Lettbes 131

Stephane MallamU [Februaiy 28, 1894]

L'ESPAONE DU DOK QUIJOTE I49

A, MoreUFatio [November 21, 1894]

Paolo Sabpi 209

H, B, F. Broum, New College [November 20, 1895]

GUSTAVE FlAUBEBT 253

Paul Bourget [June 23, 1897]

Goethe's Italian Joubney 275

Professor Hefford, LiU*D. [November 18, 1897]

The Spanish Rogub-Stoby (Novela de Pioabos) . 313
Henry Butler Clarke^ MA, [November ii, 1898]

. Boccaccio 351

Professor Ker, M.A. [Februaiy 27, igoo]

I

LITERARY CRITICISM
IN FRANCE

WHEN the Curators of the Taylorian Institution
honoured me with an invitation to lecture on
some subject connected with the study of modem litera-
ture^ I glanced back oyer my recent readings and I
found that a large part, perhaps an undue proportion of
it, had consisted of French literary history and French
literary criticism. The recent death of that eminent
critic^ M. Scherer^ had led me to make a survey of his
writings. I had found in M. Bruneti^re an instructor
vigorous and severe in matters of literature ; one who
allies modem thought with classical tradition. I had
beguiled some hours^ not more pleasantly than profit-
ably^ with M. Jules Lemaitre's bright if slender studies
of contemporary writers, in which the play of ideas is
contrived with all the skill and grace of a decorative art.
I had followed M. Paul Bourget, as many of us have
done, through his more laborious analjrses in which he
investigates, by means of typical representatives in litera-
ture, the moral life of our time. And I had in some
measure possessed mjrself of the legacy of thought left to
us by two young writers, ardent students, interested in

2 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

the philosophical aspects of literature^ whose premature
loss French letters must deplore^ M. Guyau^ the author
of several volumes on questions of morals and aesthetics^
and M. Hennequin, whose attempt to draw the outlines
of a system of scientific criticism has at least the merit
of bold ingenuity. It seemed to me that I had fresh in
my mind matter which must be of interest to all who
care for literature^ and that I should not do ill if I were
to try to gather up some of my impressions on recent
literary criticism, and especially on methods or proposed
methods of criticism in France.

Nearly a generation has passed since a distinguished
son of Oxford, Mr. Matthew Arnold, declared that the
chief need of our time — and especially the need of our
own country — was a truer and more enlightened
criticism. He did not speak merely of literature;
he meant that we needed a fresh current of ideas
about life in its various provinces. But he included
the province of literature, the importance of which,
and especially of poetry, no man estimated more highly
than did Mr. Arnold. And as the essential prelude to
a better criticism, he made his gallant, and far from
unsuccessful, effort to disturb our national self-com-
placency, to make us feel that Philistia is not a land
which is very far off ; he made the experiment, which
he regarded as in the best sense patriotic, to rearrange
for our uses the tune of Rule Britannia in a minor key.
His contribution to our self-knowledge was a valuable
one, if wisely used. The elegant lamentations of the
prophet over his people in captivity to the Philistines
were more than elegant, they were inspired by a fine
ideal of intellectual freedom, and were animated by a
courageous hope that the ideal might be, in part at least.

DOWDEN 3

attained. Disciples, however, too often parody the
master, and I am not sure that success in any other
affectation is more cheaply won than in the affectation
of depreciating one's kinsfolk and one's home. There is
a Jaques-like melancholy arising from the sundry con-
templation of one's intellectual travel, which disinclines
its possessor for simple household tasks. Our British
inaccessibility to ideas, our wilfulness of temper, our
caprices of intellect, our insular narrowness, the provin-
ciality of our thought, the brutality of our journals,
the banality of our popular teachers, our incapacity to
govern, or at least to be gracious in governing— these
are themes on which it has become easy to dilate :**

* Most can raise the flowen now,
For all hare got the seed.'

And with the aid of a happy eclecticism which chooses
for comparison the bright abroad with the dark or dull
at home, and reserves all its amiable partiality and
dainty enthusiasm for our neighbours, it really has not
been difficult to acquire a new and superior kind of
complacency, the complacency of national self-depre-
ciation.

As regards the criticism of literature, Mr. Arnold
did good service in directing our eyes to France, and
when we spoke of French literary criticism any time in
the fifties and sixties of this century, we meant first of
all Sainte-Beuve. Here Mr. Arnold was surely right,
nor did he depart from the balance and measure which
he so highly valued when, in the Encyclopaedia
Britannicay he described Sainte-Beuve as an unrivalled
guide to bring us to a knowledge of the French genius
and literature — ^ perfect, so far as a poor mortal critic
can be perfect, in knowledge of his subject, in tact, in

B2

4 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

tone.' We are all pupils of Sainte-Beuve. But to
what Mr. Arnold has said of Sainte-Beuve, I should
like to add this : that while the great critic was French
in his tact^ French in his art of finely insinuating
opinions^ in his seeming bonhomiey and at the same
time in the delicate malice of his pen, French above all
in his sense of the intimate relations of literature with
social life, his method as a critic was not the dominant
method of France; it was hardly characteristic of the
French intellect ; it was his own method, and it had
been in great measure our English method \

For, while possessing extraordinary mobility within
certain limits seldom overpassed, the French intellect,
as compared with that of England, is pre-eminently
systematic, and to attain system, or method, or order
in its ideas, it is often content to view things in an
abstract or generalizing way, or even to omit things
which present a difficulty to the systematizer. At the
highest this order is a manifestation of reason, and
when it imposes itself upon our minds, it brings with it
that sense of freedom which accompanies the recogni-
tion of a law. But when by evading difficulties a
pseudo-order is established, and when this is found, as
it inevitably will be found in the course of time, to be
a tyranny, then the spirit of system becomes really an
element of disorder, provoking the spirit of anarchy,
and, as M. Nisard has called it, the spirit of chimera.
In a nation where the tendency towards centralization
is strong, and a central authority has been constituted,
an order of ideas, which is probably in part true, in

^ Mr. Arnold's ^e does not apply to the earlier writings of
Sainte-Beuve, which were wanting in critical balance^ and often in
critical disinterestedness.

DOWDEN 5

part false, will be imposed hj that authority, and as
years go by this will become traditional. So it was in
France. The Academy was precisely such a central
authority in matters intellectual, and from its origin it
asserted a claim to be a tribunal in literary criticism.
It imposed a doctrine, and created a tradition. But
even among writers who revolted from the traditional
or Academical manner in criticism, the spirit of system
was often present, for the spirit of system is charac-
teristic of the intellect of France. An idea, a dogma
was denounced, and the facts were selected or compelled
to square with the idea ; an age was reduced to some
formula which was supposed to express the spirit of
that age, and the writers of the time were attenuated
into proofs of a theory.

Now Sainte-Beuve's method as a critic was as far as
possible removed from this abstract and doctrinaire
method. He loved ideas, but he feared the tyranny of
an idea. He was on his guard against the spirit of
system. Upon his seal was engraved the English word
' Truth,' and the root of everything in his criticism, as
Mr. Arnold said of him, is his simple-hearted devotion
to truth. Mr. Arnold might have added that his
method for the discovery of truth is the method charac-
teristic of the best English minds, that of living and
working in the closest relation with facts, and inces-
santly revising his opinions so that they may be in
accord with facts. It will be in the memory of readers
of Sainte-Beuve that in 1869, in the articles on
Chateaubriand, afterwards included in the third volume
of Nouveaua Lundis, he turned aside to give an exposi-
tion of his own critical method. He had been re-
proached with the fact that he had no theory. ^ Those

6 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

who deal most favourably with me have been pleased to
say that I am a suiBciently good judge, but a judge
who is without a code.' And while admitting that
there existed no 'code Sainte-Beuve,' he went on to
maintain that he had a method, formed by practice, and
to explain what that method was. It was that for
which afterwards, when reviewing a work by M.
Deschanel, he accepted the name of naturalistic
criticism. He tells us how we are inevitably carried
from the book under our view to the entire work of the
author, and so to the author himself; how we should
study the author as forming one of a group with the
other members of his household, and in particular that
it is wise to look for his talent in the mother, and, if
there be sisters, in one or more of the sisters ; how we
should seek for him in 'le premier milieu,' the group of
friends and contemporaries who surrounded him at the
moment when his genius first became full-fledged;
how again we should choose for special observation the
moment when he begins to decay, or decline, or deviate
from his true line of advance under the influences of
the world; for such a moment comes, says Sainte-
Beuve, to almost every man ; how we should approach
our author through his admirers and through his
enemies ; and how, as the result of all these processes
of study, sometimes the right word emerges which
claims, beyond all power of resistance, to be a defini-
tion of the author's peculiar talent; such an one is
a 'rhetorician,' such an one an 'improvisator of genius.'
Chateaubriand himself, the subject of Sainte-Beuve's
causerie, is 'an Epicurean with the imagination of
a Catholic' But, adds Sainte-Beuve, let us wait for
this characteristic name, let us not hasten to give it.

DOWDEN 7

This method of Sainte-Beuve^ this inductive or
naturalistic method^ which advances cautiously from
details to principles^ and which is ever on its guard
against the idols that deceive the mind^ did not^ as he
says, quite satisfy even his admirers among his own
countrymen. They termed his criticism a negative
criticism, without a code of principles ; they demanded
a theory. But it is a method which accords well with
our English habits of thought ; and the fact is perhaps
worth noting that while Mr. Arnold was engaged in
indicating, for our use, the vices and the foibles of
English criticism as compared with that of France,
Sainte-Beuve was thinking of a great English philo-
sopher as the best preparatory master for those who
would acquire a sure judgement in literature. ^ To be
in literary history and criticism a disciple of Bacon,^
he wrote, ^ seems to me the need of our time.'
Bacon laid his foundations on a solid groundwork of
facts, but it was his whole purpose to rise from these
to general truths. And Sainte-Beuve looked forward
to a time when as the result of countless observations,
a science might come into existence which should be
able to arrange into their various species or families
the varieties of human intellect and character, so that
the dominant quality of a mind being ascertained we
might be able to infer from this a group of subordinate
qualities. But even in his anticipations of a science of
criticism Sainte-Beuve would not permit the spirit of
system to tyrannize over him. Such a science, he says,
can never be quite of the same kind as botany or
zoology ; man has ^ what is called freedom of will^'
which at all events presupposes a great complexity in
possible combinations. And even if at some remote

8 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

period, this science of human minds should be
oi^anized, it will always be so delicate and mobile,
says Sainte-Beuve, that 'it will exist only for those
who have a natural calling for it, and a true gift for
observation; it will always be an art requiring a skilful
artist, as medicine requires medical tact in those who
practise it.' There are numberless obscure phenomena
to be dealt with in the criticism of literature, and they
are the phenomena of life, in perpetual process of
change ; there are nuances to be caught, which, in the
words of one who has tried to observe and record them,
are 'more fugitive than the play of light on the waters/
Sainte-Beuve felt that to keep a living mind in contact
with life must for the present be the chief efEort of
criticism, to touch here some vital point, and again
some other point there. In that remarkable volume,
Le Roman ExpMmental, in which M. Zola deals with
his fellow authors not so much in the manner of
a judge as in that of a truculent gendarme, he lays
violent hold on Sainte-Beuve, claiming him as essen-
tially a critic of his own so-called experimental school ;
not, indeed, that Sainte-Beuve's was one of those
superior minds which comprehend their age, for was
he not rather repelled than subdued by the genius
of Balzac, and did he not fail to perceive that the
romantic movement of 1830 was no more than the cry
for deliverance from dogma and tradition of an age on
its way to the naturalism of M. Zola himself ? Still,
says M. Zola, in certain pages Sainte-Beuve formulated
with a tranquil daring the experimental method 'which
we put in practice.' And it is true that there are
points of contact between Sainte-Beuve's criticism,
with its careful study of the author's tniiieu, and the

DOWDEN 9

doctrines proclaimed by M. Zola. But what a contrast
between the spirits of the two men ; what a contrast
in the application to life even of the ideas which they
possessed in common ! M. Zola^ whose mind is over-
ridden, if ever a mind was, by the spirit of system;
whose work, misnamed realistic, is one monstrous
idealizing of humanity under the types of the man-
brute and the woman-brute ; and Sainte-Beuve, who in
his method would fain be the disciple of our English
Bacon; Sainte-Beuve, ever alert and mobile, ever
fitting his mind to the nicenesses of fact, or tentatively
grouping his facts in the hope that he may ascertain
their law ; Sainte-Beuve, whom, if the word ^ realism '
be forced upon us, as it seems to be at the present
time, we may name a genuine realist in the inductive
study of the temperaments of all sorts and conditions
of men.

Of M. Scherer I spoke a few days after his death in
the pages of the Fortnightly Review, and I shall only
say here that he resembled Sainte-Beuve at least in this,
that he too feared the tyranny of the spirit of system.
In his earlier years, indeed, he had aspired as a philo-
sophical thinker and a theologian to the possession of
a body of absolute beliefs ; but he found, or thought he
found, that all which he had supposed to be fixed was
moving, was altering its shape and position. He saw,
or thought he saw, a sinking of the soil on which he
had buUt his house as if to last for ever, a gaining of
the tide upon the solid land ; he recognized, as so many
have had to recognize in this century of moral difficulty,
the processes of the evolution, or at least the vicissitude,
of beliefs. He ceased to hope for truth absolute, but it
was not as one disillusioned and disenchanted that he

lo FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

took refuge in the relative. He felt that his appointed
task of truth-seeking had grown more serious and more
full of promise. It seemed to him that there was some-
thing childish in the play of building up elaborate
erections of dogma^ ingenious toy-houses^ to be tumbled
down presently by the trailing skirts of Time. The
business of a man was rather, as he conceived it, to live
by the truth of to-day, trusting that it would develop
into the completer truth of to-morrow, to contribute
something of sound knowledge and well-considered
opinion to the common fund, to work with all other
honest minds towards some common result, though
what that result may be, none of us as yet can be
aware. He thought that he could perceive a logic in
the general movement of the human mind, and he was
content, for his own part, to contribute a fragment of
truth here and a fragment there which might be taken
up in the vast inductions of that mighty logician, the
Zeit'Geist.

A critic of such a temper as this can hardly set up
absolute standards by which to judge, he can hardly
make any one age the final test of another, and con-
demn the classic because it is not romantic, or the
romantic because it is not classic. Yet he is far from
being a sceptic either in matters of faith or matters of
literary conviction; he may possess very clear and
strong opinions, and indeed it becomes his duty to give
a decided expression to his own view of truth, even if
it be but a partial view, for how otherwise can he assist
in the general movement of thought ? The discomfiture
of the absolute, as Scherer has said, is an aid to toler-
ance, is even favourable to indulgence, but it need not
and should not paralyze the judgement, or hopelessly

DOWDEN II

perplex the literary conscience. And Scherer himself
was indeed at times more inclined to severity than to
indulgence; behind the man^ who was the nominal
subject of his criticism^ he saw the idea^ and with an
idea it is not necessary to observe the punctilio of fine
manners. He must at the same time make his own
idea precise^ must argue out his own thesis. Yet he
feels all the while that his own idea^ his own thesis, has
only a relative value, and that his criticism is at best
something tentative. Scherer's conviction that all our
truths are only relative, and that none the less they are
of the utmost importance to us, gives in great measure
its special character, at once tentative and full of
decision, to his criticism.

But Scherer came on his father's side from a Swiss
family, and the Parisian critic had been formed in the
school of Protestant Geneva; Sainte-Beuve's mother
was of English origin, and his reading as a boy was
largely in our English books. These are facts which
may fairly be noted by one who accepts Sainte-Beuve's
principles of literary investigation. The critical methods
characteristic of the French intellect as contrasted with
the English intellect are not the methods which guide
and govern the work of these writers. Their work
lacks the large crdonnancej the ruling logic, the vuea
d'ensemble in which the French mind, inheritor of Latin
tradition, delights. Without a moment's resistance we
yield ourselves to such guides, because the processes of
their minds agree with those to which we are accus-
tomed, only they are conducted by them with an ease
and grace which with us are rare. But perhaps we gain
more, or at least something more distinctive, from con-
tact with intellects of a type which differs essentially

L_

la FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

£rom the English type^ minds more speculative than
om^, more apt in bringing masses of concrete fact
under the rule and regimen of ideas. These charac-
teristics of the French intellect are exhibited in a very
impressive way by two well-known histories of litera-
ture, which, as regards methods and principles of criti-
cism, stand as far apart from each other as it is possible
to conceive — Nisard's History of French Litercdvre,
and the much more celebrated History of English
Literature by Taine. The one is of the elder school of
criticism, dogmatic and traditional ; the other is of the
newer school, and claims to be considered scientific.
Both are works over which ideas preside — or perhaps
we might say dominate with an excessive authority.
A mind of the English type could hardly have produced
either of the two.

The name of M. D^ir^ Nisard seems to carrv us far
into the past. It is more than half a century since he
made his masked attack on the Romantic school, then
in its fervid youth, in his Latin Poets of the Decadence,
and put forth his famous manifesto against la litt4rature
facile. It was in 1840 that the first two volumes of his
History of French Literature appeared : but twenty
years passed before that work was completed ; and it is
little more than twelve months since M. Nisard gave to
the public his Souvenirs et Notes biographiqueSj volumes
followed, perhaps unfortunately for his fame, by the
JEgri Somnia of the present year. Such a life of
devotion to letters is rare, and the unity of his career
was no less remarkable than its length. For sixty
years M. Nisard was a guardian of the dignity of
French letters, a guardian of the purity of the French
language, a maintainer of the traditions of learning and

r

DOWDEN 13

thought^ an inflexible judge in matters of intellect and
taste. The aggressive sallies of his earlier years were
only part of the system of defence which at a later
time he conducted with greater reserve from within the
stronghold of his own ideas. When the first volumes
of his History of French Literature were written^
M. Nisard^s doctrine and method were fully formed,
and when, twenty years later, he finished his task, it
seemed never to have been interrupted ; and though the
author was of Voltaire's opinion that he who does not
know how to correct, does not know how to write, there
was nothing to alter in essentials of the former part of
the work. It is a work which cannot be popular, for
its method is opposed to that which at present has the
mastery, and its style has a magisterial, almost a monu-
mental, concision, which is not to the liking of the
crowd of torpid readers. It is, says a contemporary
critic, a feature in common between two writers, in
other respects so unlike, M. Nisard and M. Renan, that
neither can be enjoyed by the common mass of readers,
because ^ they are equally concerned, though in different
ways, with the effort to be sober and simple, to efface
colours that are over lively, and never to depart, in the
temperate expression of their thought, from that scrupu-
lous precision and exquisite netteti which Vauvenargues
has named le vemis des maitresJ^ But though it cannot
live the noisy life of a popular book, M. Nisard's History
remains, and does its work, a work all the more valuable
because it resists in many ways the currents of opinion
and taste in our age.

What, then, is M. Nisard's method ? It is as far as
possible removed from the method of Sainte-Beuve,
as far as possible removed from what I may call the

14 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

English method of criticism. A piece of literature — a
poem, a novel, a play — carries Sainte-Beuve to the other
works of the author, whether they be of the same kind or
not, and thence to the author himself, to the little group
of persons with whom he lived and acted, and to the
general society of which he formed a member. M. Nisard
views the work apart from its author and apart from
his other works, if those other works be of a different
literary species. He compares this book or that with
other books of the same genrCj or rather with the type
of the genrey which, by a process of abstraction, he has
formed in his own mind ; he brings it into comparison
with his ideal of the peculiar genius of the nation, his
ideal of the genius of France, if the book be French ;
he tests its language by his ideal of the genius of the
French language ; finally, he compares it with his ideal
of the genius of humanity as embodied in the best
literature of the world, to whatever country or age that
literature may belong. Criticism, as conceived by
M. Nisard, confronts each work of literature with a
threefold ideal — that of the nation, that of the language,
that of humanity: 'elle note ce qui s'en rapproche;
voiUb le bon: ce qui s'en ^loigne; voilit le mauvais.'
The aim of such criticism, according to M. Nisard's
own definition, is ^ to regulate our intellectual pleasures,
to free literature from the tyranny of the notion that
there is no disputing about tastes, to constitute an exact
science, intent rather on guiding than gratifying the
mind.^

Surely a noble aim — to free us from the tyranny of
intellectual anarchy. We all tacitly acknowledge that
there is a hierarchy of intellectual pleasures, and it is
M. Nisard^s purpose to call upon these individual pre-

DOWDEN 15

ferences and aversions to come forward and justify
themselves or stand condemned in the light of human
reason. The historian of French literature has some-
where contrasted two remarkable figures of the Re-
naissance and Reformation— Montaigne and Calvin;
Montaigne, a representative of the spirit of curiosity
then abroad, and, notwithstanding his sceptical ten-
dency, a lover of the truth; Calvin, a representative
of theological system and rigour, a wielder of the logic
of the abstract idea. We may describe Sainte-Beuve
as a nineteenth-century descendant of Montaigne, with
the accumulated erudition and the heightened sensi-
bility of this latter time. M. Nisard carries into the
province of literature something of Calvin's spirit of
system, and we can hardly help admiring the fine
intolerance of his orthodoxy as he condemns some
heretic who disbelieves or doubts the authority of the
great classical age of French letters. He would have
criticism proceed rather by exclusions than by admis-
sions, and has no patience with the ^ facile and accom-
modating admirations of eclecticism ;' he sees a sign of
decadence in the ambition peculiar to our time which
pretends to reunite in French literary art all the
excellences and all the liberties of foreign literatures ^.
It is easy to indulge a diluted sympathy with every-
thing; it is harder, but better, to distinguish the evil
from the good, and to stand an armed champion of
reason, order, beauty.

The genius of France, according to M. Nisard, is
more inclined to discipline than to liberty ; it regards
the former — discipline — as the more fruitful in ad-
mirable results. An eminent writer in France is ' the

^ Ei8i, de la LUUratum FranfoiM^ i. 13.

i6 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

organ of all^ rather than a privil^ed person who has
thoughts belongmg to himself alone^ which he imposes
on bis fellows by an extraordinary right.' And hence^
French literature, avoiding, when at its best, all indi-
vidual caprice, all license of sensibility or imagination,
is, as it were, the Uviug realization of the government
of the human faculties by reason. It is not so with
the literature of the North; there the equilibrium of
the faculties is disturbed, there liberty often prevsuls
over discipline, there reverie or subtlety often usurps
the place of reason. It is not so with the literatures
of the South ; there passion often prevails over reason,
and the language of metaphor takes the place of the
language of intelligence. But human reason did not
come to. maturity in France until the great age of
classical literature, the age of Moli^re and Racine and
La Fontaine, of Bossuet and Pascal, of La Bruyk^e
and La Rochefoucauld. Then first in French literature
humanity became completely conscious of itself, then,
first, man was conceived as man in all the plenitude
of his powers, then, first, human nature was adequately
represented and rendered in literary art. And since
that great age, if we strike the balance of gains and
losses we shall find perhaps that the gains are exceeded
by the losses. In the eighteenth century, which claimed
to be the age of reason, the saeculum rationalisticumy
the authority of reason in fact declined, and the
spirit of Utopia, the chimerical spirit, exemplified by
Rousseau, obtained the mastery. As to our own
century, the magisterial words of condemnation uttered
by M. Nisard half a century ago have perhaps gained
in significance since the day on which his LcUin Poets
of the Decadence appeared. We have, as he says.

DOWDEN 17

analyses infinitely subtle of certain moral situations ;
delicate investigations of the states^ often morbid states,
of individual souls; but where is the great art that
deals with man as man in those larger powars and
passions which vary littie from generation to genera-
tion ? The difficulties of our social problems^ the mass
of talents for which^ in our old world, scope can
hardly be found, the consequent restlessness of spirit,
the lack of religious discipline, the malady of doubt,
the pcditical passions of the time, a boundless freedom
of desires, ambitions, sensations, and almost no pro-
portion between power and desire, a refinement of
intelligence which multiplies our wants — these were
enumerated long since by M. Nisard as causes un-
favourable to the growth of a great nineteenth-century
literature; and though the word pessimum was not in
fashion in 1854, the anxious physician of his age fore-
saw the modem nudady.

No wonder that such a critic was not popular with
young and ardent spirits in the first fervours of the
Romantic movement. But M. Nisard^s work, as I
have said, remains, and partiy by virtue of the fact
that he maintained the great tradition of French
letters. In the literature of the age of Louis XIV,
where M. Taine sees only or chiefly the literature of
a court and courtiers, he saw the genius of humanity
embodied and expressed by the special genius of the
Frendi nation. His view was determined by a deeper
and a truer insight than that of M. Taine or of the
romantic critics of an earlier date. The revolt of the
Romantic school itself testifies to the strength in France
of the classical tradition, and no critic of French
can be a sure guide who does not recognize

c

l8 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

the force and value of that tradition. We, who have
had no one age supremely great, who have had the
double tradition of the age of Queen Elizabeth and
the age of Queen Anne, this embodying the truths of
discipline and that the truths of liberty, can find in
our literary history no one stream of tendency ^ strong
without rage, without overflowing, full,' at all corre-
sponding to that derived in French literary history from
the age of Louis XIV. We may feel sure that how-
ever the fashions of literature may change, the best
mind of France must always, from time to time, make
a return upon the wonderful group of writers, poets,
thinkers, orators, epigrammatists, of the seventeenth
century, and find in them imdying masters of thought,
of art, of literary style. And this is what the idealist
school of critics, represented by M. Nisard, have
rightly understood, and what the historical school, re-
presented by M. Taine, has failed to perceive. At the
present moment we may rejoice to see so eminent
a critic as M. Brunetiere taking vigorous part in the
much-needed return upon the masters of the great
tradition. He comes to them in no servile spirit to
pay blind homage. Without accepting the ingenious
paradox that every classic was in his own day a
romantic, he perceives that these revered masters were
in fact innovators, and encountered no little opposition
from their contemporaries; they enlarged the bounds
of art; and one who now dares to enlarge the bounds
and break the barriers may be in the truest sense the
disciple of Racine and of Mbliere. He perceives that
the immortal part of such a writer as Racine is not
his reproduction of the tone and manners of the
Court. If Assu^rus, in Esther, speaks in the mode of

DOWDEN 19

Louis XIV, or Berenice has a likeness to Marie de
Mandni^ tMs^ as M. Bruneti^re says^ is precisely what
is feeble in Racine, this is the part of his work which
has felt the effects of time, the part which is dead.
The enduring part of his work is that which, if French
of the seventeenth century is something more than
French, the part which is human, and which in 1889
has precisely the same value that it had in the fortunate
days when his masterpieces appeared for the first time
on the stage ^.

M. Bruneti^, from whose review of a study of
Racine by M. Deschanel I have cited some words, is,
like Nisard, a critic who values principles, who himself
possesses a literary doctrine, and who certainly does
not squander his gift of admiration in various and
facile sympathies. He has been described as a less
amiable, less elegant, less delicate Nisard: and it is
true that he has not Nisard^s fineness of touch nor his
concinnity of style; but M. Bruneti^re suffers less than
Nisard from the rigour of system, and he is far more
than Nisard in sympathy with contemporary ideas. He
is a combative thinker, with a logic supported by solid
erudition and reinforced by a resolute temper which
does not shrink from the severities of controversy.
Tet to a certain extent M. Bruneti^ has been a
conciliator, attempting, as he has done, to distinguish
what is true and fruitful in that movement of the
present day which has claimed the titie of ^ naturalism,'
and to ally this with the truths of that other art dis-^
credited or extolled under the name of ^ idealistic.^ He
recognizes the power of environing circumstances, the
^milieu,' in forming the characters of men and deter-

^ F. Bnmetitoe, Hi$totn ei Littiraiuin, ii. 9.

C2

20 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

mining their action; but^ as becomes one who does
honour to the great art of the seventeenth century^ the
art of Comeille and Racine^ he recognizes also that
(to use Sainte-Beuve's hesitating phrase) there is in
man that which they call freedom of wiU. ' Man hath
all which nature hath, but more/ wrote Matthew
Arnold in a memorable sonnet, in which perhaps he had
that far more admirable poem of Goethe, Das GottUchey
in his mind : —

'Kan, and man only,
Aohieyee the impossible^
He can distingaish.
Elect and direct'

In an article on M. Paul Bourget's remarkable novel
Le Disciple, in the Revue des Deux Mondes of July i,
M. Brunetiere, in the interest of art and of sound criti-
cism no less than in the interest of morality and social
life, sets himself to oppose what he terms the great
error of the last hundred years, the sophism which
reduces man to a part of nature. In art, in science, in
morals, argues M. Brunetiere, man is human in pro-
portion as he separates himself from nature.

' It is natural^' he writes, ' that the law of the stronger and the
more skilful should prevail in the animal world ; but this, precisely,
is not human, ... To live in the present, as if it had no existence,
as if it were merely the continuation of the post and the prepara-
tion for the ftiture— this is human, and there is nothing less naftiraL
By justice and by pity to compensate for the inequalities which
nature, imperfectly subdued, stiU allows to subsist among men —
this is human, and there is nothing less natural Far from loosening,
to draw closer the ties of marriage and the family, without whidi
society can no more progress than life can organize iteelf without
a cell — ^this is human, and there is nothing less natural. Without
attempting to destroy the passions, to teach them moderation, and,
if need be, to place them nnder restraint — this is human, and there
is nothing less naituraL And finally, on the ruins of the base and

DOWDEN 21

saperstitioiis wonhip of force, to establiah, if we Oftn, the
flOTereignty of justice — thi« is human, and this, above all, is an effort
which is not natural,'

I have quoted this passage from M. Bruneti^re
because^ aa we are all aware^ there is a school of
literary criticism^ brought into existence by the same
tendencies of the present time which have given birth
to what M* Zola somewhat absurdly names ^the ex-
perimental novel/ a school of criticism, led by an
eminent French thinker, which reduces to a minimum
the independence and originating force of the artist,
and is pleased to exhibit him in a group with his con-
temporaries aa the natural and inevitable product of
ancestry and ambient circumstances. Since the pub-
lication of M. Taine's History of English Literature
some twenty-five years ago, all students of literature
and art have been more or less under the spell of that
triple charm — ^the race, the milieu, and the moment,
and every critic has found it needful to get the magic
formula by heart* A new dogmatism, which in the
name of science holds all dogma in scorn, has set forth
its credo; and the spirit of system, that passion for
intellectual ordonnance, characteristic of the French
mind, has once again manifested itself in a powerful
manner. M, Taine's great work is one which at first
overmasters the reader with its clear and broad design,
its comprehensive logic, its scientific claims, its multi-
tude of facts arranged under their proper rubrics; it
seems for a little while to put a new organon for the
study of literature into our hands ; and the rest of our
time, I fear, is spent in making ever larger and larger
reservation. The truth is, as Scherer noticed, that
professing to proceed by the way of induction, M. Taine

a2 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

is constantly deductive in his method. ' He begins by
giving us a formula^ and then draws from that formula
the consequences and conclusions which, as he believes,
are included in it.' The works of this writer or of that
are studied not for their own sakes, but in order that they
may furnish proofs of the thesis of the scientific critic.
^His crowd of descriptions, his accumulation of details'
— ^I quote the words, eminently just, of Scherer — ^ his
piled-up phrases are so many arguments urged upon the
reader. We perceive the dialectic even underthe imagery*
I never read M. Taine without thinking of those gigantic
steam hammers, which strike with noisy and redoubled
blows, which make a thousand sparks fly, and under
whose incessant shock the steel is beaten out and
shaped. Everything here gives us the idea of power,
the sense of force; but we have to add that one is
stunned by so much noise, and that, after all, a style
which has the solidity and the brilliancy of metal has
also sometimes its hardness and heaviness.'

Two debts we certainly owe to M. Taine, and we
acknowledge them with gratitude; first, he has helped
us to feel the close kinship between the literature of
each epoch and the various other manifestations of the
mind of the time; and secondly, he has helped to
moderate the passion for pronouncing judgements of
good and evil founded on the narrow aesthetics of the
taste of our own day. We have all learnt from M.
Taine the art of bringing significant facts from the
details of social manners, government, laws, fashions of
speech, even fashions of dress, into comparison with
contemporaneous facts of literature. He has made it
easier for us to ascertain, at least in its larger features,
what is called the spirit of an age. And this is much*

DOWDEN 23

But there are two things which as they express them-
selves in literature he has failed to enable us to com-
prehend — ^the individual genius of an artist^ that unique
power of seeing^ feeling, imagining, what he and he
alone possesses; and again, the universal mind of
humanity, that which is not bounded by an epoch nor
contained by a race, but which lives alike in the pillars
of the Parthenon and in the vault of the Gothic cathe-
dral, which equally inspires the noblest scenes of Sopho-
cles and of Shakespeare, which makes beautiful the
tale of Achilles' wrath and that of the fall of the Scot-
tish Douglas* Of what is local and temporary in art
M* Taine q>eaks with extraordinary energy. Of what
is abiding and universal he has less to say. Each
author whom he studies is presented to us as the crea-
ture of the circumstances of his time, or at the highest
as a representative of his tribe and people* The critic
does not possess that delicate tact which would enable
him to discover the individuality of each writer; it
suits his thesis rather to view the individual as one
member of a group. Nor does he possess that higher
philosophical power which would enable him to see
in each great work of art the laws of the universal
mind of man.

M. Taine has served us also, I have said, by mode-
rating our zeal for a narrow kind of judicial criticism,
which pronounces a work of art to be good or bad as it
approaches or departs from some standard set up by
the taste or fashion of our own day. He started indeed
from a false position — that criticism was to attempt no
more than to note the characteristics of the various
works of literature and art, and to look for their causes.
It was, he said, to be a sort of botany applied not to

24 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

plants^ but to the works of men. Botany does not
pronounee the rose superior to the lily, nor should
criticism attempt to establish a hierarchy 'in art;
enough, if it records characteristics and ascertains
their causes. But it will be remembered that M. Taine
quickly abandoned his false position. In his lectures
on T%e Ideal in Art he showed himself as ready to
absolve or condemn as any disciple of the old aesthetic,
and as I remember putting it in a review of M. Taine's
volume which appeared soon after its puUicalion, he
flaid in unmistakable language, ^Despise pre-Raphaelite
art, it is ascetic,' ^Despise the English school of
painting, it is literary ;' 'Admire above all else Renais-
sance art ; it shows you what painting ought to show,
straight limbs, well-developed muscles, and a healthy
skin/

M. Taine, in fact, did not cease to be a judicial
critic ; but he endeavoured to base his judgements on
principles of a different kind from those accepted by
the older school of judicial critics. He endeavoured to
find what we may call an objective standard of litenry
and artistic merit, one which should be independent of
the variations of individual caprice and current habits of
thought and feeling. A great work of art, he tells us,
is one in which the artist first recognizes, in the object
he would represent, the predominance of its central
characteristic — ^the flesh-eating lust, for example, of
the greater camivora ; and secondly, by a conveigence
of effects heightens in his representation the visible or
felt predominance of that characteristic, so that with
a great animal painter the lion becomes indeed — as
a zoologist has described the creature — a jaw mounted
on four feet So also, in representing man, the artist

DOWDEN 25

or author who exhibits the predominance of the master
powers of our manhood ranks higher than he does who^
merely records a passing fashion^ or even thim he who
interprets the mind of a single generaticm. A book
which possesses an universal and immortal life^ like the
P$alfMy the IKady the Imitatiany the plays of Shake-
speare^ attains this deserved pre-eminence by virtue of
its ideal representation of what is central and pre*
dominant in man. Thus M. Taine^ no less than M.
Nisard^ attempts to establish a hierarchy of intellectual
pleasures, and he has perhaps this advantage over
M. Nisard that he does not identify the human reason
with the genius of the French people^ nor this again
with its manifestation in the literature of the age of
Louis XIV. If he does not reap the gains, he does not
suffer from the narrowing influence of the French
tradition of which we are sometimes sensible in M.
Nisard, he does not yield to that noble pride or prejudice
which once drew from Sainte-Beuve the impatient excla-
mation — ^Toujoursl'esprit fran9ais et sa glorification!'
M. Bruneti^re, in a thoughtful article on the
Literary Movement of the Nineteenth Century ^ in the
Revue des Deux Mondes of October 15, has justiy
distinguished M. Taine as the critic who has expressed
most powerfully the tendencies of that movement which
has carried literature forward into new ways since the
Romantic movement has ceased to be a living force.
The Romantic movement was essentially lyrical in
spirit; it subordinated everything to personal senti-
ment, personal passion, often to personal fantasy and
caprice; it cared littie for the life of the worid at
huge; it consisted of an endless series of confessions
in prose or rhyme uttered by great souls and by little ;

26 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

it perished because the limited matter of these confes-
sions was speedily exhausted^ and the study of outward
things and of social life was found to be inexhaustibly
rich in fruit* Hence the justification of that movement ,
of our own day which has assumed the title of
naturalism or realism^ of which the error or misfortune
has been that it has studied too exclusively and too
persistently the baser side of life. M. Taine's critical
writings have tended to reduce the importance of the
individual^ have operated together with the scientific
tendencies of our time in antagonism to the lyrical,
personal character of the Romantic school; they belong
essentiaUy to the same movement of mind which has
foimd other expression in the plays of Dumas, the
poems, severely impersonal, of Leconte de Lisle, the
novels of Flaubert, and the works of the modem school
of historians which stand in marked contrast with the
Ijrrical narratives of Michelet and our English Carlyle.
A play of Shakespeare's, a group of Victor Hugo's
odes or elegies, is for M. Taine not so much the work
of its individual author as the creation of the race, the
milieUf and the moment — a document in the history
and the psychology of a people* We perceive, as
M* Brunetidre has justly said, the close relation be-
tween his principles of criticism and the doctrine of
the impersonality of art, a doctrine drawn out to its
extreme logical consequences in some of the recently
published letters of Flaubert.

Scientific criticism, however, in the hands of its ktest
exponent comes to restore to the individual leaders of
literature some of their alienated rights. M. Henne-
quin, while expressing his high esteem for Taine, as
the writer who has done more than any other of our

DOWDEN 27

generation to advance the study of literature, was him-
self ambitious to remodel the method of Taine, to
amend it in various respects, to widen its scope, and to
set forth the revised method as a Novum Organum for
the investigation of literature. He does not deny the
influence of heredity, which Taine asserts so strongly,
but the race, considered as the source of moral and
intellectual characteristics, seems to him to be littie
better than a metaphysical figment. There is no pure,
homogeneous race in existence, or at least none exists
which has become a nation, none which has founded a
civilized state, and produced a literature and art. Nor
is it true, as M. Taine assumes, that the intellectual
characteristics of a people persist unchanged from
generation to generation. The action of heredity on
individual character is in the highest degree variable
and obscure ; we may admit it as an hypothesis, but it
is an unworkable hypothesis, which in the historical
study of literature can only confuse, embarrass, and
mislead our inquiry. In like manner, as to the milieu,
the social environment, we may admit that its influence
is real and even important; but can that influence, in
which there is nothing fixed and constant, be made
a subject of science ? It is in the power of the artist
to shield or withdraw himself from the influence of his
environment, and to create a littie milieu in harmony
Avith his peculiar genius; or he may prove himself
refractory and react against the social milieu. How
else shall we account for the diversity, the antagonism
of talents existing in one and the same historical
period ? Did not Pascal and Saint Simon come each to
his full development at the same epoch and in the
same country ? Did not Aristophanes and Euripides ?

28 FRENCH LITERARY CRITICISM

Hume and Whitefield? Shelley and Scott? William
Blake and David Wilkie? Mr. Herbert Spencer and
Cardinal Newman ? In truths the influence of environ-
ment constantly diminishes as an art or a literature
advances to maturity. Man has acquired modes of
adapting circumstances to himself, and so of econo-
mizing the force of his individuality; in a highly
civilized community every type of mind can find the
local habitation and the social group which correspond
with its peculiar wants and wishes. Nor indeed is the
principle of life and growth altogether that of adapta-
tion to surrounding circumstances; life is also ^a
resistance and a segregation, or rather a defensive
adaptation, antagonistic to the action of external
forces/ and as the years advance the system of def^ice
becomes more ingenious, more complicated, and more
successful. Each of the great influences, the effects of
which M. Taine attempts to ascertain, doubtless exists
and is operative, but the action of each is occult and
variable. If M. Taine's results have an appearance of
precision, this arises from the art with which he mani-
pulates his facts and disposes his arguments.

Such in substance is the criticism of the younger
thinker on the method of his master. He recognizes
no fixed relation between an author and his race or his
environment. On the other hand, such a fixed relation
can certainly be discovered between an author or artist
and the group of his disciples or admirers. He is
a centre of force drawing towards him those who
spiritually resemble himself. Thus a great author,
instead of being the creature of circumstances, in fiict
creates a moral environment, a world of thoughts and
feelings, for all those who are attracted, and as we may

DOWDEN 29

say enveloped^ by his genius. The history of literature
is the history of the successive states of thought and
feeling proceeding from eminent minds and obtaining
the mastery^ often in the face of much contemporary
opposition^ over inferior minds of a like tjrpe. With
much pomp of scientific terms — some of them possibly
seeming more scientific because they are barbarous
from a literary point of view — M. Hennequin brings us
round to the obvious truth that a powerful writer^ if
he is in part formed by his age^ reacts on his contem-
poraries and impresses his individuality upon them.

The central fact with respect to the contemporary
movement remains, the fact dwelt on with much force
by M. Bruneti^re, that literature has turned away from
the lyrical, the personal, or, as they call it, the sub-
jective, to an ardent study of the external world and
the life of man in society. The lyrical, the personal,
has doubtless a subordinate place in literary criticism,
but the chief work of criticism is that of ascertaining,
classifying, and interpreting the facts of literature. We
may anticipate that criticism in the immediate future if
less touched with emotion will be better informed and
less wilful than it has been in the past. If it should be
founded on exact knowledge, illuminated by just views,
and inspired by the temper of equity we shall have
some gains to set over against our losses. The subordi-
nation of self to the faithful setting forth of the entire
truth of one's subject will be some compensation for
the absence of the passion, the raptures, the despairs,
the didactic enthusiasm of one great English critic;
some compensation even for the quickening half-views
and high-spirited, delightful wilfulness of another.

1889.

PROSPER M^RIM^E

FR one born in eighteen hundred and three much
was recently become incredible that had at least
warmed the imagination even of the sceptical eighteenth
century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the Revolution,
had foreclosed many a problem, extinguished many a
hope, in the sphere of practice. And the mental parallel
was drawn by Heine. In the mental world too a great
outlook had lately been cut off. After Kant's criticism
of the mind, its pretensions to pass beyond the limits
of individual experience seemed as dead as those of old
French royalty. And Kant did but furnish its inner^
most theoretic force to a more general criticism, which
had withdrawn from every department of action, imder-
lying principles once thought eternal. A time of dis-
illusion followed. The typical personality of the day
was Obermann, the very genius of ennuij a Frenchman
disabused even of patriotism, who has hardly strength
enough to die. More energetic souls, however, would
recover themselves, and find some way of making the
best of a changed world. Art : the passions, above all,
the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely empirical

32 MERIMEE

knowledge of nature and man : these still remained^ at
least for pastime^ in a world of which it was no longer
proposed to calculate the remoter issues : — art, passion^
science, however, in a somewhat novel attitude towards
the practical interests of life. The dMttusianni, who
had found in Kant's negations the last word concerning
an unseen world, and is living, on the morrow of the
Revolution, under a monarchy made out of hand, might
seem cut off from certain ancient natural hopes, and
will demand, from what is to interest him at all, some-
thing in the way of artificial stimulus. He has lost
that sense of large proportion in things, that all-
embracing prospect of life as a whole (from end to end
of time and space, it had seemed), the utmost expanse
of which was afforded from a cathedral tower of the
Middle Age : by the church of the thirteenth century,
that is to say, with its consequent aptitude for the co-
ordination of human effort. Deprived of that exhila-
rating yet pacific outlook, imprisoned now in the narrow
cell of its own subjective experience, the action of
a powerful nature will be intense, but exclusive and
peculiar. It will come to art, or science, to the experi-
ence of life itself, not as to portions of human nature's
daily food, but as to something that must be, by the
circumstances of the case, exceptional ; almost as men
turn in despair to gambling or narcotics, and in a little
while the narcotic, the game of chance or skill, is
valued for its own sake. The vocation of the artist, oi
the student of Hfe or books, will be realized with some-
thing — say ! of fanaticism, as an end in itself, imrelated,
unassociated. The science he turns to will be a science
of crudest fact ; the passion extravagant, a passionate
love of passion, varied through all the exotic phases of

PATER 33

French fiction as inaugurated by Bdzac ; the art
exaggerated^ in matter or form^ or both^ as in Hugo or
Baudelaire. The development of these conditions is the
mental story of the nineteenth century^ especially as
exemplified in France.

In no century would Prosper M^rim^ have been
a theologian or metaphysician. But that sense of
negation^ of theoretic insecurity, was in the air, and
conspiring with what was of like tendency in himself
made of him a central tjrpe of disillusion. In him the
passive enntd of Obermann became a satiric, aggressive,
almost angry conviction of the littleness of the world
around ; it wm as if man's fatal limitations constituted
a kind of stupidity in him, what the French call bStise^
Grossiping friends, indeed, linked what was constitu-
tional in him and in the age with an incident of his
earliest years. Corrected for some childish fault, in
passionate distress, he overhears a half-pitying laugh at
his expense, and has determined, in a moment, never
again to give credit — to be for ever on his guard, espe*
cially against his own instinctive movements. Quite
unreserved, certainly, he never was again. Almost
everywhere he could detect the hoUow ring of funda-
mental nothingness under the apparent surface of
things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would be the
proper complement thereto, on his part. In his infal-
lible self-possession, you might even fancy him a mere
man of the world, with a special aptitude for matters of
fact. Though indifferent in politics, he rises to social,
to political eminence ; but all the while he is feeding
all his scholarly curiosity, his imagination, the very eye,
with the, to him ever delightful, relieving, reassuring
qpectacle, of those straightforward forces in bnman

34 M£rIM^

nature^ which are also matters of fact. There is the
formula of M^rim^ ! the enthusiastic amateur of rude,
crude, naked force in men and women wherever it
could be found; himself carrying ever, as a mask, the
conventional attire of the modern world — carrying it
with an infinite, contemptuous grace, as if that, too,
were an all-sufficient end in itself. With a natural gift
for words, for expression, it will be his literary function
to draw back the veil of time from the true greatness of
old Roman character ; the veil of modem habit from
the primitive energy of the creatures of his fancy, as
the Lettres i une Inconnue discovered to general gaze,
after his death, a certain depth of passionate force which
had surprised him in himself. And how forcible will
be their outlines in an otherwise insignificant world !
Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, at least
some relics of it remain^Hjueries, echoes, reactions,
after*thoughts ; and they help to make an atmosphere,
a mental atmosphere, hazy perhaps, yet with many
secrets of soothing light and shade, associating more
definite objects to each other by a perspective pleasant
to the inward eye against a hopefully receding back-
ground of remoter and ever remoter possibilities. Not
so with M^rim^e ! For him the fundamental criticism
has nothing more than it can do ; and there are np half-
lights. The last traces of hypothesis^ of supposition,
are evaporated. Sylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen,
Colomba, that impassioned self within himself, have no
atmosphere. Painfully distinct in outline, inevitable to
sight, unrelieved, there they stand, like solitary moun-
tain forms on some hard, perfectly transparent day.
^hat M^rim^e gets around his singularly sculpturesque
creations is neither more nor less than empty space.

PATER 35

So disparate are his writings that at first sight you
might fancy them only the random efforts of a man of
pleasure or afEairs^ who^ turning to this or that for the
relief of a vacant hour^ discovers to his surprise a work-
able literary gift, of whose scope, however, he is not
precisely aware. His sixteen volumes nevertheless range
themselves in three compact groups. There are his
letters — those Lettrea h une Inconnue, and his letters
to ,the librarian Panizzi, revealing him in somewhat
dose contact with political intrigue. But in this age of
novelists, it is as a writer of novels, and of fiction in
the form of highly descriptive drama, that he will count
for most: — CohmbUy for instance, by its intellectual
depth of motive, its firmly conceived structure, by the
faulUessness of its execution, vindicating the function
of the novel as no tawdry light literature, but in very
deed a fine art The Chronigue du Signe de Charles IX,
an imusually successful specimen of historical romance,
Unks his imaginative work to the third group of
M^rim&'s writings, his historical essays. One resource
of the disabused soul of our century, as we saw, would
be the empirical study of facts, the empirical science
of nature and man, surviving all dead metaphysical
philosophies. M6nm6e, perhaps, may have had in
him the making of a master of such science, dis-
interested, patient, exact: scalpel in hand, we may
fancy, he would have penetrated far. But quite
certainly he had something of genius for the exact
study of history, for the pursuit of exact truth, with
a keenness of scent as if that alone existed, in some
special area of historic fact, to be determined by his
own pectdiar mental preferences. Power here too again,
— the crude power of men and women which mocks,

D %

36 m£RIM£e

while it makes its use of, average human nature ; it was
the magic function of history to put one in living con-
tact with that. To weigh the purely physiognomic
import of the memoir, of the pamphlet saved by chance,
the letter, the anecdote, the very gossip by which one
came face to face with enei^etic personalities: there
lay the true business of the historic student, not in
that pretended theoretic interpretation of events by
their mechanic causes, with which he dupes others if
not invariably himself. In the great hero of the Social
WcoTy in SyUa, studied, indeed, through his environment,
but only so far as that was in dynamic contact with
himself, you saw, without any manner of doubt, on one
side, the solitary height of human genius ; on the other,
though on the seendngly so heroic stage of antique
Roman story, the wholly inexpressive level of the
humanity of every day, the spectacle of man's eternal
btttse. Fascinated, like a veritable son of the old pagan
Renaissance, by the grandeur, the concentration, the
satiric hardness of ancient Roman character, it is to
Russia nevertheless that he most readily turns — ^youthful
Russia, whose native force, still unbelittled by our
western civilization, seemed to have in it the promise of
a more dignified civilisation to come. It was as if old
Rome itself were here again; as, occasionally, a new
quarry is laid open of what was thought long since
exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde anHgue^
M^rim^, indeed, was not the first to discern the fitness
for imaginative service of the career of ^^ the false De-
metrius,'' pretended son of Ivan the Terrible; but he
alone seeks its utmost force in a calm, matter-of-fact,
carefully ascertained presentment of the naked events.
Tes! In the last years of the Valois, when its fierce

PATER 37

passions seemed to be bursting France to pieces^ you
might have seen^ far away beyond the rude Polish
dominion of which one of those Yalois princes had
become king^ a display more effective still of exceptional
courage and cunnings of horror in circumstance^ of
bStisCy of course^ of bitise and a slavish capacity of
being duped^ in average mankind: all that imder
a mask of solemn Muscovite court-ceremonial. And
Merim^'s style, simple and unconcerned, but with the
eye ever on its object, lends itself perfectly to such pur-
pose — to an almost phlegmatic discovery of the facts,
in all their crude natural colouring, as if he but held
up to view, as a piece of evidence, some harshly dyed
oriental carpet from the sumptuous floor of the Kremlin,
on which blood had fallen.

A lover of ancient Rome, its great character and
incident, M^rim^e valued, as if it had been personal
property of his, every extant reUc of it in the art that
had been most expressive of its genius — architecture.
In that grandiose art of building, the most national, the
most tenaciously rooted of all the arts in the stable
conditions of life, there were historic documents hardly
less clearly legible than the manuscript chronicle. By
the mouth of those stately Romanesque churches, scat-
tered in so many strongly characterised varieties over
the soil of France, above all in the hot, half-pagan
south, the people of empire still protested, as he under-
stood, against what must seem a smaller race. The
Gothic enthusiasm indeed was already bom, and he
shared it — felt intelligently the fascination of the
Pointed Style, but only as a further transformation of
old Roman structure ; the round arch is for him still the
great arcfaiteGtural form, la/orme noble, because it was

38 m£rim£e

to be seen in the monuments of antiquity. Romanesque^
Gothic, the manner of the Renaissance, of Lewis the
Fourteenth : — ^they were all, as in a written record, in
the old abbey church of Saint^Savin, of which M^rimfe
was instructed to draw up a report. Again, it was as
if to his concentrated attention through many months
that deserted sanctuary of Benedict were the only
thing on earth. Its beauties, its peculiarities, its odd
military features, its faded mural paintings, are no
merely picturesque matter for the pencil he could use
so well, but the lively record of a human society. With
what appetite ! with all the animation of Geoiges Sandys
Mauprai, he tells the story of romantic violence having
its way there, defiant of law, so late as the year 1611 ;
of the family of robber nobles perched, as abbots in
commendam, in those sacred places. That grey, pensive
old church in the little vidley of Poitou, was for a
time like Santa Maria del Flore to Michelangelo, the
mistress of his affections— of a practical affection ; for
the result of his elaborate report was the Government
grant which saved the place from ruin. In architecture,
certainly, he had what for that day was nothing less
than intuition — an intuitive sense, above all, of its logic,
of the necessity which draws into one all minor changes,
as elements in a reasonable development. And his care
for it, his curiosity about it, were symptomatic of his
own genius. Structure, proportion, design, a sort of
architectural coherency : that was the aim of his method
in the art of literature, in that form of it, especially,
which he will live by, in fiction.

As historian and archfleologist, as a man of erudition
turned artist, he is well seen in the Chranique du BJigne
de Charles IX, by which we pass naturally from

PATER 39

M£rim€e*8 critical or scientific work to the products of
his imagination. What economy in the use of a lai^
antiquarian knowledge! what an instinct^ amid a
hundred details^ for the detail that carries physiognomy
in it, that really tells ! And again what outline^ what
absolute clarity of outiine ! For the historian of that
puzzling age which centres in the ^' Eve of Saint Bartho>
lomew/^ outward events themselves seem obscured by
the vagueness of motive of the actors in them. But
M^rim^^ disposing of them as an artist, not in love
with half-lights, compels events and actors alike to the
clearness he desired; takes his side without hesitation ;
and makes his hero a Huguenot of pure blood, allowing
its charm, in that charming youth, even to Huguenot
piety. And as for the incidents — however freely it may
be undermined by historic doubt, all reaches a perfectiy
firm surface, at least for the eye of the reader. The
Chronicle of Charles the Ninth is like a series of
masterly drawings in illustration of a period — the period
in which two other masters of French fiction have found
their opportunity, mainly by the development of its
actual historic characters. Those characters — Catherine
de Medicis and the rest — M^rim^e, with significant
irony and self-assertion, sets aside, preferring to think
of them as essentially commonplace. For him the
interest lies in the creatures of his own will, who carry
in them, however, so lightiy I a learning equal to
Balzac's, greater than that of Dumas. He knows with
like completeness the mere fashions of the time — how
courtier and soldier dressed themselves, and the lai^
movements of the desperate game which fate or chance
was playing with those pretty pieces. Comparing that
favourite century of the French Renaissance with our

40 M^IM^E

own^ he notes a decadence of the more energetic
paauons in the interest of general tranquillity^ and per-
haps (only perhaps !) of general happiness. '^Assassi-
nation/^ he obsenres^ as if with r^^t, '^ is no longer
a part of our manners/' In fact, the duel, and the
whole morality of the duel, which does but enforce
a certain regularity on assassination, what has been well
called le ieniiment dufer, the sentiment of deadly steel,
had then the disposition of refined existence. It was,
indeed^ very different, and is, in M^rim^e's romance.
In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all the prompt-
ings of the lad's virile goodness are in natural collusion
with that sentiment du fer* Amid his ingenuous
blushes, his prayers, and plentiful tears between-white,
it is a part of his very sex. With his delightful, fresh-
blown air, he is for ever tossing the sheath from the
sword, but always as if into bright natural sunshine.
A winsome, yet withal serious and even piteous figure,
he conveys his pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy
theme, into M^rim^'s one quite cheerful book.

Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it
presents are but the accidents of a particular age, and
not like the mental conditions in which M^rimee was
most apt to look for the spectacle of human power,
allied to madness or disease in the individual. For
him, at least, it was the oflEice of fiction to carry one
into a different if not a better world than that actually
around us; and if the Chronicle of Charles the
Ninth provided an escape from the tame circum-
stances of contemporary life into an impassioned
past, Colomba is a measure of the resources for mental
alteration which may be found even in the modem
age. There was a corner of the French Empire, in

PATER 41

the manners of which asBassination still had a large
part.

^^The beauty of Corsica/^ says M^rim^^ ^^is grave
and sad. The aspect of the capital does but augment
the impression caused by the solitude that surroimds it.
There is no movement in the streets. Tou hear there
none of the laughter, the singing, the loud talking,
common in the towns of Italy. Sometimes, imder the
shadow of a tree on the promenade, a dozen armed
peasants will be playing cards, or looking on at the
game. The Corsican is naturally silent. Those who
walk the pavement are all strangers : the islanders stand
at their doors: every one seems to be on the watch,
like a falcon on its nest. All around the gulf there is
but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it, bleached
mountains. Not a habitation ! Only, here and there,
on the heights about the town, certain white construc-
tions detach themselves from the background of green.
They are funeral chapels or family tombs.^^

Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as
M^rim^e here describes it, is like the national passion
of the Corsican — that morbid personal pride, usurping
the place even of grief for the dead, which centuries of
traditional violence had concentrated into an aU-absorb-
ing passion for bloodshed, for bloody revenges, in
collusion with the natural wildness, and the wild social
condition of the island stUl unaffected even by the
finer ethics of the duel. The supremacy of that passion
is well indicated by the cry, put into the mouth of
a young man in the presence of the corpse of his
father deceased in the course of nature — ^a young man
meant to be common-place. ^^ Ah ! Would thou hadst
died mala morte — by violence ! We might have avenged

42 M£RIM]^

thee ! ^' In Colomba^ M^rimfe's best known creation^
it is united to a singularly wholesome type of personal
beauty^ a natural grace of manner which is irresistible^
a cunning intellect patiently diverting every circum-
stance to its design; and presents itself as a kind of
genius^ allied to fatal disease of mind. The intarest
of M^rim^s book is that it allows us to watch the
action of this malignant power on Colomba's brother,
Orso della Rebbia, as it discovers, rouses, concentrates
to the leaping-point, in the somewhat weakly diffused
nature of the youth, the dormant elements of a dark
humour akin to her own. Two years after his father's
murder, presumably at the instigation of his ancestral
enemies, the young lieutenant is returning home in
the company of two humorously conventional English
people, himself now half Parisianised, with an immense
natural cheerfulness, and willing to believe an account
of the crime which relieves those hated Barricini of all
complicity in its guilt. But from the first, Colomba,
with ^^ voice soft and musical '', is at his side, gathering
every accident and echo and circumstance, the very
lightest circumstance, into the chain of necessity which
draws him to the action every one at home expects of
him as the head of his race. He is not unaware. Her
very silence on the matter speaks so plainly. '^You
are forming me ! ^^ he admits. ^' Well ! ' Hot shot,
or cold steel !^ — you see I have not forgotten my
Corsican.'^ More and more, as he goes on his way
with her, he finds himself accessible to the damning
thoughts he has so long combated. In horror, he tries
to disperse them by the memory of his comrades
in the regiment, the drawing-rooms of Paris, the
English lady who has promised to be his bride, and

PATER 43

will shortly visit him in the humble manair of his
ancestors. From his first step among them the vil-
lagers of Pietranera^ divided already into two rival
camps^ are watching him in suspense — Pietranera,
perched among those deep forests where the stifled
sense of violent death is everywhere. Colomba places
in his hands the little chest which contains the father's
shirt covered with great spots of blood. ^' Behold the
lead that struck him ! '* and she laid on the shirt two
rusted bullets. ^^Orso ! you will avenge him ! *' She
embraces him with a kind of madness, kisses wildly
the bullets and the shirt, leaves him with the terrible
relics already exerting their mystic power upon him. It
is as if in the nineteenth century a girl, amid Cluistian
habits, had gone back to that primitive old pagan
version of the story of the Gndl, which identifies it not
with the Most Precious Blood, but only with the
blood of a murdered relation crying for vengeance.
Awake at last in his old chamber at Pietranera, the
house of the Barricini at the other end of the square,
with its rival tower and rudely carved escutcheons,
stares him in the face. His ancestral enemy is there,
an aged man now, but with two well-grown sons, like
two stupid dumb animals, whose innocent blood will
soon be on his so oddly lighted conscience. At times,
his better hope seemed to lie in picking a quarrel and
killing at least, in fair fight, one of these two stupid dumb
animals with their rude ill-suppressed laughter one day,
as they overhear Colomba^s violent utterances at a funeral
feast, for she is a renowned improvisatrice. ''Tour
father is an old man,^^ he finds himself saying, '' I could
crush with my hands. ^Tis for you I am destined, for
you and your brother ! '^ And if it is by course of nature

44 M^RIMl^E

that the old man dies not long after the murder of these
sons (self-provoked after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, as
it happens, by an odd accident, in the presence of
Colomba, no violent death by Orso's own hand could
have been more to her mind. In that last hard page
of M^rim^e's story, mere dramatic propriety itself for
a moment seems to plead for the forgiveness, which,
from Joseph and his brethren to the present day, as
we know, has been as winning in story as in actual
life. Such dramatic propriety, however, was by no
means in M^rim^e's way. '^ What I must have is the
hand that fired the shot,'^ she had sung, ^^the eye that
guided it; aye! and the mind moreover — ^the mind,
which had conceived the deed!^' And now, it is in
idiotic terror, a fugitive from Orso's vengeance, that
the last of the Barricini is dying.

Exaggerated art ! you think. But it was precisely
such exaggerated art, intense, unrelieved, an art of
fierce colours, that is needed by those who are seeking
in art, as I said of M^rimle, a kind of artificial
stimulus. And if his style is still impeccably correct,
cold-blooded, impersonal, as impersonal as that of Scott
himself, it does but conduce the better to his one exclu-
sive aim. It is like the polish of the stiletto Colomba
carried always under her mantle, or the beauty of
the fire-arms, that beauty coming of nice adaptation to
purpose, which she understood so well — a task clyaiv
acteristic also of Merim^ himself, a sort of fanatic
joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at its height in the
singular story he has translated from the Russian of
Pouchkine. Those raw colours he preferred ; Spanish,
Oriental, African, perhaps, irritant certainly to cis-
alpine eyes, he undoubtedly attained the colouring you

PATER 45

associate with sun-gtroke^ only possible under a sun in
which dead things rot quickly.

Pity and terror^ we know, go to the making of the
essential tragic sense. In M^rim^, certainly, we have
all its terror, but without the pity. Saint-Clair, the
consent of his mistress barely attained at last, rushes
madly on self-destruction, that he may die with the
taste of his great love fresh on his lips. All the
grotesque accidents of violent death he records with
visual exactness, and no pains to relieve them; the
ironic indifference, for instance, with which, on the
scaffold or the battle-field, a man will seem to grin
foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has
passed. Seldom or never has the mere pen of a
writer taken us so dose to the cannon's mouth as
in the TaHng of the Redoubt, while Matteo Falcone —
twenty-five short pages — ^is perhaps the cruellest story
in the world.

Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code
of action, of self-respect, a conscience, all to herself,
who with all her virginal charm only does not make you
hate her, is, in truth, the type of a sort of humanity
M^rim^ found it pleasant to dream of — a humanity as
alien as the animals, with whose moral affinities to
man his imaginative work is often directly concerned.
Were they so alien, after all? Were there not sur-
vivals of the old wild creatures in the gentlest, the
politest of us? Stories that told of sudden freaks of
gentle, polite natures, straight back, not into Paradise,
were always welcome to men's fancies ; and that could
only be because they found a psychologic truth in them.
With much success, with a credibility insured by his
literary tact, M6rim^ tried his own hand at such stories :

46 Ml^RIM^E

unfrocked the bear in the amorous young Lithuanian
noble, the wolf in the revolting peasant of the Middle
Age. There were survivals surely in himself, in
that stealthy presentment of his favourite themes, in
his own art. Tqu seem to find your hand on a
serpent, in reading him.

In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of
his favourite motive, the sense of wild power, under
a sort of mask, or assumed habit, realised as the very
genius of nature itself; and that interest, with some
superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in the
vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certiun
pretended lUyrian compositions— prose transUtions, the
reader was to understand, of more or less ancient
popular ballads ; La Ouzla, he called the volume, 7%e
Lyre, as we might say; only that the instrument
of the niyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic
deception, a trick of which there is something in
the historic romance as such, in a book like his own
Chronicle of Charles the Ninth, was always welcome
to M^rim^; it was part of the machinery of his
rooted habit of intellectual reserve. A master of
irony also, in Madame Lucrezia he seems to wish to
expose his own method cynically; to explain his art
— ^how he takes you in — as a clever, confident con«-
juror might do. So properly were the readers of La
Guzla taken in that he followed up his success in
that line by the Theatre of Clara Crazul, purporting
to be from a rare Spanish original, the work of a nun,
who, under tame, conventual reading, had felt the
touch of mundane, of physical passions; had become
a dramatic poet, and herself a powerful actress* It
may dawn on you in reading her that M^rim^ was

PATER 47

a kind of Webster^ but with the superficial mildness
of our nineteenth century. At the bottom of the true
drama there is ever^ logically at least, the ballad : the
ballad dealing in a kind of short-hand (or, say! in
grand^ simple, universal outlines) with those passions,
crimes, mistakes, which have a kind of fatality in
them, a kind of necessity to come to the surface of the
human mindy if not to the surface of our ejsperiencef
as in the case of some frankly supernatural incidents
which M^rimee re-handled. Whether human love or
hatred has had most to do in shaping the universal
fancy that the dead come back, I cannot say. Cer-
tainly that old ballad literature has instances in plenty,
in which the voice, the hand, the brief visit from the
grave, is a natural response to the cry of the human
creature. That ghosts should return, as they do so
often in M^rim&'s fiction, is but a sort of natural
justice. Only, in M^rim^s prose ballads, in those
admirable, short, ballad-like stories, where every word
tells, of which he was a master, almost the inventor,
they are a kind of haU-material ghosts — a vampire
tribe — and never come to do people good ; congruously
with the mental constitution of the writer, which, alike
in fact and fiction, could hardly have horror enough
— theme after theme. M^rim^ himself emphasises this
almost constant motive of his fiction when he adds to
one of his volumes of short stories some letters on
a matter of fact — a Spanish bull-fight, in which those
old Romans, he rqpretted, might seem, decadentiy, to
have survived. It is as if you saw it. In truth,
M^rim^ was the unconscious parent of much we may
think of dubious significance in later French literature.
It 18 as if there were nothing to tell of in this world

48 M]£rIM£E

but various forms of hatred, and a love that is like
lunacy ; and the only other world, a world of maliciously
active, hideous, dead bodies.

M^rim^, a literary artist, was not a man who used
two words where one would do better, and he shines
especially in those brief compositions which, like
a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his wonderful
faculty of design and proportion in the treatment of his
work, in which there is not a touch but counts. That
is an art of which there are few examples in English;
our somewhat diffuse, or slipshod, literary language
hardly lending itself to the concentration of thought
and expression, which are of the essence of such
writing. It is otherwise in French, and if you wish to
know what art of that kind can come to, read M&i-
m^s little romances ; best of all, perhaps. La Vimu
d^IUe and Arshie GvxUot. The former is a modem
version of the beautiful old story of the Ring given to
Venus, given to her, in this case, by a somewhat sordid
creature of the nineteenth century, whom she looks on
with more than disdain. The strange outline of the
Canigou, one of the most imposing outlying heights of
the Pyrenees, down the mysterious slopes of which the
traveller has made his way towards nightfall into the
great plain of Toulouse, forms an impressive back-
ground, congruous with the many relics of irrepressible
old paganism there, but in entire contrast to the Aomt-
geois comfort of the place where his journey is to end,
the abode of an aged antiquary, loud and bright just
now with the celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage.
In the midst of this well-being, prosaic in spite of the
neighbourhood, in spite of the pretty old wedding
customs, morsels of that local colour in which M^rim^

PATER 49

delights^ the old pagan powers are supposed to reveal
themselves once more (malignantly^ of course) in the
person of a magnificent bronze statue of Venus recently
unearthed in the antiquary's garden. On her finger,
by ill-luck, the coarse young bridegroom on the
morning of his marriage places for a moment the
bridal ring only too effectually (the bronze hand closes,
like a wilful living one, upon it), and dies, you are to
understand, in her angry metallic embraces on his
marriage night. From the first, indeed, she had seemed
bent on crushing out men's degenerate bodies and
souls, though the supernatural horror of the tale is
adroitly made credible by a certain vagueness in the
events, which covers a quite natural account of the
bridegroom's mysterious death.

The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly
designed as M^rim^e's depends in part on the sense as
you read, hastily perhaps, perhaps in need of patience,
that you are dealing with a composition, the full secret
of which is only to be attained in the last paragraph,
tiiat with the last word in mind you will retrace your
steps, more than once (it may be) noting then the
minuter structure, also the natural or wrought flowers
by the way. Nowhere is such method better illustrated
than by another of M^rim^s quintessential pieces,
Arsine GuUloty and here for once with a conclusion
ethically acceptable also. M^rim^ loved surprises in
human nature, but it is not often that he surprises us
by tenderness or generosity of character, as another
master of French fiction, M. Octave Feuillet, is apt to
do; and the simple pathos of Arsine OuUlot gives it
a unique place in M^rim^e's writings. It may be said,
indeed^ that only an essentially pitiful nature could have

5a MtSIMtE

told the exquisitely cruel story of Matteo Falcone pre-
cisely as M^rim^ has told it; and those who knew
him testify abundantly to his own capacity for generous
friendship. He was no more wanting than others in
those natural S3rmpathies (sending tears to the eyes at
the sight of suffering age or childhood) which happily
are no extraordinary component in men's natures* It
waS; perhaps^ no fitting return for a friendship of over
thirty years to publish posthumously those Lettres i
une Irtcannuey which reveal that reserved^ sensitive, self-
centred nature, a little pusillanimously in the power,
at the disposition of another. For just there lies the
interest, the psychological interest, of those letters. An
amateur of power, of the spectacle of power and force,
followed minutely but without sensibility on his part,
with a kind of cynic pride rather for the mainspring
of his method, both of thought and expression, you
find him here taken by surprise at last, and somewhat
humbled, by an unsuspected force of affection in himself «
His correspondent, unknown but for these letters
except just by name, figures in them as, in truth, a
being only too much like himself, seen from one side ;
reflects his taciturnity, his touchiness, his incredulity
except for self-torment. Agitated, dissatisfied, he is
wrestling in her with himself, his own difficult qualities.
He demands froin her a freedom, a frankness, he would
have been the last to grant. It is by first thoughts, of
course, that what is forcible and effective in human
nature, the force, therefore, of carnal love, discovers
itself; and for her first thoughts M^rim^ is always
pleading, but always complaining that he gets only her
second thoughts ; the thoughts, that is, of a reserved,
self-limiting nature, well under the yoke of convention.

PATER 51

like his own. Strange conjunction ! At the beginning
of the correspondence he seems to have been seeking
only a fine intellectual companionship ; the lady^ per*
haps^ looking for something warmer. Towards such
companionship that likeness to himself in her might
have been helpful^ but was not enough of a comple-
ment to his own nature to be anything but an
obstruction in love ; and it is to that, little by little, that
his hmnour turns. He — the Megalopsychusy as Aristotle
defines him — acquires all the lover's humble habits;
himself displays all the tricks of love, its casuistries, its
exigency, its superstitions, aye! even its vulgarities;
involves with the significance of his own genius the
mere hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average
nature ; but too late in the day— the years. After the
attractions and repulsions of half a lifetime, they are
but friends, and might forget to be that, but for his
death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching
letter, just two hours before. There, too, had been the
blind and naked force of nature and circumstance,
surprising him in the tmcontrollable movements of his
own so carefully guarded heart.

The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed
personality of those letters does but emphasise the fact
that imperstmality was, in literary art, Merim^'s cen-
tral aim. Personality vertus impersonality in art: —
how much or how litde of one's self one may put into
one's work: whether anything at all of it: whether
one can put there anything else: — ^is clearly a far-
reaching and complex question. Serviceable as the
basis of a precautionary maxim towards the conduct of
our work, self-effacement, or impersonaUty, in literary
or artistic creation, is, perhaps, after all^ as littie pos-

52 M^RIM^E

sible as a strict realism. " It has always been my rule
to put nothing of myself into my works^'^ says another
great master of French prose, Gustave Flaubert ; but,
luckily as we may think, he often failed in thus effacing
himself, as he too was aware. '^ It has always been my
rule to put nothing of myself into my works'' (to be
disinterested in his literary creations, so to speak), '^yet
I have put much of myself into them'': and where he
failed M^rim^e succeeded. There they stand — Carmen,
Colomba, the ^' False" Demetrius — ^as detached from
him as from each other, with no more filial likeness to
their maker than if they were the work of another
person. And to his method of conception, M^rimee's
much-praised literary style, his method of expression,
is strictly conformable — impersonal in its beauty, the
perfection of nobody's style — ^thus vindicating anew by
its very impersonality that much worn, but not untrue
saying, that the style is the man :-^a man, impassible,
unfamiliar, impeccable, veiling a deep sense of what is
forcible, nay, terrible, in things, under the sort of per^
sonal pride that makes a man a nice observer of all
that is most conventional. Essentially unlike other
people, he is always fastidiously in the fashion — ^an
expert in all the little, half-contemptuous elegances of
which it is capable. M^rim^'s superb self-effacement,
his impersonality, is itself but an effective personal
trait, and, transferred to art, becomes a markedly
peculiar quality of literary beauty. For, in truth, this
creature of disillusion who had no care for half-lights,
and, like his creations, had no atmosphere about him,
gifted as he was with pure mindy with the quality
which secures flawless literary structure, had, on the
other hand, nothing of what we call satU in literature :— *

PATER 53

hence, also, that singular harshness in his ideal, as if,
in theological language, he were incapable of grace.
He has none of those subjectivities, colourings, pecu-
liarities of mental refraction, which necessitate varieties
of style— could we spare such ? — and render the per-
fections of it no merely negative qualities. There are
masters of French prose whose art has begun where
the art of M^rimee leaves off.

1890.

LEOPARDI

IT is^ I believe^ not only plausible but correct to de^
scribe Leopardi by two phrases in the superlative
degree of comparison : he is the most unhappy among
men of literary genius; and he is the most finished
master of style in Italian letters since the date of
Petrarca. If these statements are even approximately
true^ he must be a very interesting personage to study
in both relations. Certainly^ in the brief time at our
disposal this evenings nothing like justice can be done
t9 him in either regard ; I shall endeavour to present
tfie facts as comprehensively and as clearly as I can^
and must trust to your indulgence if, at the con-
clusion of my discoxmse, you find — ^what I myself know
— that much of what required to be indicated or
developed is left unsaid.

The Conte Giacomo Leopardi — or, to give his long
name in fuU, Giacomo Aldegardo Francesco Salesio
Saverio Pietro — ^was bom on June 29, 1798, at the
height of the turmoils in Italy consequent on the
French Revolution ; the more important part of

56 LEOPARDI

his literary activity began in 1818, when everything
connected with France and with Napoleon I had
vanished from the Italian soil, the old reigning families
were reinstated, and the dead weight of Austria lay
heavy upon the whole peninsula; and he died in 1837,
at the age of very nearly thirty-nine, when the series
of great events which have resulted in the national
revival and unity of Italy remained still a score or so
of years distant, and were not so much as surmised
to be contingently probable, still less impending.
The birthplace of Leopardi was the small town of
Recanati in the March of Ancona, belonging to the
then Papal States* Recanati stands conspicuous upon
a tall hill, not far from the sea coast, between Mace-
rata and the famous shrine of the Holy House of
Loreto : the set of sun darkens the distant Apennines.
Recanati is a place of no great note ; not to us alone
on the present occasion, but to Italy also and to
the world, its chief distinction is that it gave birth
to Giacomo Leopardi. The town and its immediate
vicinity have, however, at least one other point of pre-
eminence, to which our poet has borne very emphatic
testimony, namely, that the Italian language is spoken
there with singular purity and propriety. In this
respect Recanati is an oasis in the desert, for all around
the contrary condition prevails in a marked d^^ree.
Of the old-world isolation of this town one may obtain
some idea from the statement, made by Leopardi in
a letter dated 1819, that were a book to be ordered
from Milan, it might take from four to twelve months
in arriving.

Leopardi came of an ancient and patrician stock,
which, towards the time of his birth and during his too

ROSSETTI 57

brief life, was greatly embarrassed. His father, the
Conte Monaldo Leopardi (or Leopardi-Confallonieri),
who attained his majority shortly before the date when
Oiacomo, his eldest child, was born, had inherited
a considerable fortmie. He appears to have been
a man of strict virtue, and, according to his lights,
even of exemplary character; but, in one way or
another — ^perhaps through mere generosity, or perhaps
through want of practical insight and business faculty
— ^he dissipated his patrimony so deplorably that the
law had to be invoked against him, and he was inter-
dicted in 1803 from controlling his own money affairs,
the charge of which was transferred to his wife. One
form of expense in which he largely indulged was the
collection of a copious and valuable library, which,
with the munificence of a true scholar, he placed at
the disposal of all his fellow citizens; but, from the
account which Giacomo Lieopardi has given us of the
Recanatese, their temper, likings and habits, it may
be inferred that they left the library strictly alone,
and never invaded its sacred and unrevered precincts.
Here therefore the Conte Monaldo shut himself up,
as a man not only unadapied for commerce with the
laige outer world, but even pronounced incapable of
managing his own affairs. His character as a family
man has been painted in very diverse colours, and at
one time he used to be the theme of much obloquy as
harsh and oppressive to his illustrious son, and worse
than indifferent to his interests and aspirations. The
lapse of time and the course of investigation have
enabled us to form a truer and gentier judgement of
Monaldo. He was in fact a very affectionate father,
and watched over his family of four sons and a

58 LEOPARDI

daughter with the most anxious solicitude, so £ar as his
peculiar position allowed. But he belonged to the
narrowest and most hidebound school of thought in
politics and religion, abhorring all new lights, and
seeing the mystery of iniquity in whatsoever savoured
of modem progress or expansion of ideas* Every
petty prince or established abuse of the old r^me,
every mouldering authority which could plead a tradi-
tion or a pedigree, seemed to him a bulwark of order
beyond cavil or challenge. Hence it necessarily fol-
lowed that to stunt the active and inquiring mind of
his son whenever it tended towards an independent flight
was, in the view of Conte Monaldo, an act at once of
absolute duty and of the most judicious kindness.
Monaldo, it should be added, was himself an author ;
and writings of his, in verse as well as prose, can be
unearthed, showing excellent feeling according to his
restricted point of view, and some of them, if not
striking, certainly far from contemptible, in point of
composition.

The mother of Giacomo was the Marchesina Ade-
laide Antici, a fit match for Monaldo in birth and
station, and in severe principle. Her daughter Paolina,
even when chafing the most uneasily under her rigid
rules, has spoken of her as a standard of Christian per-
fection. She seems to have been as capable as her
spouse was incapable of managing money affairs; he
and all the rest of the household were kept down
within strict limits of expenditure, and, if money was
wanted and the father was applied to as the more
squeezable party, and by far the more good-natured, he
had to plead inability and refer the applicant to the
mother. The crown and proof of her able handling of

ROSSETTI 59

affairs was that^ just about the time when Giacomo
Leopardi died, after his lifetime of narrow means,
careful thrift, and galling dependence, the Contessa had
retrieved the fortunes of the family, which once again
became opulent and prosperous* I will only here add
that the father survived the poet-son by ten years, and
the mother survived him by twenty.

Such then — let me very briefly recapitulate it — was
the environment into which our poet was bom. A
troublous and revolutionary state of public affairs,
holding out high promises which collapsed into the
antiquated abuses; a stagnant small town, the hotbed
of small gossip, small amorous and other intrigues,
small malignities, unleavened (so at least Giacomo has
repeatedly said) by a particle of intellectual fervour;
a noble but impoverished race; well-principled and
well-meaning but narrow-minded parents — ^the father
studious and affectionate, a cipher in his own house,
the mother managing, economizing, and hard; three
younger brothers and a sister, all of whom — but
more especially the elder brother Carlo and the sister
Paolina — were warmly beloved by Giacomo and warmly
returned his love. As to the relations between our poet
and his father it may be well to observe that a
multitude of letters addressed by the former to the
latter are in print. The form of address is invariably
in the third person — the ceremonial or complimentary
ella and lei of the Italians. They are most profuse
in professions of affection, as well as respect and
deference ; this has sometimes been spoken of as insin-
cere, but, in my own opinion, without any sufficient
reason. It is certainly true, however, that Giacomo
suffered acutely under the tight restrictions, personal

eo LEOPARDI

and intellectual, which hemmed him round under the
paternal (one might rather say the maternal) roof ; and
in one letter to a friend — written in a mood of great
mortification, for he had just then been baulked in an
attempt to abscond and see a little of the outer world —
he charged his father with systematic dissimulation.
This must count for what it is worth.

I must now proceed to give some account of Leo-
pardi's career — an equaUy sad and uneyentful one;
and I shall for the present relate the external facts,
with as little reference as possible to his literary work,
which will be detailed afterwards. Up to the age of
fourteen he was tutored by two ecclesiastics ; beyond
that age he received no education whatever, except
what he gave himself by incessant and inexorable study
in his father's library — the father also doing his very
best to encourage and direct him. He spent his days
over grammars and dictionaries ; learning Latin with
but little aid, and Greek and Hebrew and the principal
modem languages with none; French, Spanish, and
English are specified — not German, though I presume
that this also was not wholly neglected. He became
thus a consummate scholar in Greek, both of the best
period and of the decline, deeply imbued with the
antique conception of life, and of literary form and
style. Indeed, he has left it on record that Greek,
far rather than Latin or Italian models, is the true
guide to perfection of style for an Italian. It was not
till 1822, when Giacomo was about twenty-four years
of age, and was already celebrated as a poet — his two
odes, AW Italia and Sapra il Monumento di Dante che
ri preparava in Frienze, having been written in 18x8
and published in 181 9 — that his father at length

ROSSETTI 6r

authorized him to leave Recanati^ and to go to Rome.
Here he was cheered by the zealous encouragement of
the learned Germans Niebuhr and Bunsen; but his
interest in the monuments of the Eternal City was
soon exhausted, and he found scarcely any satisfaction
in Roman lettered society, complaining that it was
solely concerned with archaeological pedantry, to the
grieyous neglect of pure literature. He would have
liked to obtain some employment from the Govern-
ment; but his sceptical opinions — formed at an
early age, although not until after he had written
various things in a contrary sense — prevented his
taking holy orders, the only avenue to office under
the papal rule. He returned poor and dispirited to
Recanati, and remained there for three years in great
dejection. In 1825 ^^ undertook to edit Cicero and
Petrarca for the Milanese publisher Stella, and he
resided in Bologna, enjo}ning the friendship of the
Coimt of Malvezzi (who, however, seems to have grown
lukewarm after a while), and of the Tommasini and
Maestri families, distinguished in learned professions.
His letters to the ladies of these two families glow with
the most cordial friendship. The same may be said of
his prolonged correspondence with the eminent author
Pietro Oiordani of Piacenza, who had discovered his
genius, and had visited him in 181 8 at Recanati; and
again of his letters to the Awocato Brighenti of
Bologna. If a tithe of the expressions in these various
letters is to be taken as genuine — nor do I question
that substantially it is so — ^Leopardi must have been
most eminently susceptible of the sentiment, or indeed
the passion, of friendship; warmer protestations, a
more moving impulse of the affections, are hardly to

62 LEOPARDI

be found anywhere. Nor were Giordani and the
others at all behindhand in reciprocation* Leopardi
also visited Florence, and Pisa, which he found more
suitable than Florence to his health; and more than
once he returned to Recanati. The small income
which he derived from his literary work for the pulK
lisher Stella ceased towards the middle of 1828. His
last sojourn in his native place— and this soon became
a most unwilling sojourn — ended in May, 1830; he
then went back to the Tuscan capital, becoming inti-r
mate with the literary leaders, Oiambattista Niccolini,
Gino Capponi, and Frullani ; Florence was succeeded
by Rome, and finally by Naples* In Florence he had
had an unhappy attachment to a lady whom in his^
verse he names Aspasia. This attachment, like his
other love affairs, of which some three or four are
rather vaguely traceable, appears to have been of the
purest kind; but Leopardi considered after a tim^
that he had been trifled with, and he has left in verse
a vivid record of his wounded self-respect. Who
Aspasia may have been is a subject of some dispute*
Some writers erroneously suppose that she was the
Princess Charlotte Bonaparte, then a widow ; one Leo*
pardian editor, Mestica, says on the contrary that she
was a married lady, still living in i886* Certain it is
at any rate that Leopardi knew the princess, and to
some extent admired her, though he did not consider
her beautiful. This lady was a daughter of Joseph
Bonaparte, the ex-king of Naples and of Spain; and
she had married the Prince Napoleon, who was the
elder son of Louis Bonaparte, ex-king of Holland, and
was therefore the elder brother of that Louis Napoleon
whom most of us remember too well as the Emperor

ROSSETTI 63

Napoleon IIL The Prince Napoleon died youngs of
hardships encountered in an abortive attempt at Italian
insurrection. The Princess Charlotte cannot have
been Aspasia; for Leopardi speaks of the infants
(bambini) of Aspasia^ whereas the princess was child-
less. She inspired, about that very date, a hopeless
passion in a very distinguished French painter, L&>pold
Robert, who committed suicide in consequence; we
need not duplicate her responsibility by assuming that
she in any way played fast and loose with the greatest
Italian poet of recent times.

We have now reached the last stage of Leopardi's
gloomy monotony of life, A young Neapolitan of
some literary position, named Antonio Ranieri, who
had met him in 1827, re-encountered him in Florence
in 1830. Ranieri admired most intensdy the poetical
and literary eminence of Leopardi, and in this respect
he did no more than many other Italians : but he went
beyond them in a very important practical relation —
he shared his purse with the poet, and, instead of allow-
ing him to lapse once again into the dreaded obscurity
and lassitude of Recanati, he persuaded him to journey
soutiiwards, and try what the enchantments of Naples
might do for his health and spirits. To Naples there-*
fore Leopardi, along with Ranieri, proceeded in October,
1833 : the two young men housed together, and they
were joined by Ranieri's sister — named, like Leopardi^s
own sister, Paolina — who devoted herself to tending
and solacing the poet with an abnegation worthy of any
mediaeval saint, or any modem sister of charity. They
lived generally at Capodimonte, but at certain periods
of the year adjourned to a littie villa at Torre del Greco
pn the slopes of Vesuvius, amid scenery not easily sur*

64 LEOPARD!

passed in Europe. In 1836 the cholera was raging in
Italy. It was one of the singular contradictions of
character in Leopardi that^ although in constant ill-
healthy and professing, no doubt with a good deal of
sincerity^ a longing for death, he exhibited a lively
alarm at cholera; so in August he returned from
Naples to Vesuvius, and remained there till the ensuing
February, getting gradually worse and worse. Towards
this time he was about to bring out a new edition of his
works in four volumes — ^two of these were already
printed : the obscurantist Government of the Neapolitan
kingdom confiscated the two printed volumes, and pro-
hibited the issue of the other two. Leopardi was on
the eve of going back to the Vesuvian villa, when
dropsy at the heart put a period to his sufferings and
his life on June 14, 1 837. The physician. Dr. Mannella,
sent for a priest as the end was approaching, but, before
the churchman's arrival, Leopardi was no more. One
of his last utterances was, like Goethe's, a longing for
more light (fammi veder la luce) ; and then, to his de-
voted Ranieri, ' I see thee no more ' (to nan ti veggio
piu). It was only by active exertion and entreaty that
Ranieri succeeded in saving the remains of his friend
from the promiscuous burial which attended all persons
who died in Naples during that visitation of the
cholera ; he procured for the poet a separate interment
in the church of San Vitale near Pozzuoli, marked by
a suitable inscription, which was traced by the loving
and admiring hand of Giordani.

I have just said that Leopardi was ^ in constant ill-
health': this is but a very faint term for indicating
his truly deplorable physique. The catalogue of his
tribulations is indeed an appalling one. Such it would

ROSSETTI 65

be for anybody : but, when we reflect upon the excessive
sensitiveness of the poetical temperament, and upon the
yearning of a scholar for a fair chance of prosecuting
his studies, we shall see that to a man like Leopardi
the conditions were peculiarly desperate. He must
apparently have been bom sickly and over-nervous. Of
this, however, we hear nothing until, at the age of
eighteen or thereabouts, he is represented to us as totally
ruined in constitution through incessant, unmitigated
over-study. His eyesight was so weakened that he was
frequently unable to read or write for months together ;
in the last seven years of his life he could hardly read,
and he wrote not at all, unless it were some three or
four verses per day, but simply dictated. His hearing
also became very defective. His bones were per-
manently softened and wasted ; his blood was pale and
slow ; he suffered from dyspepsia and pulmonary and
kidney disease, leading on to dropsy. Sono tm ironco
che sente epena is his own expression in the year 1824.
And in 1828, ^ I am unable to fix my mind upon any
serious thought for a single minute, without feeling an
internal convulsion, without a disturbance in the
stomach, bitterness in the mouth, and the like.' No
change of diet, no alternation from walking to resting,
would serve his turn. Doctors told him that the
essential evil was an extraordinary intestinal delicacy,
combined with a corresponding affection of the nerves.
Heat and cold were equally noxious to him : the winter
shattered him, and he could not approach a fire.
During one cold season in Bologna he had to plunge
himself into a sack of feathers up to the armpits,
and in this plight he studied and received visitors.
'A double and deforming curvature' (as Ranieri ex-

F

66 LEOPARDI

presses it) came on, beginning when he was only seven-
teen years old : in fact^ Leopardi became a hunchback^
and was termed by his townsmen in Recanati, more
expressively than politely, il Gobbo dei Leopardu In
the winter of 1831 a horrid phthiriasis assailed him, of
which Ranieri has given some pitiable details. It is
not to be supposed indeed that he was always equally
ill: at intervals he improved^ and acknowledged it
(unlike some other invalids) freely enough: but there
was always an early relapse in store for the tormented
body and the tortured mind. He had got so used to
suffering that at last, contrary to his earlier imprefr-
sions, he even came to suppose that he might be
destined to a long life : this idea was to him the reverse
of consoling, and he was rapidly undeceived. One
must add that Leopardi was anything but a reasonable
or cautious invalid. He was so far obedient to his
doctors that, if they recommended meat or what not for
his dietj he would take to that sort of food with in-
discriminate zeal ; but, spite of severe warnings, he
persisted in indulging in sweets and ices. He turned
night into day, and would be wanting a solid meal in
Naples or Torre del Greco when poor Paolina Ranieri
and her servants were needing to get to bed. It may
well be that by this time he had given up as hopeless
any attempt to re-establish his health by regimen^ and
therefore humoured his own capricious taste, in whatever
direction it might point.

In person Leopardi was of middling height, bowed
and thin. His head was large^ his complexion pallid ;
the eyes blue and languid^ the features delicate, with
a prominent aquiline nose, a small chin, a small and
thin mouth and a large expansive forehead— rthe whole

ROSSETTI 67

type of face not greatly unlike that of Mr. Algernon
Swinburne in our own days. Ranieri credits him with
^an unspeakable and almost heavenly smile/ His
elocution was modest and rather weak.

I said at starting that Leopardi was ' the most un-
happy among men of literary genius/ I by no means
intend to imply that he suffered outward misfortunes
greater than^ or at all equalling, those which several of
his compeers have had to endure; to go no farther
than two of his OMm illustrious countrymen, the external
misfortunes which tried the mettle of Dante and of
Tasso in the furnace of afSiction were beyond com-
parison greater than those which beset Leopardi. We
have now skimmed the current of our poet's life, and
we find that, by way of external misfortunes, he had
nothing severer to show than a partly uncongenial
home, unappreciative townsfolk, narrow means, and
(what I have not brought out in any detail) some dis-
appointments in the attempt to obtain employment, or
to develop on a lai^e scale the vast resources of his
intellect. Even these distresses were but partial; for
hia family were upright and to a large extent affec-
tionate, and his literary reputation was, if limited in
scope, very considerable in degree. But it is the man
himself that was unhappy — abnormally and almost
uniquely unhappy. His miserable ill-health scourged
him from pillar to post, deformed his person, made him
an object of derisive compassion, hampered and stunted
his power of work. But physical disability and suffering
served only as the ante-room to settled and profound
mental gloom. Leopardi meditated upon the nature
and the destiny of man, and the character of men in
society; and he found scarcely anything to record

F 2

i& LEOPARDI

except the blackness of desolation. A large proportion
of bis writings is devoted to enforcing the view that
.men and women in society are almost miiversally selfish^
heartless^ malicious, and bad; that the very idea of
happiness in this world, for any human being, is a mere
delusion ; that there is not any other world to serve as
a counterbalance or compensation to man for his un-
happiness in this sphere of being ; and that thus it is
a universal misfortune for men to be born, and the
only thing to which they can reasonably look forward
with some sense of consolation, or some approach to
satisfaction, is death. He allowed that the emotion of
Hope, though irrational, affords some mitigation to the
evils of humanity; and laid stress upon the noUe
aspirations of virtue, wisdom, glory, love, and patriotism,
as magnificent incentives, although essentially illusions
— phantasms which man does well to believe in until
the paralyzing influence of Truth resolves them into
nothingness. Happiness, according to Leopardi, would
really consist in the sensation or emotion of pleasure,
and freedom from pain ; but these, especially after the
season of early youth is past, are not to be attained,
unless in transient and momentary glimpses : old age he
regarded with peculiar repulsion. He was therefore as
absolute a pessimist as any writer of whom literature
bears record. It seems difficult to doubt that what
compelled him into pessimism was, to a great extent,
his own chronic suffering, and the lot of bitterness and
self-abnegation which this imposed upon him in all his
personal and social relations. He himself admitted as
much, in a letter dated in 1820; but afterwards, in
another letter of May, 183a, he indignantly repelled
such an inference, and affirmed that his pessimism was

ROSSETTI 69

the genuine unbiassed deduction of his own reasoning
upon the nature and condition of general humankind. It
is curious that, of the two poets who, by frailty of con-
stitution and deformity of frame, most nearly resembled
each other, Alexander Pope and Oiacomo Leopardi,
one, the Englishman, professed the extreme of optimism,
^Whatever is, is best,^ while the other proclaimed an
equally complete pessimism, amoimting practically to
the assertion, ' That speck in the universe, called man,
is bom to nothing but disaster in life, and extinction in
death — ^the puppet and the mockery of fate/

I find it somewhat difficult to account for the
extremely bad opinion which Leopardi formed of the
characters of men — and women he regarded as even
inferior to men. It is said that in his early years he
assumed that people were, broadly speaking, all good ;
with the lapse of time he went to the opposite pole of
opinion, and considered them to be all bad. In other
words, he held that human nature was so frail and
faulty as to leave the good elements in it, or the good
specimens of the race, in a lamentable minority. As
early as 1820 (when he was only twenty-two years of
age, and had never left his native town) he could write
as foUows to a friend: 'The coldness and egoism of
our time, the ambition, self-interest, perfidy, the insen-
sibility of woman, whom I define as an animal without
a heart, are things which scare me.^ He does not
however appear to have ever become misanthropic,
rightly speaking ; he was wUling to be courteous and
accommodating to all, and cordial to some. Neither
is it shown that he had any cause to regard his pro-
fessing friends as callous or treacherous, or to complain
of the treatment which he received from ordinary

70 LEOPARDI

acquaintances^ or (apart from his own townspeople)
from general society. His letters to various friends —
more especially Giordani, Brighenti, the ladies of the
Tommasini and Maestri families^ and his own sister
and brother Carlo — continued to the end to be full^
not only of earnest affection^ but of strong asseverations
of his belief in their ^ts and virtues; and^ if he
thought so extremely well of a few persons with whom
he was intimate^ he might have been expected to infer
that a vast number of other people^ whom he had no
opportunity of knowings would prove to be similarly
distinguished for character or faculty. This however
was not his inference; he viewed human nature as
a mean affair, human society as a hotbed of corruption,
and human beings as condemnable in the lump. As
to his pessimism in its more express shape — his opinion
that no man is even moderately happy, and that all
men, from the cradle to the grave, are an example of
persistent tribulation, increasing as the years advance —
it is not my business to enter into any discussion. Spite
of Leopardi, a great multitude of people have believed,
and will continue to believe, that their life consists of
a balance between unhappiness and happiness. Some
will go so far as to say that the happiness visibly
predominates. To consider yourself, to feel yourself,
principally or partially happy, mugif pro tanto amount
to being principally or partially happy ; and the lucky
people who are conscious of that sensation will continue
to entertain it, spite of the most positive assurances
from the pondering or ponderous philosopher that,
under the fixed conditions and adamantine bonds of
human existence, they neither ought to be, nor are, nor
can be, happy in any but the smallest degree. It

ROSSETTI 71

should be added that^ according to Leopardi's view^
not only mankind but all living creatures drag out
a life of sufferings and had better never have been
bom; he made a possible exception for birds^ whose
structure^ powers, and demeanour, impressed him as
showing a vivacity of temperament unknown to other
animals. Men, of course, he regarded as more unhappy
than the others, owing to their vaster aspirations, their
acuter perception of the facts, and their unshared faculty
of reasoning upon them, and realizing to themselves
the nothingness of hope and the emptiness of things.

We shall do well to listen to the very words of Leo-
pardi on some of these points. I collect the passages
here and there as they happen to come ; but I confine
myself to prose passages, being reluctant to turn his
superb Italian verse into bald English prose : ^ Be
assured that, in order to be strongly moved by the
beautiful and the great in works of imagination, it is
needful to believe that there is in human life something
great and beautiful in reality, and that the poetic of
the world is not a mere fable. Which things a young
man always does believe, even though he may know
the contrary, until his own experience supplements the
knowledge ; but they are with difficulty believed after
the sad discipline of practical testing, and all the more
when experience id combined with the habit of specu-
lating, and with scholarship.' ^The truest delights
which our life admits of are those which arise from
false imaginings; and children find everything even
in nothing, men nothing in everjrthing.' ' If in my
writings I record some hard and sad truths, either to
relieve my mind, or to find some consolation in a jeer,
and not for any other object^ I none the less fail not in

72 LEOPARDI

those same books to deplore^ deprecate, and reprehend^
the study of that miserable and frigid truth, the know-
ledge of which is the source either of apathy and sloth,
or baseness of spirit^ iniquity, and dishonour of act^ and
perversity of character. Whereas on the contrary
I laud and exalt those opinions, false though they
be, which generate acts and thoughts noble, strong,
magnanimous, virtuous, and useful to the common
or private good ; those beautiful and felicitous imagin-
ings, although vain, which confer a value on -life; the
natural illusions of the soul; and in fine the antique
errors, far diverse from barbarian errors, which latter
alone, and not the former, ought to have collapsed by
dint of modem civilization and of philosophy/ ^If
I obtain death, I will die as tranquil and as content as
if I had never hoped or desired anything else in the
world. This is the sole benefit that can reconcile
me to destiny. If there were proposed to me on one
side the fortune and the fame of Caesar or of Alex-
ander, free from every blemish, on the other, to die
to-day, and if I had to choose, I would say, ''To die
to-day,^' nor would I need any time for deciding.'
' Men of feeling are little understood when they speak
of tedium^ (la noja, or ennuiy for which we have,
I believe, and strange it seems, no right English word);
^ and they make the herd sometimes marvel and some-
times laugh when they refer to this, and complain of
it with that gravity of terms which is used in relation
to the greatest and most inevitable evils of life. Tedium
is in a certain sense the most sublime of human senti-
ments. Not that I believe that^ from an examination
of this sentiment, those consequences flow which many
philosophers have undertaken to deduce ; but none the

ROSSETTI 73

less the inability to be satisfied with any earthly thing,
or (so to say) with the whole earth ; the contemplation
of the incalculable amplitude of space, the number and
the marvellous dimensions of the worlds, and finding
that all is little and puny to the capacity of one's own
mind; imagining the number of worlds infinite, and
the universe infinite, and feeling that our soul and
desire would be yet greater than this universe; and
always to accuse things of insufficiency and nullity,
and to suffer default and void, and hence tedium,
seems to me the highest symptom of greatness and
nobility which human nature exhibits. Therefore
tedium is but little known to men of no faculty, and
very little or not at all to other animals/ My next
extract comes from a letter addressed by Leopardi
from Rome, in 1 825, to bis sister at RecanatL ' I am
extremely sorry to learn that you are so harassed by
your imagination. I say ^^by imagination,^' not as
intending to imply that you are under a mistake, but
I mean to indicate that thence come all our ills ;
because in fact there is not in the world any real good
nor any real ill, humanly speaking, except bodily pain.
I wiU not repeat to you that human happiness is
a dream, that the world is not beautiful, is not even
endurable, unless seen as you see it, that is, from afar ;
that pleasure is a name, not a thing ; that virtue, sen-
sibility, greatness of soul, are not only the sole solaces
of our evils, but even the sole goods possible in this
life; and that these goods, if one lives in the world
and in society, are not enjoyed nor turned to profit, as
young people fancy, but get entirely lost, the spirit
remaining in a terrifying void. Hold as certain this
maxim, recognize^13y all philosophers, which may

74 LEOPARDI

console you in many contingencies^ namely, that the
happiness and the imhappiness of every man (leaving
out of count bodily pains) are absolutely equal to those
of every other, in whatever grade or situation the one
and the other may be found* And therefore, speaking
with exactness, the poor man, the old, the weak, the
ugly, the ignorant, enjoys as much and suffers as much
as the rich, the young, the strong, the handsome, the
learned; because every one, in his own condition,
fashions his good and his evil, and the sum of the
good and of the evil which each man can fashion for
himself is equal to that which any one else can fashion/
The following comes from a letter to Giordani, written
from Recanati in 1825* ^I study day and night so
long as health permits* When health gives in, I pace
up and down my room for a month or so, and then
I return to study; and thus do I live* As to the
quality of my studies, as I am changed from what
I was, so are the studies changed. Anything which
partakes of the emotional or eloquent wearies me, looks
like a mockery and risible child's play* I no longer
seek for anything except the truth — what I heretofore
so much hated and detested* I find a pleasure in ever
better discovering and fingering the misery of men and
of things, and in shuddering self-possessed (inorridire
freddamente) as I scrutinize this hapless and terrible
arcanum of the life of the universe* I now well per*
ceive that, when the passions are spent, study supplies
no other source and foundation of pleasure except
a vain curiosity, the satisfaction of which has never-
theless much attractive force ; a fact which previously,
so long as the last spark remained in my heart, I could
not comprehend*^

ROSSETTI 75

These utterances of Leopardi's, fragmentary though
they are, throw a good deal of light upon his character
and mind* I think the main trait of his character was
a great personal pride. By pride I do not mean any-
thing allied to arrogance^ presumption^ or conceit ; but
a strenuous internal self-assertion^ which urged him to
rise superior to whatever^ in natural conditions^ or in the
stress of society or of the affections^ seemed to threaten
to bend or break his will. Pride of this sort can even
take on the guise of humility, and Leopardi confessed,
with a frankness emulated by few writers, those terrible
problems of the dominancy and inscrutability of nature^
and the impotence of man bound with the iron chain of
necessity — problems which sap the very root of human
pride. He confessed them, but did so with a sense that
this was a bolder, a manlier course than other people
were prepared to adopt — that he could do what others
flinched from doings and that to do it was one more
proof, not of a submissive, but of a resolute and uncon-
quered soul. A distinguished French writer, Edouard
Rod, makes some observations on Leopardi^s mental
attitude which appear to me both true and acute.
^ Remark,^ he says, ^ that Leopardi never did anything
to escape from the tyranny of his ideas ; quite on the
contrary, he cherished them. He found a sort of bitter
and haughty satisfaction in proclaiming, in the name of
all sentient beings, the woe of living.' And further on^
^ His disposition for seeing the truth of things made him
at once timid in temperament and stoical in mind.' In
society Leopardi appears to have been uniformly quiet^
unassuming, and free from any aristocratic prejudices ;
conscious indeed that he seldom or never met his peers^
but not allowing this consciousness to transpire by any

76 LEOPARDI

overt act or wilfulness o{ speech. He was^ according to
Ranieri, modest, pure in mind and in deed, just, humane,
liberal, high-spirited, and upright. It is true that at
a later date Ranieri wrote in a different strain — ^im-
pelled perhaps by that jealous penrersity which makes
a man resent the commonplaces of universal praise
bestowed upon a long-deceased friend to whom, in his
hour of trial, only the one helping hand had been
extended. He then dwelt more than enough on the
poet's physical infirmities, and partly on blemishes of
his mind or character. Of these blemishes, most are
immediately related to those same physical infirmities,
and consist of capricious, neglectful, or unreasonable
habits, detrimental to his own interests as an invalid,
and to the comfort of the persons whose care was
lavished upon him in that capacity. Apart from this,
the most substantial charge is that he was excessively
and unduly sensitive to literary praise or blame ; a point
in which, even if we suppose the charge to be true to
the uttermost, Leopardi only shared a weakness highly
common among poets, and not uncommon among
authors of whatsoever class. There is also the state-
ment, well worth noting, that Leopardi detested the
country and country-life as distinct from town-life.
If this is entirely correct, he must have had a wonderful
power of assimilating, without enjoying or liking, the
aspects of natural landscape ; for many most finished,
touching, and intimately felt pictures and details of this
kind are to be found in his poems. His love of the
moon and moonlight seems at any rate unmistakably
genuine. It is perhaps true that Italians generally
are not such lovers of scenic nature as people are in
England, where a Wordsworth and a Ruskin — not to

ROSSETTI 77

speak of other writers — have almost made it a caiion
of moral obligation^ or a test of spiritual rectitude^ that
we should admire a flower or a tree^ a mountain or
a river^ the rolling rack or the iUumined horizon and
unfathomable zenith.

I will recur for a moment to one of the very strong
expressions which I quoted direct from Leopardi — that
in which he says he would rather die to-day than enjoy
the fortune and fame of Caesar or of Alexander. This
is spoken in the person of Tristano^ an imaginary
speaker in one of his JDialoffues; but it is plainly
intended to represent the deliberate conclusion of the
author himself. The idea of well-earned renown, of
glory, was certainly one of those for which Leopardi
had a powerful natural bias ; and, if he preferred death
to glory, he must have wished for death very intensely —
and indeed he constantly asserted that so he did. The
wish for death, combined with the highly negative
opinions which he entertained regarding a revealed or
peremptory rule of right, or an immortal destiny for
man, might naturally have suggested the act of suicide.
Nor was this thought foreign to Leopardi's mind. But
practically he rejected the notion of suicide ; saying, in
a letter to Signora Tommasini, dated in 1828, 'the
unmeasured love which I bear to my friends and rela-
tives will always retain me in the world so long as
destiny wills I should be there/ And in an elaborate
dial<^ue which he composed^ with Porphyry and
Plotinus as the speakers, he develops the same concep-
tion in befitting detaiL

Having now slightly sketched the life and exhibited
some outlines of the character of Leopardi, I must
devote the remainder of my Lecture to that which makes

78 LEOPARDI

him a memorable figure for our contemplation — ^his
writings in poetry and in prose.

As we have already seen, the chief tendency of
Giacomo Leopardi^s boyish studies was towards lin-
guistics, or a consideration of the classical authors as
the subject of critical scholarship. About the earliest
writing of his that has been preserved is a Latin essay,
De Viid et Scriptis Bhetorum quarundam, ue. Latin
rhetoricians of the second century a.d.; its date is
1 814, Leopardi's sixteenth year, but he is said to have
begun writing on Latin Philology even at the age of
twelve. Then came a treatise On the Life and Writings
o/HesycMus of Miletus ; a translation of the Fragments,
published by Cardinal Mai, of Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus ; The History 0/ Astronomy, from its origin up
to the year 181 1, written at the age of fifteen, and said
to show great erudition in its way, though defective
in respect to science and criticism; an essay On the
Popular Errors of the Ancients, citing more than 4CX)
authors ; Notes on Plato, Demetrius Phalereus, Theon
the Sophist ; a Collection of Fragments written by fifty-
five Fathers of the Church ; a Comment on Porphyry*s
life ofPlotinusi aDiscourse on the Batrachomyomachia^
popularly attributed to Homer, followed by two verse-
translations of the poem ; an essay On the Reputation
of Horace among the Ancients ; and another on the
Chronicle ofEusebius, one of the best and maturest of
these writings. Several more could be named. Out of
this great mass of learned compositions, a few were
published by the author here and there in reviews. The
bulk of them were confided by him towards 1831 to
a Swiss philologist. Dr. De Linner, who undertook to
have them published in Germany or in Paris. But, for

ROSSETTI 79

one reason or another, De Linner left his promise
almost totally unfulfilled. After De Linner's death the
Italian Oovemment bought the MSS., and they are
now preserved in the Palatine Library of Florence, and
a large proportion of them have been published. Besides
these productions in prose, I should not omit a Greek
ode to Poseidon, and two others on the manner of
Anacreon, which were written towards the age of
eighteen, and imposed upon some accredited Italian and
even German scholars ; at a later date there was a fic-
titious martyrology of some Sinaitic monks, imitating
the Italian of the thirteenth century, and this also was
accepted as genuine. Another early prose writing, of
a different kind, was an Oration on the Liberation of
the Piceno in the May of 1 815, written when Leopardi
was not quite seventeen. This is a philippic against
King Joachim of Naples, Murat, when he undertook
his disastrous expedition for freeing Italy from the
Austrians. I don't suppose that Leopardi, at any
period of his life, felt the least predilection for a French,
as opposed to an Austrian, predominance in Italy ; at
any rate he did not in 1815, when he was still more or
less under the influence of his father's stiffly conserva*
tive opinions, and moreover Muraf s miUtary movements
had caused much commotion and inconvenience in the
young author's own vicinity, and popular animosity
seethed against them. This pamphlet is adverse to
Italian national imity, and upholds small sovereigns
and their courts. It arraigns the French Revolution as
having led to the tyranny of Napoleon — ^ that monster
— ^the barbarous slaughterer who used to entitle himself
our king^ — and it denounces tyranny in general. One
need scarcely observe that the political sentiments

8o LEOPARDI

expressed by Leopard! at this very early age are not of
much importance to any one ; yet they are worth noting
as the starting-point from which he developed into the
earnest advocacy of national dignity and enlightenment,
though he was not at any time a believer in ^ the pro-
gress of the species^ (a conception inconsistent with his
pessimism), or in mechanical discoveries as a powerful
factor for such progress, or in the motives or the
methods of insurgent leaders. It seems curious that in
his later writings there is practically nothing about
Napoleon, that colossal figure who had filled Italy and
the world through all the years of Leopardi's youth.
I find only one reference to him, in the scattered
Pensieriy where Napoleon is taken as an illustration
of the axiom that men of extraordinary faculty are
admired and loved, not only in spite, but even because^
of their avowed contempt of mankind. We must
remember however — and this is with respect to all the
burning questions of which Leopardi treated — that he
was writing in the days of censorship of the press^ and
he was well aware that any outspoken utterance on
certain subjects would not be permitted to pass
muster.

We have now done with Leopardi's early prose
writings, mostly philological or critical, and must pro-
ceed to his poems. Among these a few very early
specimens have been preserved to us, chiefly a boyish
and of course quite worthless tragedy, Pompeo in
Egitto, written at the age of thirteen, and a fairly long
composition, nearly 9C0 lines, in terza rima, AppreMO^
mento alia Mortej which belongs to his eighteenth or
nineteenth year. This is modelled on the Trimfi of
Petrarca, which are themselves to some extent modelled

HOSSETTI 8r

on the Commedia of Dante. The Appressamento alia
Morie is a poem of very fair merit and attainment,
although it runs on in a rather uniform strain of over-
emphasis^ which lacks the relief of concentration and
strong constructive points. It was never published
until long after its author's decease, though he printedy
in a modified form, one or two detached fragments of
the composition. The poem is at any rate highly
interesting as one of personal feeling ; written as it
was to give vent to Leopardi's emotions when, in the
early break-up of his health, he first became convinced
that he was foredoomed to a premature death. The
argument is briefly this : — ^The young poef s Guardian
Angel appears to him, warns him that he is shortly to
die, and shows him visions to satisfy him that death is
not an evil. He exhibits Love and his victims (our
Henry VIH is one of them), then Avarice, Heresy (or
speculative error, false philosophy, &c.). War, Tyranny,
and Oblivion, and the victims of all these. Then comes
a vision of Paradise and the Saints, vrith Dante among
them, and the King and Queen of Heaven, Christ and
Mary. Why then should the youth be reluctant to
die, and to see the very reality of this glorious vision ?
In the last canto Leopardi meditates his own hopes of
poetic and other renown, and his natural shrinking
from a death which would compel him to leave no
name behind; but he finally resigns himself, taking
refuge in the religious ideas of eternity and of God.
This poem, it will be seen, clearly indicates that
Leopardi was as yet animated by the Christian beliefs
and sentiments in which he had been brought up;
these, without being openly attacked, are either tacitly
dropped in the various poems which he himself pub-

a

/

/

83 LEOPARDI

lished^ or they are visibly incompatible with the line of
thought which we find there developed.

The mature period of Leopardi's poetic genius and
performance commences with the two odes which
I have already had occasion to name — ^the address To
Italy and the canzone On the Projected Monument to
Dante. As these were composed in the autumn of
1818^ when he was but twenty years of age, and as
both are highly finished performances, majestic in
tone, exalted in style, and purged in diction, one must
number Leopardi among the poets who in adolescence
have produced the fruits of ripest manhood — an Ephe-
bus worthy to take his seat among the Areopagites.
Having once attained this height, he never descended
from it; whatever he produced afterwards in verse is
so excellent of its kind, so clearly conceived as a whole,
with details so congruous and so selected, adornment
so precious and so discriminate, fine literary form so
constantly observed, force and depth of feeling so
enhanced by strength of self-restraint, that one might
almost cite any and every one of his compositions as
a model of how — ^given the theme to be treated — the
treatment should best proceed. In saying that he
never descended from his origmal height, I do not
mean to ignore the fact that a few of his pieces^
especially his last and longest poem, are of a more
familiar kind — ^they are indeed of a directly satirical or
sarcastic cast, with clear touches of humorous ridicule ;
but these examples, not less than the others, are per-
meated by large ideas, and executed with a not inferior
sense of style, according to their requirements. Neither
do I beg the question whether the themes which he
treated are alwajna or to the full approvable; they are

EOSSETTI ?3

often the themes of a pessimist, and pessimism is a
doctrine which many or most of us dissent firom^ and
which a large number heartQy disapprove.

If we leave out of count the one rather long poem^
the whole of Leopardi's mature writing in verse is of
extremely moderate bulk ; there are about forty com-
positions, in the form of canzoni or other lyrics, and of
blank verse ; not a single sonnet is among them —
a rarity for an Italian author. Their most general
subject-matter is the sorrows of mortality — the mystery
and nothingness of man's life, his perpetual en-
deavours, his ever-recurrent and sometimes sublime
illusions, the fate which dogs, and the death which
extinguishes him. I should incline to say that the
very finest of these poems is that entitled Canto Not*
tumo di «f» Pastare Errante delP Asia (Nightly
Chaunt of a Nomadic Shepherd of Asia), written
chiefly in 1826; the greatest general favourites are
perhaps the two latest in date. The Setting of the Moon,
and La Ginestra (The Broom-Plant) — where this shrub,
growing in abundance on the volcanic slopes of Vesu-
vius, is used as the occasion for much gloomy and far-
reaching comment on the transiency and insignificance
of the human generations. Leopardi continually takes
some aspect of Nature as a symbol or incentive of
feelings and fuses the two things so that the feeling
predominates. Apart from their general tone of philo*
Sophie or speculative meditation, always in the direction
of sadness and pessimism — a sadness which is bitter
without being exactly sour, and pessimism which is
scornful without lapsing into actual cynicism — the
poems have naturally some amount of variety in sub-
ject ; some being mainly patriotic, others tender and

G %

84 LEOPARDI

pasnonate (never erotic) ; others chiefly descriptive,
replete with quiet yet precise observation of Nature and
of ordinary life, all touched with a lingering pity, and
mellowed by the light of a noble contemplative ima-
gination. That none of these poems is in any degree
^entertaining' (if perhaps we except the Palinodia
a Oino Capponi) may be admitted at once; their
general tone is castigated and severe, and certainly not
conciliating to such as are minded to run while they
read. The epithet ^stuck-up' is about the mildest
which readers of this turn would apply to the verse
of Leopardi.

If opportunity permitted, it would be very befitting
to enter into an analysis of some of the most con-
spicuous of these poems — the ideas on which they are
founded, their details of thought, treatment, and exe-
cution. But, as this is not now practicable, I must
limit myself to a few remarks upon their general
poetic quality. Melody of sound and poetic charm are
ever present, with a grace and force of words which (so
far as these precious qualities are alone concerned) we
may perhaps more nearly compare to that of Tenny-
son than of any other English writer ; there are of:
course greater austerity of presentment, and greater
detachment from the thing presented, than we find in
Tennyson. The diction is very condensed, and one
has to pay steady attention lest some delicacy of
meaning or some shade of beauty should remain
imprized. The perfection of expression is great in-
deed. In some of his poems Leopardi is free in
mixing unrhymed with rhyming lines; and he does
it with so much mastery that the ear catches a dif-
fused sense of rhyme, without missing it where it is

ROSSETTI 85

not. He is throughout one of the most personal of
poets ; all that he says he says out of himself; I use the
term ^ personal ^ raUier than ^ subjective/ though the
latter now rather hackneyed adjective would also be
quite apposite here. Not indeed that he never takes
a motive or a suggestion from earlier writers; he
has done so — especially in his more youthful com*
positions — from Petrarca^ and not from him alone;
but he appropriates such things^ and does not merely
reproduce them. His subject never overmasters him.
Whatever he deals with^ he seems to see round it^
to impose upon it his own law of thought^ to extract
its quintessential virtue according to this law^ and
to present the result to us with a sense of superiority
— no mean or common achievement of volition for
a writer whose continual theme is inscrutable and
unappealable Fate^ Nature hostile and Man the shadow
of a shade.

The last and longest poem of Leopardi — ^he com*
pleted it only the day before his death — is of a very
different class from all the others. It is named Para^
Hpomini detta Bairacomiomachia, forming a kind of
arbitrary sequel to the Greek Batrachomyomachia, of
which in early youth he had produced two verse-trans-
lations. This poem is in the ottava rima, the metre
of Ariosto and Tasso^ and represents the fortunes or
misfortunes of the Mice after their army had been
slaughtered by the Crabs. It is the only narrative
poem by our author, and the only one which professes
to be amusing. And amusing it is, though rather
diffuse — one may well suppose that it would have been
condensed here and there prior to publication by him-
self. Its tone is light, pungent, and grotesque^ not

86 LEOPARDI

unmingled with serious meanings. The poem is gene-
rally reputed to be a satire on the Neapolitans, and
their revolution of 1840; the Mice (so says Ranieri,
who must have heard something of the sort from
Leopardi) standing for the Italians, the Crabs for the
Austrians, and the Frogs for the Priests. There is,
however, I think, a great deal of ^ chance medley ' in
the narrative, which does not stick close to Neapolitan
or any other political events, but here glances at
some actual incident, there laughs at some actual
person (Louis Philippe and the French Revolution
of 1830 are clearly enough implied), and there again
makes merry at the weaknesses or grievances of
general himiankind.

From what has been said of his style it necessarily
follows that Leopardi was an extremely careful writer :
even such a minor matter as punctuation received con-
siderate and precise attention from him. In conception
he was rapid, in execution deliberate and fastidious.
In a letter dated in 1824, after observing that he had
only written few and short poems, he adds : ^ In writing
I have never followed anything except an inspiration or
phrensy: when this arrived, I found in a couple of
minutes the design and distribution of the entire com-
position. When that is done, my custom always is to
wait until I again feel myself in the vein ; when I do,
and this generally happens only a month or so later on,
I then settle down to composing; but with so much
slowness that I cannot possibly finish a poem, short as
it may be, in less than two or three weeks. This is my
method : and, if the inspiration does not come to me
spontaneously, more easily would water gush from a
tree-trunk than a single verse from my brain/ The

ROSSETTI 87

flerious spirit in which Leopardi wrote poetry appears
from another letter, dated in 1826. He there remarks
that, by the mere common sort of verse-spinning, ^we
do an express service to our tyrants, because we reduce
to a sport and a pastime literature, from which alone
the regeneration of our country might obtain a solid
beginning/

The prose works of Leopardi — apart from those early
critical or linguistic writings to which I have already
referred — consist principally of Dialogues, which he
began writing towards 1820. There is also a very
noticeable performance named Detti Memorabili di
Filippo Ottonieri, which may be termed a mental auto-
biography, thinly disguised: it is imitated from the
account of a real sage in Lucian's Demomuc ; and a set
of scattered Pensieri on a variety of subjects. For
acuteness and penetration, and a kind of intrinsic per-
ception of the characters and manners of men from an
extrinsic point of view, these two works are highly
remarkable. The style of them, as also of the Dialogues,
is r^arded by Italians — and we may safely acquiesce in
this verdict — as consummately good: straightforward,
pure without mannered purism, unlaboured, and yet
tempered and polished like the most trenchant steel.
Leopardi considered excellent prose-writing to be more
difficult than excellent verse; comparing the two to
the beauty of a woman, undraped and draped. There
is besides the collection of his letters, of which no fewer
than 544 are given in the principal edition, and some
others are to be found elsewhere. Of these I have
already spoken to some extent : they are full of sensi-
bility, and contain a great deal of strong substance
eloquently put. An Italian editor holds that the

88 LEOPARDI

letters to Giordani, and to the historian Colletta^ sur-
pass all Italian letters except those of Tasso; he
terms them ^tasteful, candid, affectionate, edifying,
philosophical/ To an English taste the letters gene-
rally are no doubt somewhat marred by the ceremonial
style which has been common among Italians : some
small service or symptom of good-will is acknowledged
as if it were the acme of benevolence; the acknow-
ledgment itself pants through superlatives ; the person
addressed figures as the most commanding, and the
writer as the least considerable, of mankind. All
this is on the surface; it must be skimmed off and
allowed for, and the letters then become enjoyable
reading, though also — from the constant suffering
of body and mind which they exhibit — saddening
and poignant.

The Dialogues and some other prose-writings were
published in 1827 under the name of Operette MoraU*
Lucian appears to have been Leopardi's chief model in
the Dialogues, as in the Detti Memorabili di FiRppo
Ottonieri; but, while often sportive in form, and not
sparing in sallies of telling wit and humour, he is a far
more serious Lucian. As usual, the unaccountableneas
of life, the yawning gulf between the aspirations of man
and his capacities and destiny, the want of raison tPitre
for such a creature so circumstanced, the trammels
which he fashions for himself so as to make his position
all the more comfortiess and absurd, form the burden
of the strain. Leopardi here combines the weeping
and the laughing philosophers. That so the thing should
be is a grief ^too deep for tears^ : the mode in which
the thing presents itself to observation, the sorry shifts
adopted by these sorry beings, oscillating and staggering

ROSSETTI 89

between a hapless birth and a death inevitable^ finals
and in its degree welcome^ the uselessness of hope^ the
cruelty of Nature and of Truth, furnish the occasion for
smiles frequent enough, though they come mostly on
the wrong side of the mouth. ' Grin and bear it^
might be inscribed as a general motto for Leopardi's
Dialogues. Luckily he writes so well, says so many
things barbed with meaning and feathered with grace,
that the reader is enabled to smile along with him.
After A History of the Human Race, a very pregnant
and suggestive summary in a vivid imaginative form of
allegOTy (this is not a dialogue), come the coUoqides of
Faahion and Death, Nature and a Soul, The Earth
and the Moon, A Physicist and a Metaphysician, Nature
and an Icelander, Copernicus and the Sun, and several
others, bearing titles which do not so strongly indicate
the general nature of their subjects. The two which
I have named last are among the very best. In the
Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander we find a
hyperborean who, chastened by experience into long-
ing for no higher good than a life as far as possible
quiet and unpainful, has journeyed into the interior of
Africa, where it is vouchsafed to him to descry Nature
in a human form. He inquires why she so perpetuaUy
persecutes the tmfortunate denizens of Earth, and is
answered that, persecution or no persecution, she
scarcely so much as reflects whether these personages
exist or not ; and the conversation is proceeding with
much earnestness on the part of the Icelander, and
some courtesy tempering indifference on the part of
Nature, when a brace of famished lions arrive on the
scene, and eat up the traveller, or (as a different account
of the transaction runs) a violent sandblast overwhelms

90 LEOPARDI

him, and preserves his mummy in prime condition
for some European Museum. The Dialogue between
Copernicus and the Sun is throughout a piece of arch
pleasantry; in which the Sun is represented as being
mortally weary of his perpetual task of moving round
the Earth, and therefore he persuades Copernicus to
get the Earth to move round the Sun; and the
philosopher, willing to accommodate but afraid of
being burned as a heretic, is reassured on being
enjoined to dedicate his treatise (as in fact he did)
to the Pope.

With this I must bring to a conclusion the slight
account which I have been able to furnish of the Conte
Oiacomo Leopardi, his melancholy career and his
melancholy intellect, but a career as blameless and an
intellect as exalted as they were melancholy. His
writings have not perhaps had any very extensive vogue
outside Italy : the Poems have, however, been translated
into German by Heyse and Brandes, and the Essays
and Dialogues into English by Mr. Edwards and by the
late James Thomson; and by one means or another
he has certainly borne a considerable part in clinching
the nail of pessimism into the speculative panoply of
our now closing century. It has been his privilege
to convey to the reader, along with the hard and un*
welcome assertions of pessimism, a large measure of
sympathy with his own singularly adverse fate: we
read his personal sorrows into his abstract cogitations,
and those among us who have no liking and little indul-
gence for the latter are still touched by their all too
close affinity to the former. As a poet, Leopardi holds
us by a firm and thrilling grasp, and readers who have
once passed under his spell recur to him again and

ROSSETTI gi

again with a still increasing sense of its potency. I will
borrow in conclusion a strong, yet no more than a just,
expression of one of our best critical authorities.
Dr. Richard Garnett, and say that Leopardi is ^the
one Italian poet of the nineteenth century who has
taken an uncontested place among t^.'e classics of
the language/ *

1891.

LESSING AND MODERN
GERMAN LITERATURE

NOT long ago a friendly reviewer of a small book of
mine on the life and work of Lessing observed
that in dealing with Lessing's scholarship, with that
knowledge of the literatures of Greece and Rome which
so largely contributed to make him a great originative
force in the literature of his own country, I had not
laid sufficient stress on the limitations of that scholar-
ship, or, what my reviewer called, its essentially
^eighteenth-century' character. By which he meant
that Lessing, like most scholars of his day, concerned
himself with the text of the ancient literature and not
with what lay behind it, not with that body of legend
and tradition, or the social or historical influences, which
form as it were the soil out of which literature grows.
Of course it is quite true that in this respect Lessing
did belong to the earlier, the pre-Wolfian, generation
of scholarship. It is also true that the fact was alto-
gether a favourable one for the work he had to do.
His mission was to create a modem Oerman literature.
For this purpose he was obviously much better equipped
in knowing the literature of the ancients as a product

^

94 LESSING

of imaginative art than as a field for scientific investi-
gation. Of course no one who knows anything of
these investigations^ or of the vast and rich field of
interest which they open up^ would dream of dis-
paraging them. Nor do I. But it is highly necessary
to dwell upon the fact that these investigations^ however
full and complete^ however valuable and necessary^ are
not in themselves a study of literature^ and will not
yield to those who pursue them what it is the function
of literature to yield. They are a branch of science^
and their main interest is scientific ; literature — ^imagi-
native^ creative literature — is a branch of art^ and its
main interest is aesthetic. Now, as everybody knows,
the scientific interest has been very keenly and almost
exclusively pursued in Germany for some two genera-
tions. And Germany is great in philology, great in
mj^hology and folklore; but she has ceased for the
present to produce, I will not say writers like Goethe
or Lessing, but like our own Tennyson or Matthew
Arnold — ^poets, these, without any very conspicuous
endowment of native force, but whose loving familiarity
with the supreme types of literary art gave them no
small measure of the height, the dignity, the disdain
for every cheiqp and vulgar success which mark in all
ages, in all languages, and in all materials, the art
called classic.

Tet if one happens to hear the question of higher
education discussed in Germany, one is pretty sure to
find it taken for granted that German education at the
present day is based on the literature of Greece. And
it is easy to verify the assertion that the German
* gymnasiast ' of to-day is very largely concerned with
Greek. But what does he get from Greek — what does

ROLLESTON 95

he ask from it ? Let me here quote a remark of an
acquaintance of mine who has had a large practical
experience as an assistant-master in one of the historic
public schools in England^ and who has also had
unusual opportunities for making himself acquainted
with German classical education. 1 had asked him
what he thought of the relative attainments in Greek
of the average English and the average German school-
boy of the same standing. His reply was to this effect :
^The German schoolboy will be posted in the latest
theory of the composition of the Homeric poems ; the
English boy will perhaps be but dimly aware that there
is any question in the matter at all. But if you set
them both down to a piece of unseen translation^ the
English boy will leave the German a long way behind/
Now^ it is better^ incomparably better^ to be able to
read the Iliad, than to know^ or to know that we cannot
know^ how the Iliad came to be written. To English
readers this might seem a truism of a very obvious
kind^ yet it is certain that the ideas of literary study
which have long prevailed in Germany^ and which are
beginning to prevail in France^ are making themselves
distinctly visible in England too. Thus we have a
scholar of the eminence oi the late Mr. F. A. Paley^
asserting^ in his introduction to the (Edipus Colonetu
(Cambridge Texts)^ that without believing the plot to
be founded on a solar myth it is impossible to have
other than ^ a partial and imperfect conception ' of it.
Mr. Paley probably did not realize that he was denying
to Sophocles himself any genuine understanding of his
own play. Struck with the importance and significance
of modem investigations into the sources of literature,
he confounded for a moment the scientific interest of

96 LESSIN6

these investigations with the aesthetic interest of a great
poetic work — an interest always^ surely, centring not
upon the raw material, but upon the poet's conception.
And of this we may be sure — that the quickening and
inspiring influences of Greek literature which acted so
conspicuously and so momentously in the revival of
German literature in the last century will never be felt,
or communicated, by scholars who see little or nothing
in that literature but the materials for philology or
folklore.

I am writing of the origins of modern German litera-
ture. The phrase may need, perhaps, some justifica-
tion. There is no such thing as a modem English
literature; there is no chasm between Tennyson and
Chaucer. But between German literature in the epoch
of Lessing and Grerman literature in the epoch of the
NibelungenUed there is a chasm of some 600 years.
Not, of course, that German histories of literature are
a tabula rasa for that period. But if, as was once
suggested, all German books likely to be read outside
Germany were to be printed in Latin characters, then
by far the greater part of the literature — ^I speak of the
secular literature — of those 600 years might safely be
left in Gothic. This is in itself a somewhat singular
fact, for the Germanic peoples are not notably lacking
in the literary impulse, and never have been. The
famous library of Charlemagne contained a collection
of barbara cannina, among which were doubtless some
relics of those ancient hj^ns, described as antigua by
so early an authority as Tacitus, who, like a modem
savant, is chiefly interested in them for the light, they
throw on Teutonic mythology.

Among the luminous and pregnant criticisms on

ROLLESTON 97

German literature of which Groethe's Wahrheit und
Dicktung is full, he observes that during this long
period of barrenness the thing which seems to have
been mainly wanting to that literature was substance,
contents, Inhalt — and that, he adds, a 'national'
InhalL Bedde this remark let us place a sentence
from the interesting AUgemeine lAtteraturgeschichte of
Johannes Scherr. ' The idea of Fatherland,' he writes,
'must be the soul of every achievement of culture,
and hence also the fundamental motive of literature/
Now Germans are at present possessed by this idea of
Fatherland to a degree which is not favourable to a
perfectly clear, unbiassed view of things ; yet here, I
think, with certain restrictions, with certfun explana-
tions, Scherr states a very important truth. At any
rate, what he here asserts is really the unexpressed
background of nearly all literary criticism. Literature
is universally regarded as being something peculiarly
national. How far does the actual history of literature
justify this view? And can we discover a rational
basis for it?

Let us begin, in Lessing's fashion, by considering
what is naturally and necessarily implied in the very
existence of literature as such. We observe first that
the written word, like the spoken word, implies an
audience. And by the nature of that audience, by its
characteristic influence upon the person who addresses
it, the nature of his utterance must, one would think,
be very largely determined. Speaking broadly, may
we not say that no great, worthy, and enduring work
of literature could ever be addressed save to an audience
which the writer regarded with a profound love and
veneration, and which had power to stir and sway to

H

98 LESSIN6

their very depths the tides of noble passion ? Now two
such audiences there are, and only two : as a matter
of fact, the great literatures of the world have been
addressed to Fatherland, or they have been addressed
to 6od« These are the august presences — these, and
not Fatherland alone, which have hitherto dominated
all literature. Take, for instance, the literature of
Greece, which ran a course so singularly self-impelled,
so free from complicating external influences, that any
true law of literary evolution will surely be mirrored
there with singular clearness. To begin with the
Homeric poems : little, comparatively, as we know of the
external conditions under which they were produced,
they bear internal witness of the most unmistakable
kind to the fact that they took form among a people
who had a proud and keen sense of Achaean unity.
It was stronger than that which existed in Hellas in
the period closely preceding the Persian wars. But
when those wars had roused the Hellenic spirit into
vivid life and energy, when, in the words of Mr. Swin-
burne —

'All the lesser tribes pat on the pure Athenian &8hion,
One Hellenic heart was from the mountains to the sea'—

then the second epoch of Greek literature began. It
began with a poet who fought at Marathon, and with
whom did it end? With an orator who fought at
Chaeronea. The Macedonian conquerors dispersed
Greek culture throughout the world, but they ended
the national life of Greece. There was Hellenism, but
there was no longer a Hellas. And secular literature,
now the pastime of courtiers and scholars, ceased to
attract the noblest powers and ambitions of the race.
In what direction, then^ did those powers turn ? They

ROLLESTON 99

turned to the divine. It was now that the great ethical
systems of antiquity began to take shape. The illu&^
trious names of the epoch are Zeno, Cleanthes^ Chrys-
ippus^ Epicurus^ and it was they who handed on to
future generations the torch of Greek intellect. Yet
there is one poetic work surviving to us from the Hel-
lenistic epochs one^ no doubt, of many that have perished,
which su£Bices — to quote the words of Mr. MahafFy—
to redeem the whole literature of that epoch ^from the
charge of mere artificiality and pedantry.^ And what
is this work ? It is a hymn, the profound and majestic
Hymn to Zeus written by the Stoic Cleanthes. This
we owe to the Hellenistic, the denationalized epoch —
this, and the creed its author helped to found, a creed
which, though Pagan, was destined never to be outworn*
The secular literature of Greece was succeeded by
that of Rome, and we find the flowering time of the
latter coinciding with the final establishment of Roman
unity and power. That unity was dissolved, that power
dethroned, and that literature perished. But when the
flood of barbarism which had submerged the ancient
civilization began to sink, then, one by one, like islands
above the waste of waters, the different European
nationalities made their appearance. There began to
be an England, a France, a Germany. And then, and
not till then, there b^an to be an English, a French,
a German literature. There was not indeed then, or
for long afterwards, an Italy, though there was an
Italian literature* But there were in Italy many centres
of an intense municipal patriotism. There was a Milan,
a Florence, a Pisa, and literature and art found there
the soil in which they could strike root and grow. But
was there, then^ no literature in the preceding ages of

100 LESSINO

tumult and dissolution ? There was a literature^ ma-
jestic and impressive to the utmost height ever reached
by the human spirit^ but it was not a secular literature
addressed to Fatherland^ it was a religious literature^
addressed to God. This was the age which saw the
development of the hynmology and the liturgy of the
Christian Church. That was the direction in which
literary power then went, and if we seek for a poetic
work which may stand as a type of the most serious,
the most impassioned, the most central utterance of
the time, we shall no more think, let us say, of the
Hero and Leander of Musaeus, lovely as it is, than in
a previous age we should think of the Idylls of Theo-
critus. We shall think of the Te Deum, of the Fimt,
sancte S^rituSy or of the tremendous heart-shaking
rhythm of Bernard of Cluny.

And now to fix our eyes on Germany alone. Only
in one spot amid her chaos of warring tribes did the eye
of Tacitus discern the beginnings of anything like a
national organization. The name ^ Suevi,' he tells us,
unlike the other names noted by him, was applied not
td one tribe or clan but to a kind of military con-
federacy. Some century or so after Tacitus, however,
events of profound importance, which have never found,
and never will find, an historian, b^an to be accom-
plished in the obscurity of the German forests. When
Germany again emerges into historic light a great change
has taken place. Clans have grown together and become
nations, the old tribal names have largely disappeared,
and instead of them we hear now of Saxons, Bavarians,
Akmanni, or they win a wider significance Uke that of
the Lombards or the Goths. That new and powerful
sentiment which the Germans brought into European

ROLLESTON loi

politics^ the seutiment of TTreuey of passionate fidelity to
a personal leader^ suffers nothing in these changes.
With every advance in centralization^ the kingly power
is strengthened and consolidated. Grermany hitherto
had been on her defence against Rome. Now the
situation is reversed^ Rome is the defender^ Germany
the aggressor. With centralization has come power,
the power which broke in pieces the civilization of the
south, and which made, if ever anything made, a
breach in the continuity of history.

After this amazing triumph one might have looked
for the speedy formation of a great and united German
Empire. But for a time many causes conspired to
prevent this consummation. Religious differences were
amongst the principal. Many of the German clans or
confederacies were Arian,others orthodox, others heathen,
or half Christian, half heathen. Add to this, that the
very power and dignity which the centralizing move-
ment had conferred upon the German leaders made
further steps in the same direction increasingly difSicult
after a certain limit had been reached.

But the time, of course, did come when the conception
of a strong and united Germany became an object of
policy, and in great measure an attained object. We
may set it down as having been first consciously pursued
in the tenth century, the period of the great Saxon
Emperors. Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great
building an impregnable rampart of German valour
against the deluge of Hunnish barbarism; Otto II
besieging Paris, and restoring Lothringen to the Reich ;
Otto III, the 'World's Wonder,' with his soaring
imagination, the German and the Greek mingled in his
blood, who took the insignia of empire from the dead

102 LESSING

hands of Charlemagne — this great dynasty left a legacy
of aspirations and memories which sank deq> into the
heart of the German people. Giesebrecht notes that it
was in the reign of Otto the Great that the word
Detttsche was first used in official documents to signify
the mass of German-speaking peoples^ a memorable
landmark indeed*

Under the Franconian Emperors the same movement
went on^ and we note here a decisive token of the height
it had reached in the expression 'Teutonica Patria,'
first used^ and used by two independent annalists,
towards the close of the eleventh century. But that
epoch was marked by an historic event from which, as
from a fountain head, we can trace, down the history
of Germany, a long sequence of barren and devastate
ing warfare, of rebellion and anarchy, of oppression
and plunder, of the encouragement of all lawless and
the enfeeblement of all lawful power. In 1075 a
German Emperor was summoned to give an account
of his government before the Court of Rome. For
long the German Emperors had encouraged the autho-
rity and increased the territory of the Church in
Germany, hoping thus to check and balance the grow-
ing power of the secular princes. The fruits of this
short-sighted policy were now evident. Henry IV,
treating the summons of the Pope with contempt, was
forced to expiate his contumacy in dust and ashes.
And henceforth the prime object of Papal policy, policy
successfully pursued for many centuries, was to prevent
the growth of a strong central power in Germany. But
the national impulse once given could not be subdued
by one defeat. The predecessor of Henry IV had made
and unmade Popes at will, and the Pope who brought

ROLLESTON 103

a German Emperor to the dust at Canoasa himself died
in defeat and exile. It was not until the tragic ruin of
the great House of Hohenstaufen that fortune finally
declared against the hope of German unity^ a hope
which even then continued for many a generation to
haunt the imagination of the German people, embodied
in that strange and significant legend of the great
Hohenstaufen Emperor, alive in his mountain sepulchre
and waiting but the fulness of the time to awaken from
his enchanted sleep, and drive out the oppressors and
robbers who had made the 'Teutonica Patria^ their
victim since his death.

It was in the time of the Hohenstauf ens that Grermany
began to possess a great national literature. And it is
not perhaps idle to note that while Tacitus found the
first indications of a national organization in the ^ Suevi/
it was Swabia, the home of that organization, which
gave to Germany the Hohenstaufen Emperors, under
whom Germany reached her highest pitch of unity and
power, and it v^as Swabia which became the centre of
the poetic movement of the time. Out of that move-
ment issued a literature of heroic greatness, a literature
which was the indisputable authentic product of the
German spirit and of a German nationality.

To have produced such a king as Barbarossa, and
such a poem as the Nibelungenlied, was to have taken
a step towards national self-consciousness which could
never be retraced. The word 'Teutonica Patria^ had
been uttered, and had become more than a word. Tet,
even in the full glory of the Hohenstaufen period, it
was evident that the realization of this idea vras to be
left for other times and other men. When Henry YI
conquered Sicily in 11 94, every German province sent

104 LESSING

its contingent to his anny. When, forty years later,
his son, the wizard Emperor Frederick II, set forth to
subdue rebels in Lombardy, his main reliance was on
the Saracen troops with whom he had surrounded him-
self, and who had this essential superiority over Ger-
mans, that they were proof against exconmiunication.
And when, in 1239, this terrible sentence was launched
against himself, the ferment which took place all over
Germany showed what a blow had been struck.
^Robbers rejoiced,' says a contemporary annalist,
^ ploughshares were turned to swords, and pruning hooks
to spears/ Aided by the aU-important fact that the
Empire was elective, not hereditary, the Papacy had
by this time succeeded in driving a hundred lines of
cleavage through the heart of the nation. That Ger-
many should be wholly subdued was not written in the
book of fate, but henceforth for many centuries Pope
and Kaiser could do nothing but mutually enfeeble
each other, and aggrandize the petty princes and feudal
lords whose minute territories and boundless pretensions
made the future work of consolidation one of such
infinite difficulty.

The history of this disastrous conflict is the history
of Germany for 600 years; and in those dismal
centuries German literature, which had produced the
Nibelungenlied and the Sang of Gudrun, the Parzival
and the Tristan, withered wellnigh to death. By which,
as I have already observed, it is not to be understood
that German histories of literature are a blank for this
period. But certainly the best powers of the nation
did not then go into literature, as that word is com-
monly understood. They did precisely what we have
seen them do in the period intervening between the fall

ROLLESTON 105

of Greece and the rise of Rome> and again in the period
intervening between the fall of Rome and the emergence
of the modem European nationalities. They turned to
religion. Now was the time of Tauler and the mystics^
now was the time of the religious and didactic verse of
the Meistersinger. The Reformation, essentially a
national movement, would doubtless have led to the
growth of a great national literature ; and, indeed, in
the poetry of the typical Meistersinger, Hans Sachs,
and in the dramatic movement which roughly coincided
with the great Elizabethan period in England, the
promise of such a literature is distinctly visible. But
the fresh struggle with the Papacy, which culminated
in the devastations, the incredible horrors, of the Thirty
Years' War, drowned this bright promise in a sea of
blood. From the time of Hans Sachs to the time of
Liessing, German literature, as it is commonly understood
— that is, secular literature, was at the lowest depth of
insignificance and feebleness. And again, true to the
thesis with which I introduced this somewhat too pro-
longed retrospect, it was now that the great hymnology
of the Lutheran Church took shape — tiie names which
really ennoble and illuminate the period are not those
of Opitz and Hoffmanswaldau, they are those of
Gerhardt and Paul Fleming.

The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, marked in
truth not the close of the Thirty Years' War, nor the
close of any war, but it was a notable crisis and turning-
point in a much longer war, the war in which Germany
suffered her first defeat at Canossa, and won her final
victory at Sedan. After the Peace of Westphalia,
North Germany, Protestant Germany, may be regarded
as practically independent, and the time when this

io6 LESSING

assertion of the national idea in politics and religion
should evoke a corresponding outburst of energy in
literature was approaching* But the final, the dedsive,
stimulus to this literature was still to come. The

•

tortured nation, just released to light and freedom, was
yet to fed something of the pride and glory as well as
of the agony and desolation of war. The Thirty Tears'
War had been a war of dasperation, waged yery largdy
for Germany by non-German powers, and ceasing only
when both parties were saigrUs h blanc» But the wars
of Frederick the Great were wars of consolidation, wars
of mighty achievement and mightier promise*

The form of a German nationality was indeed still
to seek and was hardly thought of. Tet it is substan*
tially true to say that at that time Prussia was Germany
and carried the fortunes of Germany. When Frederick
the Great drove the Croat before him at Leuthen or the
French at Rossbach, every German was prouder of the
name he bore. Here again, for the first time for many
a century, a ^Teutonica Patria^ began to take visible
shape before the eyes of Europe, and Frederick the
Hohenstaufen, as the old legend prophesied, returns to
earth in the person of another Frederick, Frederick the
Hohenzollem. And if, as seems to be now made out,
the personality round which the legend originally
gathered was not that of the rugged old Crusader,
Frederick Barbarossa, but his grandson, the humanist
Emperor, the philosopher, Frederick the Second, then
the new avatar was not very unlike the old one.
Frederick the Great, too, was subtle, mocking, sceptical,
accomplished, full of intellectual life, a passionate lover
of culture in every form. But he happily lacked that
strain of moral depravity, the vicious self-indulgence.

ROLLESTON 107

the fantastic cruelty which stained the character and
career of the Hohenstaufen, and beneath his veneer of
French poUtesse and persiflage he had many of the
stem virtues of Barbarossa. In particular he had his
love of justice^ his resolve that, cost what it might,
justice and law should prevail throughout his dommions.
The meanest Prussian who was wronged might make
his direct personal appeal to Frederick, just as men did
when Barbarossa^s shield swung high above his tent in
the fields of Lombardy. As a lawgiver, as a conqueror,
as a reformer, he dominates the whole history of his
day, and he rightly enjoys that title of 'Great' which
is never granted save to monarchs who have been
illustrious both in government and in arms.

If one should wish to see a veritable concrete example
of what the influences of the hour and of the man did
for German literature I think we may find it in the
mere juxtaposition of two quotations from the works
of a single writer, the poet Gleim. Gleim was a con-
siderable literary figure in his time, though he is little
heard of now. He wrote with eminent success in the
fashion described as ' Anacreontic ' — elegant, dexterous,
and lifeless — ^which at that time infected all German
poetry. Roses, kisses, wine; wine, kisses, roses — ^you
have only to supply a certain vapid connective medium
and there are German Anacreontics : —

'Rosen pfldcke, Boeen blAhn,

Horgen ist nioht heuti
Keine Stonde lass enifliehn,

Fldohtig ist die Zeit !
Trinke, kiisse I Sieh' es ist

Heut' QelegenheitI
Weisst du, wo da morgen bist?

Flttchtig ist die Zeit I '

io8 LESSIN6

There is Gleim^ the ^ Anacreontiker.' But listen
now to Gleim in the character of a Prussian Grenadier,
Gleim when his spirit had been fired by the tremendous
events of the Seven Years' War and he became the
Tyrtaeus of Prussia : —

'Was helfen Waffen tind Qeschtltz
Im angerechton Krieg?
Gott donnerte bei Lowositz
Und unaer war der Sieg !
* * *

Und weigem sie auf dlesen Tag

Den Frieden vorznziehn,
So stdrme Friedrich erafc ihr Png

Und dann fUir una nach Wien ! '

Surely we have here passed with one stride into
another world of feeling and of utterance. Not for
centuries had that note resounded in the German
language, that note of passion and power. To quote
that is to show at one glance what Frederick the Great
did for German literature. He awakened it by the
cannon of Rossbach. What does it matter that he
never thought that literature worthy of the slightest
direct encouragement — that to the last he consistently
despised and ignored it? German literature in the
hands of Lessing and his contemporaries was little likely
to wither under the frown of royalty. One may even
say, so profound, so naturally and inevitably beneficent
is the action of a great personality, that Frederick helped
the literature of his country as much by his contempt
as he could have done by his favour. Power evokes
power, the scornful glance of the great king was a simi-
mons and a challenge. The ^Teutonica Patria' sent
a man to answer it, and that man was Lessing.

It is mainly of Lessing that I wish to treat, but of

ROLLESTON 109

which Lesfiing^ of which side of Lessing's manifold
activity ? Travel back to the close of the eighteenth
century, that day of great beginnings^ by what road we
will^ and again and again we shall find Lessing as
a pioneer at the head of it. He who reads Modem
Painters, reads Lessing; he who reads Essays and
Reviews, reads Lessing. Let us dwell for a moment
on Lessing as the source of the movement which pro-
duced the last-named of these two epoch-making books.
When he found himself forced to take part in the reli-
gious controversies of his day^ Europe was divided into
t^vo hostile camps — ^there was on the one hand a barren
and shallow Deism for which revelation simply meant
imposture^ and there was on the other hand a Biblio-
latry hardly to be distinguished from fetish worship^
which wrote above the portals of Christianity^ ^Reason
abandon^ ye who enter here.' How quickly and how
completely have these schools become things of the
pasty how spectral and unreal is the kind of existence
which either of them still continues to enjoy! It is
primarily to Lessing that we owe the immense advance
in religious insight which has made a Voltaire or a
Goeze alike impossible among men of culture at this
hour. And it is very noticeable that Lessing had the
penetration to anticipate one particular development
which was not reached for more than a century later.
Writings like those of Dr. Mivart among Roman
Catholics^ and of the authors of Luw Mundi among
Anglicans, have revealed a remarkable and hitherto un-
suspected harmony between what is called ^Catholic'
Jiheology, the * Catholic ' conception of Christianity, and
the freest application of critical methods to the letter of
the Scriptures. I venture to think the announcement

iio LESSING

of this harmony the most significant event, the most
pregnant with momentous consequence, which has taken
place in the religious history of this day and land. Yet
it was clearly announced a hundred years ago by
Lessing. He saw that this alliance was a natural and
necessary one, he saw that it must take place. ^ There
was a Christianity before there was a New Testament.^
That was the ground taken by Lessing for his criticism
of the Scriptures; it was the ground on which he
defied the Lutheran Consistorium ; and it was distinctly
Catholic ground. I have often wondered how it is that
in this country, where Lessing's great work of literary
criticism, the Laocoon, has been so abundantly dealt
with by translators, annotators, and editors, so little
attempt, comparatively, has been made to bring to the
knowledge of English readers his equally profound and
stimulating religious thought. Many and many a time
I think those who are in search of a link between the
scientific intellect and religious faith will find that the
very word which is capable of forming that link has
been uttered with incomparable force and depth of
insight by Lessing.

But it is not with Lessing as the critic, it is with
Lessing as the creator, that the student of literature is
mainly concerned. And even here we have more than
one Lessing to deal with. There is the Lessing of the
lyrics, and there is the Lessing of the dramas. And
these are very different writers indeed. The lyrics>
I venture to say, are read at this day by no human
being, unless those whose business it is to read every-
thing that a writer of such eminence has produced*
They are simply the dreary, artificial, imitative products
of the ^Anacreontic^ school, dashed occasionally with

ROLLESTON in

a satire of a rather ^ derb ^ quality^ but rarely giving
us a note of music or a stroke of imagination. And
they are curiously deficient in that feeling for nature
which was one of the great characteristics of the new
epoch. Like Socrates^ Lessing thought he had ^ nothing
to learn from fields and trees, but from men m the city.'
^When you go to the fields/ he said to his friend,
the poet of nature, Kleist, ^ I go to the coffee-house.'
But with ' men in the city ' Lesaing was thoroughly at
home. The dramas — I do not speak of the works of
Xfcssing's 'prentice-hand, but of the fruit of his ripened
powers — can be neglected by no one who desires to
have a general acquaintance with European culture.
They hold the stage in Germany to this day, and in
them Lessing speaks in that manner in which the great
works of Uterature are written, the manner which can
never grow antiquated, which is fresh and new in
Homer, and fresh and new in Tennyson, because it
springs direct from the sincere vision and the creative
passion of the artist.

The fact is, that it was the hour of the drama in
Crermany, and it was not the hour of the lync. England,
France, Italy, Spain, had produced dramatic literatures
of great and native power. Grermany had begun to
move in this direction after the Reformation, and the
same impulse reappeared when movement was once
more possible. Whenever we see any literary stir, any
debate and effort, going on in Germany at this time, it
is almost sure to be concerned with the drama. The
movement had penetrated even into the littie Saxon
town where Lessing was bom. The schoolmaster there,
Heinitz, greatiy to the alarm of that very Puritanical
community, lectured his pupils on the drama, and even

112 LESSINO

prepared pieces for them to act on days of festivaL
Yet no region of literature could have offered a more
unpromising field than that to which so many of the
finest minds in Germany, obeying the sway of some
profound impulse, turned at this time. Lessing declares
in plain terms that Germany possessed neither audiences,
authors, nor actors. The playhouse was usually a
wooden booth, the audiences were rude and unculti-
vated, or if cultivated, still ruder. It was the habit of
fashionable people to sit in the two front rows and raise
such a cloud of tobacco smoke as to obscure the stage
from the rest of the audience, a form of diversion which
some apparently yearn to make feasible in the present
day. The performance itself was either a piece of
stupid buffoonery, or one of the mechanical productions
of the pseudo-French, the Gottsched, school, in which
your drama was turned out in obedience to an un-
varying scheme, the lover and the lady, the soubrette,
the valet, and the clown, playing their part with dreaiy
r^ularity. As for the actors, if we find among them
now and then a Neuber, an Ackermann, an Eckhoff,
the mass of the company were, in Lessing's lang^age;^
people ^ without knowledge, or cultivation, or talent :
here a master-tailor, there a thing that a couple of
months ago was a washerwoman.' But perhaps the
most convincing sign of the absolute dearth of poetic
feeling which prevailed in the German drama, and in
German poetry generally, is the addiction of the poets
of the day to the rhymed alexandrine. This was in
German, as in French, the accepted and usiial vesture
for high tragic themes, as prose was for comedy. Now
in French, pace Mr. Matthew Arnold, the rhythm of
the language lends itself well to that metre — ^the pro*

ROI^liESTON 113

longed, continuous, elastic sweep of the line has a
rhydimical effect of a very satisfying kind. But in
a strongly accented language like German^ the rhymed
alexandrine becomes absolute doggerel.

* 0, Bern I O, Vaterland I Ja, ja, Dein grosser Geist
Ftir Bern erzeugt weiss nioht was mindre Soige heisst.
Wie selig, Henzi, ist's tfkn Vaterland sich grftmen,
Und sein verlomes Wohl freiwillig anf sich nehmen I
Doeh sei nicht ungereehti wid glaube dass in mir
Auch Sohweizerblut noeh fliesst und wirket wie in Dir.'

This was the vehicle for tragedy when Lessing began
to write, the vehicle in which he himself wrote some of
his early pieces ! And from that fact alone a discerning
critic will understand the abject condition of dramatic
poetry which then prevailed. But the stir of life was
there, and a single generation saw a striking change,
brought about mainly by the strength of a single man.

Our own English drama of to-day is far from being
in so deplorable a condition, yet it seems to be ^eneraUy
felt that something better might be expected of it;
there is certainly something of the same intellectual
stir and movement, the same search for new principles,
and the same tendency to arraign old ones before the
bar of criticism. Quite recentiy a number of distin-
guished authors in the department of poetry and fiction
complied with the invitation of a popular newspaper to
state the reasons why they did not write plays. They
complied in a manner very slightiy instructive. Appa-
rentiy when a successful novelist is asked why he does
not write plays, the last thing he thinks of replying is,
'Because I donH know how.' Let us turn to the
example of Lessing. Here was a writer who found
the German drama in the lowest condition that it is

114 LESSING

possible to conceive^ and who made it a classical litera-
ture^ fit for the stage and fit for the study. What was
his training ? What were the influences which shaped his
inborn dramatic genius ? I think we shall find that the
foundations of his subsequent achieyements were laid in
his student days at Leipzig. Here it happened, fortunately
for Germany, but to the intense alarm and distress of his
parents, that Lessing fell in with the famous actress-
maiiager, Frau Neuber, who had brought her company
to that city. He had already been powerfully attracted
by the dramatic literature of Rome ; in his school-days
at Meissen he had lired, he tells us, in the world of
Plautus and Terence. The world of the imitation-French
plays, which mainly composed the repertoire of Frau
Neuber and her company, was not at all unlike this,
4ind it was with wonder and delight that Lessing saw it
visibly incorporate before him. He saved and he slaved
to get admission to the theatre; he sought out the
members of the company and became intimate with
them. He drudged for them ; he translated and adapted
French plays for them — an invaluable piece of practical
training. The world behind the scenes had no disillu-
sionment for him, for behind the means of the illusion
he sought its laws. He read, reflected, questioned, com-
pared; he made himself thoroughly acquainted with
the dramatic literatures, not of France only, but of
Spain and Italy. He assisted at rehearsals ; ere long
his advice and suggestions were eagerly sought; he
became a kmd of informal stage-manager, and had
abundant opportunities for turning to practical account
the theories he was developing and the immense book-
knowledge which he was amassing. It was currently
reported that he intended to go on the stage himself.

"^

BOLIiESTON 115

Had he done so he could hardly have gained a more
intimate knowledge of the principles of dramatic art
than he did through his close connexion with Frau
Neuber's company in Leipzig. He was no amateur;
he served an arduous apprenticeship^ mastering the style
which he found prevalent before attempting to substi«>
tute another. That was the discipline of the man
through whom the German drama underwent one of
the most striking and sudden reforms that has ever
taken place in any province of literature. Is it neces^
sary to point the moral of the tale }

Thus behind Lessing's published work as a dramatic
author there lies a vast amount of unpublished, frag-
mentary, unrecorded work done whilst he was rubbing
shoulders with the actualities of the German stage.
And again, behind the published work in which Ger?
many became endowed with a classical literature, there
lies a great deal of work which the reader will find in
collected editions of Lessing's writings but which he
need be at no pains to seek out. Lessing also wrote
tragedies in rhymed alexandrines, horresco re/erens, and
mechanical comedies. They were better than the similar
productions of his contemporaries. But before he could
write Minna van Bamhelm and Emilia Galotii he
needed the vivifying contact of the greatest dramatic
literatures the world has yet seen, that of Greece and
that of England. These were the days before Winckel-
mann's memorable work, the History of Ancient Art,
had given so powerful an impulse to the study of Greek
in Germany ; and Lessing's first real knowledge of the
Greek drama appears to date from his residence in
Berlin, 1757-1760, where we find him collecting mate-
rials for a life of Sophocles, About this time, as an

k

Ii6 LES8INO

experimoit in the severe Greek manner^ be produced
one short tragedy, Phiiotas, which showed very clearly
that a new force had entered into German literature.
Here the rhymed alexandrine is discarded and the
daring experiment is made of treating a lofty tra^c
theme in prose. But it is Lessing's prose, a prose such
as no German ever wrote before and but too few since,
a prose which is swift, rhythmic, brilliant, and lucid,
moving with an elastic, marching stride, instead of
dragging forward an unmanageable bulk in a series of
tortuous convulsions. Phihtoi shows that Leasing had
learned from Sophocles to economize and control his
power. The plot is bare and simple in the extreme.
There are but four characters. The hero, Philotas, on
whom attention is riveted throughout, is the young son
of a Greek monarch : he has been slightly wounded
and taken prisoner in his first skirmish with the forces
of a rival, with whom his father was at war. From the
outset Philotas reveals his character as one of great
simplicity and great intensity, his soid is a pure flame
of warlike and patriotic passion. He resolves to slay
himself in captivity rather than allow the enemy to
retain the advantage they have gained in being able to
hold him to ransom on terms injurious to his country.
His chivalrous captor, Aridaeus, visits him, endeavours
by his courtesy and his praises to make the fiery young
prince forget his shame, and at last, when the question
of a ransom is talked of, informs him that the ransom
will be simply a case of exchange on equal terms ; his
ofwn son had been captured in the same engagement,
and he will send a fellow captive of Philotas, the soldier
Parmenio, to assure the father of Philotas that his son
is alive and well, and to- make arrangements for the

ROLLESTON 117

exchange. We now believe that the self-sacrifice of
Philotas will not be consummated^ and the young
prince is himself relieved as he sees life with all its
allurements again opened before him. ^ 6ods ! ^ he cries,
'Nearer the thunderbolt could not have fallen, unless
it had dashed me in pieces/

But in the true Lessing manner the situation which,
at first, seemed to sway the course of the plot away
from the ordained end, in reality brings us nearer to it.
He thinks of the terms which Aridaeus might have
extorted had Philotas alone been taken. Even such
might the father of Philotas now obtain if Philotas were
no more. And so in a blaze of heroic passion the fiery
young soul goes out ; he obtains a sword by stratagem,
and stabs himself in the presence of Aridaeus. ' King,'
he gasps, ' we shall meet again ' —

^AsxDAXUB. And meet as frienday O Prince t

'Prilotjlb. And so take mj victorious soul, ye gods — and,
goddess of peace, thy yictim !

' Abidabub. Prince, hear me I

' Stbabo. He dies. Am I a traitor, King, If I weep for yonr
enemy ?

'ABIDABX7& Aye, weep for him. And I too. Come I I mast have
my son again. [What a dramatic stroke that is I] Bat do not
seek to dissuade me if I buy him too dear. In vain have we shed
rivers of blood ; in vain have we conquered territories. There he
departs with our spoil, the greater victor I Come I Get me my
son ! And when I have him, I wiU be King no more. Man, do
you think one cannot have too much of it ? '

Shortly before Philotas^ another experimental drama,
«s we may call it, had been written, by no means so
successful as a work of art, but of much greater his-
toric importance because much more fitted to be a
jdetermining force in the literary evolution of the time.

Ii8 LESSIN6

This was Misi Sara Sampson, The title is signifi-*
cant — ^in itself it is a summons to German authors to
turn their eyes towards England* A tale of seduction^
vengeance^ and retribution laid entirely within the limits
of middle-class life^ a tragidie bourgeoise, in short, it
marks in Germany that great break with the time-
honoured traditions of tragedy, which in plays like
George BameweU, and the Gamester, and in tales like
Clarissa Harlowe had already been accomplished in
England* Lessing was now a close observer of eyery-
thing that took place in that country. But if Lessing
was Graicizing in Philotas, and Anglicizing in Miss
Sara Sampson, he begins to be German in the im-
mortal drama of Minna von Bamhelm, written while
he was living in Breslau as the Secretary of the Governor
of Silesia. The contemporary importance and signifi-
cance of this play can hardly be exaggerated. The
Seven Tears' War had just closed, and the gigantic
transformation which it announced in the fundamental
conditions of German politics, the extraordinary and
heroic adventures, the dazzling triumphs, the crushing
defeats, the ' sudden making of splendid names,^ with
which its history teems^ and with all this its markedly
national character — no alien Gustavus Adolphus now
fighting the battles of Germany, but a right German
King with a German people at his back — all this had
left the minds of men in the right temper to recognize
true power and passion when they saw it; they were
exalted, dilated, liberated. And Lessing's creative
power, too, was now finally set free. Minna von Bam^
helm rose from amid the disasters and glories of that
age Uke a vision in which the spirit of the German
nation took shape before the eyes of men. More than

ROLLESTON ttg

all the victories of Frederick this noble drama gave men
the right to say, ' There is then a Germany, a " Teu-»
tonica Patria^^; in these robust, war-hardened limbs^
there is indeed a souL^

Groethe has somewhere spoken of the ' vast culture/
die ungeheure Ctdtur, displayed in Lessing's dramas^
* a cidture,^ he adds, ^ beside which we all become bar-
barians again/ What does this culture mean ? Lessing
was a learned man, a scholar, but his scholarship is not
displayed in his dramas as, for instance, that of Ben
Jonson is. Goethe was speaking of a quality of which
learning forms, indeed, a part, but not the whole. The
essence of cidture is not to know facts, but to perceive
relations. It sees each thing, not isolated, but as part
of an organic whole. Useless and barren without facts,
it is to facts what Kanf s categories are to phenomena,
it gives them unity and significance. It is the mark of
the dramatic writer who has this quality that the things
which he makes us see and hear contain the suggestion
of a world of things which we do not. Hb apprecia-
tion of the historical, social, religious, philosophical
meaning of each episode governs, more or less con-
sciously, his presentation of it, and hence his work has
a richness and depth of interest such as passion alone,
or the creative instinct alone, can never give us* The
complete dramatist, in fact, has a power analogous to
that possessed by a great actor, of making the visible
suggest the invisible. I have often noticed that when
Mr. Irving enters upon the stage he somehow suggests
irresistibly the notion that he has come not from the
wings or the green room, but from some region quite
similar to that which we behold. To the illusion of the
scenery which we see, he adds the illusion of a scenery

120 LESSINO

which we do not see^ and which, in fact, is not there to
be seen. If such an actor enters a room, we at onoe
feel that this is a room in a house full of other rooms,
he has just left one of them. If he is Orlando, he
makes us feel, far better than the scene-painter can,
that the stage is surrounded by the whole forest of
Arden, he has walked through it for leagues* An
analogous power of creating the spiritual background
of the visible action is pre-eminently the power of the
great dramatist, and it is pre-eminently the giff of
culture, applied for the purposes of art. Through this
power it is that the masters of the drama invariably
make us feel that each character presented by them had
a history, had experiences before we made his acquaint-
ance, and that these experiences have helped to make
him what he is. But a writer whose mind has covered
so wide a field of study as Lessing's will do far more
than this. He may suggest the complete character,
not only of the individual but of the class, not only of
the class but of the nation, not only of the nation but
of the epoch; and he may, as Shakespeare so often
does, suggest the relations of mankind at large to those
great questions which are of no epoch and of no
nationality.

Minna von Bamhelm is full of interest of this com-
plex character. It is a picture painted in vivid and
enduring colours of the period which had just closed,
a period dominated, as the play itself is, by the towering
personality of Frederick the Ghreat. It is also a prophecy
of the future, and a prophecy, so far as the union of
Prussia and Saxony went, by no means within the
reach of ordinary observation. For Saxony had sided
with Austria in the great war, and had played her

ROLLESTON 121

unhappy part with fierce resolution* Again and again,
when the Pruasians were driving before them the wrecks
of an Austrian army, they had found some battalion of
Saxon infantry standing rock-fast amid the stream of
defeat, and had found that they were not to be driven,
only to be killed. Tet Lessing saw and declared that
Prussia and Saxony were really one, and with his tale
of a Prussian officer and his Saxon bride he overarched
the vehement hatreds of the time with a word of recon-
ciliation, ^ word over all, beautiful as the sky/ This
Lessing did in Minna von Barnhelm for the future of
his country* What he did for the present was to
ennoble the common, everyday Jife of the German
nation* Beside the sweet and gracious humour which
runs through this play, the most notable thing in it is
its beautiful, unstrained, wholly untheatrical nobility of
feeling. Hitherto German comedy had moved upon
the level on which it is always found to move in
coimtries backward in refinement and civilization. It
was devoid of serious interest, of elevation ; its laughter
was a mockery and a degradation of the object. Even
at the present day the eminent German historian
Rudolph Oneist, in an essay written shortly before his
death, deplored the barbarism of German comedy, and
its habit of seeking its material purely on the base and
ugly sides of life. But in Lessing's comedy the Russian
proverb holds good: 'What you laugh at you love.^
Lessing was a lover of Cervantes, and I imagine that
Don Quixote, the most lovable of all laughable charac-
ters, suggested to him the conception of his disbanded
Prussian officer. Tellheim is, of course, a perfectly
rational and self-possessed human being. Yet his ideas
are not without a certain dash of the fantastic element.

122 LESSING

and beneath his exaggerated punctilio there beats a heart
as simple and heroic as that of the Knight of La Mancha
himself. How significant was the appearance of such
a character on a stage which had never before seen
a soldier^ except in the character of some cowardly^
swaggering Bobadil ! How especially significant in
the case of a great military nation like Prussia !

How fine, too, is the art by which the conduct of the
plot is marked at every step ! Goethe has described
the opening scenes as a model of exposition. The
conclusion is not less admirably contrived, and is par-
ticularly noticeable in this respect, that the exterior
action is accompanied by an interior moral action which
adds much to the depth of the interest. Tellheim^
while his fortune and his reputation are clouded, rigidly
refuses to allow the noble and wealthy maiden whose
heart he has won in better days to link her fate with
his. She has recourse to a stratagem; he is led to
believe that she is disinherited, and cut off by her f amily^
and immediately his instincts of protection and devotion
start into eager life, and he feels himself ready to cham*
pion her against the world. But another unexpected
turn takes place in the action — it is now her turn to be
punctilious : to his dismay she reminds him of his own
scruples, and asks if he will have her less sensitive, less
honourable than himself. He has been fully cleared of
the charge brought against him, and reinstated in the
Prussian army; the king himself has sent his congratu-
lations ; and she bids him tread the path of glory im-
encumbered by a runaway Saxon girl of whom society
will never forget that her relations disowned her. And
so he learns to look through others' eyes as well as his
own, to appreciate better the true proportions of things.

ROLLESTON 1^3

and when the pair are united at last^ we know that
their souls have met with a clear-eyed confidence born
of a ^ new acquist of true experience/

The fact that Lessing's initiative was not followed up^
and that the dramatic vein was never thoroughly worked
out, was perhaps a greater misfortune for German lite-
rature than is commonly supposed. For in the evolu-^
tion of literature age is linked to age^ the future grows
out of the present. And the discipline of the drama
seems to give, as nothing else can give, a strong, athletic^
sinewy fibre to the literature which has passed through
it. It is easy to see how this comes about* A drama
is a doinff, an action. Place the poet imder the neces-
sity of making the passion with which he deals visible
in action^ and that an action which must strike an
audience as natural and appropriate, and it is obvious
that the passion is at once submitted to a severe test of
its genuineness. Nothing that is artificial and hollow
will pass muster here, and no mere magic of expression
will avail to hide that hollowness if it exists. Hence
the severe psychological study which the drama exacts —
the wholesome necessity of keeping closely in touch
with fact. Again, mark the conditions under which
alone a drama can make a successful appeal to an audi^
ence-*the variety it demands, and the conspicuous
unity of action which it no less strictly demands —
what a training in composition is here involved ! Com-
pare fiction as it exists at the present day in England
and France with fiction as it exists, or tries to exist, in
Germany, and we see what German literature lost
when it turned away from the path pointed out by
Lessing. Finally, it is an essential condition of the
drama that the author shall keep himself out of sight.

IS4 LESSING

He must not comment, he must not explain or justify ;
he must gain the right moral and the right aesthetic
effect by the bare presentation of what his audience
will accept as a rendering of Nature, In dealing under
these conditions with a great and moving theme^ what
a power of concentration, what a mastery of expression,
what delicacy of judgement are involved ! As a piece
of artistic training it has precisely the same effect as it
has on a human character to be forced to wrestle with
the grim realities of life. To be told, ^ Words, inten-
tions, will not avail you here — show what you can dio,'
is bracing to the strong in the measure of their strength,
disastrous to the feeble in the measure of their weak-
ness* And it is the drama above all forms of literary
art which lays upon the poet that severe and wholesome
ordeaL

All this Lessing knew well, and in his HamburgUche
Dramatwrgie he clearly pointed out the road which
German literature would have to travel ; in Jtfiima von
Bamhelm and EtniUa Galotti he led the way as far as
it was given to him to go. But Germany at the last
moment shrank from that rugged path, and instead of
the strenuous wrestling with, and conquest of, a stubborn
material, there came an opening of the floodgates and a
limitless gush of lyrical sentiment. Not, of course, that
German literature turned away from the stage. But it
did turn away from the true dramatic form. Goethe
became the dominating influence in German literature
after Lessing's death; and, unfortunately, there was
nothing in the character of Goethe's genius which fitted
him to carry on and complete the work of his prede-
cessor. Nor would he, as Lessing has acknowledged
himself to have done, make up for the lack of genius

ROLLESTON 125

by the exercise of a strenuous critical intelligence. Com-
pare the methods of the two men : Lessing doing hack-
work for a company which had to earn its living by
filling the house, adapting, re-writing — ^just like Shake-
speare, in fact — ^then writing on his own accoimt ten-
tative, crude performances, but always aiming at a true
popular success (which he obtained abundantly), and
always determined not to steal for a bad drama the
admiration which might be paid to clever dialogue;
Compare with this Goethe governing his subsidised
theatre at Weimar, imposing upon the actors all manner
of artificial and mistaken rules, clapping them into the
guardroom if they presumed to know their own art
better than he did, domineering over the audience, for-
bidding it to hiss, forbidding it to laugh, finally forbidding
it to applaud ! Really it is not surprising that, after
Weimar had for thirty years endured the misguided
experiments of an irresponsible amateur, it should have
welcomed with insuppressible delight the performances
of that accomplished poodle, whose advent, as we know,
was the occasion of Goethe's resignation.

The true position of that poodle in the history of
German literature still remains to be vindicated. What
its performances were like we know not — ^historians
have contented themselves with levelling insulting obser-
vations at its innocent head. But let us glance at the
performances it supplanted — at the dramatic works of
Goethe himself. We need not speak of Goetz and
Clavigo, on the one hand, which are hardly to be taken
as serious dramatic efforts, nor of Faust, in which, as
in Lessing's Nathan, the interest is avowedly philo-
sophical. But consider Iphigeme, a poem, indeed, of
serene and stately beauty, but a drama in which, as

126 LESSING

Schiller observes^ ^ everything which specifically belongs
to a dramatic work is wanting/ studiously avoided it
would appear^ lest it should clash with the moral
interest which is the main concern of the piece. Or
consider Ta890y where the tragic interest is made to
turn upon a mental aberration^ which at once removes
the central figure from the range of normal human
sympathies. One can pity Malvolio^ but one cannot
make him the hero of a tragedy. Or consider EffmorU,
where Goethe, unable to give us the right dnunatic
impression of an heroic figure triumphant in defeat,
such as we find, for instance, in the Brutus of Shake-*
speare, has to reconcile the spectator to the tragic issue
by means of a puerile vision, in which we behold the
Genius of Freedom, who, after a long performance in
dumb show, is to andeuten, to suggest (in some unex*
plained fashion) that the ^ death of E^mont will secure
the freedom of the Provinces/ Or consider the last
speech of Egmont, an eloquent and moving appeal
addressed to persons not one of whom is within earshot I
Now let us call to mind Lessing's treatment of a
tragic situation in Emilia GalotH. She has been kid-
napped by the Prince of Guastella, and is absolutely
in his power. She knows his designs upon her honour,
and entreats her father, who has gained access to her,
to give her his dagger that she may slay herself. He
shrinks from this dreadful issue, and she puts her hand
to her head to search for the long dagger-pin which
secures the coils of her hair, when she touches the rose
she had placed there on her bridal mom.

< « Thoa still here ? " $he cries. *^ Down with thee ; thou art not
for the hair of one such a» my father wiU have me.'

< Odoabdo : << O, my danghtei

ROLLESTON 127

* Ekzlta: ''Father, did I gaess right? Tet no— yon would not
have that I But why did you then restrain me ? " [She plucks the
roae to piecesJ] " Long ago, indeed, there was a father who, to save
his daughter's honour, seized the nearest blade his hand oould find
and droYe it to her heart. He gave her life a second time. But
all such deeds are of long ago. There are no such fathers now I "

'Odoabdo: ''There are, my daughter, there are [atdbbing her],
God, what have I done ? " [She sMce to the ground in Ma arms.]

' Emilia : ' ' You have plucked a rose before the storm had stripped
it of its leaves. Let me kiss it — this fittherly hand." '

I do not speak of the manner in which this conclusion
is motived and led np to; there^ it appears to me^
Lessing has been wanting in judgement. But the
actual issue itself is satisfying — it is great dramatic art.
We pity and we fear^ but in our pity and fear there is
a sense of exaltation and triumph ; and we need the
aid of no vision or other intrusive comment of the author
to tell us that the pure soul of Emilia has taken the
nobler and better part.

But if the dramas of Goethe tended to lead the de-
velopment of German literature out of its true course^
what, it may be asked, of those of Schiller, who made
the drama quite as much an object of serious effort as
Goethe did ? Here we are certainly on different ground,
Schiller had a genuine dramatic instinct. But unfortu-
nately that instinct was never entirely successful in
combating his overmastering tendency to prolixity and
diffuseness. Page after page is filled with empty decla-
mation — declamation which is sometimes very good in
its way, but which does nothing either to advance the
action or to illustrate character. Sometimes, as in the
death of Gessler, he grasps with more or less unsteady
band a true dramatic situation. But how much in vain
Lessing had written for him may be judged from the
conclusion of Tell, where he inserts a long scene which

128 LESSINO

is a mere unsightly excrescence on the play, for the sole
purpose of making it quite clear that he was not pre-
pared to extend an absolutely unqualified approval to
the practice of tyrannicide.

Every one knows the fine epigram devoted by Goethe
and Schiller to the memory of Lessing :

'Living we honoured thee, loved thee, we set thee among the
Immortals.
Dead, and thy spirit stiU xeigns over the spirits of men.'

Alas ! the shade of Lessing, if this noble tribute could
have reached its ears, might have murmured in reply
the lines of the epigram in which he himself had long
ago begged the German people to praise their poets less
and study them more i

'Wir woUen weniger erhoben
Und fleissiger gelesen sein.'

In the preface to a recent volume of translations from
the German I find Mr. Gladstone taken to task for
declaring, in the columns of the Speaker ^ that the whole
of German literature might be said to lie within the
period covered by the lifetime of Groethe. Assuming
that Mr. Gladstone intended to refer only to modem
German poetry, written in the modem German tongue^
this statement is still rather too sweeping. The limit
must, at least, be extended to the death of Heinrich
Heine, who outlived Goethe by some .twenty years.
But it is certainly true that in the present day the best
powers of the German intellect are going into science^
into politics, into music, into anything but creative
literature. And this is the more remarkable, in that
we should have expected the great war with France^
which crowned the struggle of so many centuries, to

ROLLESTON 129

have given, as such events usually do give^ a mighty
impulse to that form of art which can mirror more inti-
mately and more completely than any other the aspira*
tions and passions of a people. Not that the German
poets have neglected that subject. From Gteibel down*
wards it has^ of course^ been taken possession of by
every purveyor of poetical platitudes to the German
people. I have read^ or tried to read^ one portentous
work, much lauded by some German critics, which is
nothing less than a history of the Franco-German war,
written in a sonnet-sequence of five hundred sonnets.
This is the kind of literature produced by the Franco*
German war : the Seven Years' War produced Minna
von Bamhelm. But the writer of Minna von Bamhelm
had prepared the soil for the growth of a great litera-
ture in a way which no one attempts at present. And
the preparation was of the nature of a very fierce and
rigorous harrowing and tearing. In the Laocoon and
the other well-known critical works of Lessing large
questions of permanent interest are handled. But
besides these works, which we all know more or less,
there was a vast body of work of a more fugitive cha-
racter, in the shape of the critical notices which for
many years Lessing contributed to various German
newspapers. In these notices Lessing covered the
whole field of contemporary literature. In the great
works he stated the great principles which have governed
all aesthetic criticism ever since. In his journalistic
work he applied those principles in the concrete, and
drove the lesson home. The path to Parnassus imder
these circumstances was not an easy one in Germany ;
it was indeed raked by an artillery fire against which
no complacent mediocrity could make head. With

K

730 LESSIN6

human complacency. Leasing waged a relentless and
tniceless war. And he was endowed for this war with
a style of extraordinary force and incisireness, a spirit
of the true leonine temper, loving to fly at the tallest
quarry, a scholarship of which it seemed hopeless to
discover the limit, and an all but unerring perception of
what was fine and what was worthless, what was sense
and what nonsense, what had the germs of life and
power and what was mere windy pretension. That
was the preparation for the renascence of German lite-
rature. And when we see such a force in German
criticism again, we shall have seen the most hopefid
sign of another renascence. German literature, crea-
tive and critical, is correct, erudite, complacent, prolix
and anaemic. It has a host of excellent writers, but
no one to whom truth, reason and beauty are sacred
enough or their opposites detestable enough. What it
needs, and what I doubt not the ^ Teutonica Patria ^ will
one day supply, is just that which it so eminently had
in Lessing — a man.

1892.

LA MUSIQUE ET LES LETTRES

JUSQU^ICI et depuis longtemps^ deux nations^
FAngleterre, la France, les seules, parallelement
ont montr6 la superstition d'une Utt^rature. L^une a
Pautre tendant avec magnanimity le flambeau, ou le
retirant et tour a tour ^claire Finfluence ; mais c'est
Tobjet de ma constatation, moins cette alternative (ex-
pliquant un peu une prince, parmi vous, jusqu^a y
parler ma langue) que, d'abord, la yis6e si sp^ciale
d^une continuite dans les chefs-d'oeuvre. A nul ^gard,
le g^nie ne pent cesser d'etre exceptionnel, altitude de
fronton inopin^e dont depasse I'angle ; cependant, il ne
projette, comme partout ailleurs, d'espaces vagues ou a
Fabandon, entretenant au contraire une ordonnance et
presque un remplissage admirable d'^dicules moindres,
colonnades, fontaines, statues — spirituels — pour pro-
duire, dans un ensemble, quelque palais ininterrompu
et ouvert a la royaut^ de chacun, d'ou natt le goiit des
patries : lequel en le double cas, h^sitera, avec d^ice,
devant une rivalit^ d'architectures comparables et
sublimes.

K 2

133 LA MUSIQUE ET LES LETTRES

Un int^r£t de votre part, me conviant & des ren*
seignements but quelques circonstances de notre £tat
litteraire, ne le fait pas a une date oiseuse.

J'apporte en efFet des nouveUes. Les plus sur*
prenantes. MSme cas ne se vit encore.

— On a touch^ au vers.

Les gouvemements changent; toujours la prosodie
reste intacte : soit que, dans les revolutions, elle passe
inaper9ue ou que ^attentat ne s^impose pas avec
Fopinion que ce dogme dernier puisse varien

II convient d^en parler d^ja, ainsi qu^un invito
voyageur tout de suite se d^charge par traits ^haletants
du t^moignage d'un accident su et le poursuivant : en
raison que le vers est tout, d^ qu'on &:rit. Style,
rersification s'il y a cadence et c'est pourquoi toute
prose d'ecriyain fastueux, soustraite a ce laisser-aller en
usage, ornementale, yaut en tant qu'un vers rompu,
jouant avec ses timbres et encore les rimes dissimulees;
selon un thyrse plus complexe. Bien P^panouissement
de ce qui nagueres obtint le titre de poime en prose,

Tres strict, num^rique, direct, a jeux conjoints, le
mitre, anterieur, subsiste ; aupres.

Sftr, nous en sommes 1&, pr^sentement. La se-
paration.

Au lieu qu'au d^but de ce siecle, Fouie puissante
romantique combina F^lement jumeau en ses ondoyants
alexandrins, ceux a coupe ponctu^ et enjambements ;
la fusion se defait vers I'integrite. Une heureuse trou*
vaille avec quoi parait i peu pres close la recberche
d'hier, aura €tS le vere Hbre, modulation (dis-je, sou**
vent) individuelle, parce que toute &me est un noeud
rythmique.

Apres, les dissensions. Quelques initiateurs, il le

MALLARMi; 133

fallait, sont partis loin^ pensant en avoir fini avec un
canon (que je nomme, pour sa garantie) officid: il
restera^ aux grandes c^r^monies. Audace^ cette d6Bai^
fectation^ Funique ; dont rabattre. • •

Ceux qui virent tout de mauvais oeil estiment que du
tempa probablement yient d^£tre perdu.

Paa.

A cause que de vraies oeuvres ont jailli, ind^pendam*
ment d'un d^bat de forme et, ne lea reconniit-on, la
quality du lilence, qui lea remplacerait^ a Pentour d'uu
instrument surmen^^ est pr^^ieuse. Le vers, aux
occasions, fulmine, raret^ (quoiqu^ait 6t£ a Pinstant vu
que tout, mesure. Pest) : comme la Litt^rature, malgr^
le besoin, propre iL vous et a nous, de la perp^tuer dans
chaque fige, repr^sente un produit singulier. Surtout
la m^trique fran^aise, dflicate, serait d'emploi intefi-
mittent: maintenant, gr&ce a des repos balbutiants,
void que de nouveau pent s'flever, d'apres une intona-
tion parfaite, le vers de toujours, fluide, restaur^, avec
des complements peut-Stre supr^mes.

Okaob, lustral ; et, dans des bouleverssments, tout a
Pacquit de la g^n^ration r^cente, Pacte d^^crire se
scruta jusqu'en Porigine. Trte avant, au moins, quant
a un point, je le formule: — ^A savoir s'il y a lieu d'^crire.
Lea monuments, la mer, la face bumaine, dans leur
plenitude, natif s, conservant une vertu autrement attra-
yante que ne les voilera une description, Evocation dites,
allusion je sais, su^^estion : cette terminologie quelque
peu de hasard atteste la tendance, une tr^ decisive,
peut-£tFe, qu'ait subie Part litt^raire, elle le borne et
Pexempte. Son sortH^e, i lui, si ce n'est lib^rer, bors
d^une poignfc de poussi^ ou r^alit^ sans Pendore, au
livre^ mdme comme texte, la dispersion volatile soit

134 LA MUSiaUE ET LESf LETTRES

I'esprit^ qui n'a que faire de rien outre la musicalite
de tout.

Ainsi^ quant au malaise ayant tantdt sevi^ ses acc&9
prompts et de nobles hesitations; d^ja vous en savez
autant qu'aucun.

Faut-il s^arr£ter 1& et d^oii ai-je le sentiment que je
suis venu relativement i un sujet beaucoup plus vaste
peut-£tre a moi-mSme inconnu^ que telle renovation de
rites et de rimes; pour y atteindre, sinon le traiter.
Tant de bienveillance comme une invite i parler sur ce
que j'aime ; aussi la considerable apprehension d'une
attente etrang^re, me ramenent on ne sait quel ancien
souhait maintes fois denie par la solitude^ quelque soir
prodigieusement de me rendre compte a fond et haut de
la crise id^ale qui, autant qu'une autre, sociale, eprouve
certains: ou, tout de suite, malgr^ ce qu^une telle
question devant un auditoire voue aux elegances
flcripturales a de soudain, poursuivre : — Quelque chose
comme les Lettres existe-t-il; autre (une convention
fut, aux epoques classiques, cela) que Paffinement, vers
leur expression burinee, des notions, en tout domaine.
L'observance qu'un architecte, im legiste, un medecin
pour parfaire la construction ou la decouverte, les eieve
au discours : bref, que tout ce qui emane de Pesprit, se
reint^gre. Generalement, n^importe les matieres.

Tres peu se sont dresse cette enigme, qui assombrit^
ainsi que je le fais, sur le tard, pris par un brusque
doute concernant ce dont je voudrais parler avec eian.
Ce genre d'investigation peut-Stre a ete elude, en paix,
comme dangereux, par ceux-la qui, sommes d'une
faculte, se ru^rent a son injonction ; craignant de la
diminuer au clair de la reponse. Tout dessein dure ; a
quoi on impose d'etre par une foi ou des facilites^ qui

MALLARM6 135

font que c'est^ gelon aoi. Admirez le berger^ dont la
roiKf heurt^e a des rochers malins jamais ne lui revient
selon le trouble d'un ricanement. Tant mieux : il y a
d'autre part aise^ et maturite^ a demander un soleil^
mSme couchant, sur les causes d'une vocation.

Or^ voici qu^a cette mise en demeure extraordinaire,
tout a Fheure^ revoquant les titres d'une fouction
notoire^ quand s'agissait^ plutdt^ d'enguirlander Fautel ;
a ce subit envahissement^ comme d'une sorte ind^-
finissable de defiance (pas mSme dev^nt mes forces), je
reponds par une exageration, certes, et vous en pr^-
venant. — Oui, que la Litt^rature existe et, si Fon veut,
seule, a Pexclusion de tout. Accomplissement, du
moins, a qui ne va nom mieux donn^.

Un homme pent advenir, en tout oubli — jamais ne
sied d^ignorer qu'expres — de Pencombrement intellectuel
chez les contemporains ; afin de savoir, selon quelque
recours tres simple et primitif, par exemple la sym-
phonique equation propre aux saisons^ habitude de
rayon et de nu^; deux remarques ou trois d^ordre
analogue k ces ardeurs^ a ces intemperies par ou notre
passion releve des divers ciels: s^il a, recr^e par lui-
mSme, pris soin de conserver de son debarras stricte-
ment une fiiti aux vingt-quatre lettres comme elles se
sent, par le miracle de Finfinit^, fixees en quelque
langue la sienne, puis un sens pour leurs symetries,
action, reflet, jusqu^a une transfiguration en le terme
sumaturel, qu'est le vers ; il poss^de, ce civilise ^den*
nique, au-dessus d'autre bien, Fel^ment de felicites,
une doctrine en mSme temps qu^une contree. Quand
son initiative, ou la force virtuelle des caracteres divins
lui enseigne de les mettre en oeuvre.

Avec Piugenuit^ de notre fonds, ce legs> I'ortho-

13^ LA MUSiaUE ET LE8 LETTRES

graphe^ des antiques grimoires, iaole, en tant que
Litt^rature^ spontan^ment elle^ une &9on de noter.
Moyen, que plus! principe. Le tour de telle phrase
ou le lac d'un distique^ copi^ sur notre conformation^
aident I'&^losion^ en nous^ d^aper9U8 et de corre*
spondances.

Strictsment j'envisage^ ecart^s vos folios d'ftudes,
rubriques, parchemin, la lecture comme une pratique
d^sesp^r^. Ainsi toute industrie a-t-elle feilli a la
fabrication du bonheur^ que I'agencement ne s'en trouve
a port^ t je connais des instants o& quoi que ce soit^
au nom d^une disposition secr^te^ ne doit satisfaire.

Autre chose • • • ce semble que F^pars fr^missement
d'une page ne veuille sinon surseoir ou palpite d^im-
patience^ a la possibility d^autre chose.

Nous savons^ captifs d^une formuk absolue^ que,
certes, n^est que ce qui est. Incontinent barter ce*
pendant, sous un pr^texte, le leurre, accuseiait notre
incons^uence, niant le plaisir que nous voulons prendre :
car cet aundelh en est Fagent, et le moteur dirais-je si
je ne r^pugnais a op^rer, en public, le d^montage impie
de la fiction et consequemment du m^canisme litt^raire,
pour Staler la piece principale ou rien. Mais, je ^nere
comment, par une supercherie, on projette, a quelque
Elevation d^fendue et de foudre ! le conscient manque
chez nous de ce qui U-haut delate.

A quoi sert cela —

A un jeu.

En vue qu'une attirance superieure comme d^un
vide, nous avons droit, le tirant de nous par de Pennui
a regard des choses si elles s^^tablissaient solidea
et pr^pond^rantes — ^perdument les d^tache jusqu'i
s^en remplir et aussi les doner de resplendissement.

MALLARM]^ 137

a travera Pespace vacant^ en des fStes a volont^ et
flolitaires*

Quant a moi, je ne demande pas moins a P^criture
et vais prouver ce postulat.

La Nature a lieu, on n'y ajoutera pas; que des
cit^ les voies ferr^ et plusieurs inventions formant
notre materiel.

Tout Facte disponible, k jamais et seulement, reste
de saisir les rapports, entre temps, rares ou multipU6i;
d^apres quelque 6tat int^rieur et que Fon yeuiUe a son
gr^ ^ndre, simplifier le monde.

A F^gal de crfer: la notion d^un objet, ^chappant,
qui fait d^f aut.

Semblable occupation suffit, comparer les aspects et
leur nombre tel qu^il frdle notre negligence : y ^veillant,
pour d^r, Fambiguite de queiques figures belles, aux
intersections. La totale arabesque, qui les relie, a de
vertigineuses sautes en un efiEroi que reconnue; et
d'anxieux accords. Avertissant par tel ecart, au lieu
de d^concerter, ou que sa similitude avec elle-mdme, la
soustraie en la confondant. Chiffration m^lodique tue,
de ces motifs qui composent une logique, avec nos
fibres. Quelle agonie, aussi, qu^agite la Chimere ver*
sant par ses blessures d^or Fevidence de tout FStre
pareil, nulle torsion vaincue ne fausse ni ne transgresse
Fomnipr^sente Ligne espac^e de tout point a tout autre
pour instituer Fld^e; sinon sous le visage humain,
myst^rieuse, en tant qu'une Harmonic est pure.

Surprendre habituellement cela, le marquer, me frappe
comme une obligation de qui dechaina FInfini ; dont le
rythme, parmi les touches du davier verbal, se rend,
comme sous Finterrogation d^un doigte, a Femploi des
mots, aptes, quotidiens.

138 LA MUSIQUE ET LES LETTRES

AvEC y^racit^3 qu'est-ce^ les Liettres, que cette mentale
poursuite, menee^ en tant que le discourse afin de de-
finir ou de faire^ a F^gard de soi-mSme, preuve que le
spectacle r^pond a une imaginative comprehension^ il
est vrai^ dans P^spoir de s'y mirer.

Je sais que la Musique ou ce qu'on est convenu de
nommer ainsi, dans Facception ordinaire, la limitant
aux executions concertantes avec le secours, des cordes,
des cuivres et des bois et cette licence, en outre, qu'elle
s'adjoigne la parole, cache une ambition, la meme;
sauf a n^en rien dire, parce qu'elle ne se confie pas
volontiers. Par contre, a ce trac^, il y a une minute,
des sinueuses et mobiles variations de PIdee, que P^crit
revendique de fixer, y eut-il, peut-Stre, chez quelques-
uns de vous, lieu de confronter a telles phrases une
reminiscence de Porchestre ; ou succede a des rentrees
en Pombre, apres un remous soucieux, tout a coup
P^ruptif multiple sursautement de la clart^, comme les
proches irradiations d^un lever de jour: vain, si le
langage, par la retrempe et Pessor purifiants du chant,
n^y confere un sens.

CoNSiD^REZ, notre investigation aboutit : un ^change
pent, ou plutdt il doit survenir, en retour du triomphal
appoint, le verbe, que coiite que co&te ou plaintivement
a un moment mSme bref accepte Pinstrumentation, afin
de ne demeurer les forces de la vie aveugles a leur
splendeur, latentes ou sans issue. Je reclame la resti-
tution, au silence impartial, pour que Pesprit essaie
a se rapatrier, de tout — chocs, glissements, les trajec-
toires Ulimitees et spires, tel etat opulent aussitdt ^vasif,
une inaptitude d^licieuse a finir, ce raccourci, ce trait —
Pappareil ; moins le tumulte des sonorites, transf usibles,
encore, en du songe.

MALLARMl^ 139

Les grands, de magiques ecrivains, apportent une
persuasion de cette conformite.

Alors, on possede, avec justesse, les moyens reci-
proques du Mystere — oublions la vieille distinction,
entre la Musique et les Lettres, n^etant que le partage,
voulu, pour sa rencontre ulterieure, du cas premier:
Pune ^vocatoire de prestiges situ^s a ce point de Voviie
et presque de la vision abstrait, devenu I'entendement ;
qui, spacieux, accorde au feuillet dMmprimerie une
port^e ^ale.

Je pose, a mes risques esth^tiquement, cette con-
clusion (si par quelque gr&ce, absente, toujours, d'un
expos^, je vous amenai a la ratifier, ce serait pour moi
Phonneur cherch6 ce soir): que la Musique et les
Lettres sont la face alternative ici ^largie vers Fobscur ;
scintillante la, avec certitude, d^un ph^nomene, le seul,
je Pappelai Fld^e.

L'un des modes incline a Pautre et y disparaissant,
ressort avec emprunts: deux fois, se paracheve, oscil-
lant, un genre entier. Th^&tralement, pour la foule qui
assiste, sans conscience, a Paudition de sa grandeur:
ou, Pindividu requiert la lucidity, du livre explicatif et
familier.

Maintenant que je respire d^gage de Pinqui^tude,
moindre que mon remords pour vous y avoir inities,
celle, en commen9ant un entretien, de ne pas se trouver
certain si le sujet, dont on veut discourir, implique une
authenticite, necessaire a Pacceptation ; et que, ce
fondement, du moins, vous Paccord&tes, par la solennite
de votre sympathie pendant que se h&taient, avec un
cours fatal et quasi impersonnel des divulgations, neuves
pour moi ou durables si on y acquiesce : il me parait
qu^inesp^r^ment je vous aper9ois en plus d^intimite.

I40 LA MUSIQUE ET LES LETTRE8

selon le vague diasip^. Alon causer comme entre
gens, pour qui le charme f ut de se r€unir, notre deflsdn^
me 8&luirait; pardon d'un retard a m^y complaire:
j^accuse Pombre s^rieuse qui fond^ des nuits de votre
ville ou r^ne la d&u^tude de tout except^ de penser^
*\en cette salle particuli^rement sonore au rSve. Ai-je^
quand s^offrait une causerie, dissert^, ajoutant cette
suite & V08 cours des matinees ; enfin, fait une le9on ?
La specieuse appellation de chef d'^cole vite d^mSe
par la rumeur a qui s'exerce seul et de ce fait groupe
les juveniles et chers d^nteressements^ a pu^ prdc^ant
votre ^ lecturer/ ne sonner faux* Rien pourtant ; certes^
du tout. 'Si reclus que m^dite dans le laboratoire de sa
dilection, en mystagogue, j^accepte, un, qui joue sa
part sur quelques reveries a determiner; la d-marche
capable de Pen tirer, loyaut^, presque devoir, s'impose
d'epancher a Padolescence une ferveur tenue d^ain^;
j^affectionne cette habitude : il ne faut, dans mon pays
ni au vdtre, oonvinmes-nous, qu^une lacune se declare
dans la succession du fait litteraire, mSme un disaccord.
Renouer la tradition k des souhaits pr^curseurs, comme
une hantise m'aura valu de me retrouver peu ddpayse^
ici ; devant cette assembl^e de maitres iQustres et d^une
jeune ^lite.

A BON escient, que prendre, pour notre distraction
si ee n'est la commie, amusante jusqu'au quiproquoy
des malentendus ?

Le pire, sans sortir d'ici-m£me, celui-la f&cheux, je
Pindique pour le rejeter, serait que flott&t, dans cette
atmosphere, quelque deception n6e de vous, Mesdames
et mes vaillantes auditrices. Si vous avez attendu un
commentaire murmur^ et brillant a votre piano; ou
encore me vites-vous, peut-£tre, incompetent sur le cas

MALLARM& 141

de volumes, romans, feuillet^ par vos loiurs. A quoi
bon: toutes^ employant le don d'^crire, a sa source?
Je pensais, en chemin de fer^ dans ce d^placement,
a des chefs-d'oeuvre in^dits^ la correspondance de
chaque nuit, emport^e par les sacs de poste^ comme un
chargement de prix^ par excellence, derri^re la loco*
motive. Yous en Stes les auteurs privil^^s; et je
me disais que, pour devenir songeuses, ^loquentes ou
bonnes aussi selon la plume et 7 susciter avec tous ses
feux une beauts toum€e au-dedans, ce vous est super-
flu de recourir a des considerations abstruses: vous
detachez une blancheur de papier, comme luit votre
sourire, ecrivez, voila.

La situation, celle du poete, rdv^je d'^noncer, ne
laisse pas de d^couvrir quelque difficult^, ou du
comique.

Un lamentable seigneur exilant son spectre de mines
lentes a Pensevelir, en la l^gende et le mflodrame, c'est
lui, dans Pordre joumalier : lui, ce Test, tout de mdme,
a qui on fait remonter la presentation, en tant qu'ex*
plosif, d'un concept trop vierge, a la Soci^t^.

Des coupures d'articles un peu chuchotent ma part,
oh! pas assez modeste, au scandale que propage un
tome, paratt-il, le premier d'un libelle obstin^ a Paba-
tage des fronts principaux d'aujourd'hui presque
partout ; et la frequence des termes d'idiot et de fou
rarement temperes en imb^ile ou dement, comme
autant de pierres lanc^es a Pimportunit^ hautaine d'une
f&>dalite d'esprit qui menace apparamment FEurope,
ne serait pas de tout point pour deplaire ; eu egard i
trop de bonne volont^, je n'ose la railler, chez les gens^
a s'enthonsiasmer en faveur de vacants sympt6mes,
tant n'importe quoi veut se construire, Le malheur.

142 LA MUSIQUE ET LES LETTRES

dans I'espece, que la science s'en m£le ; ou qu'on I'y
m^e. DSgSnSresc€nc€f le titre, Entartung, cela vient
d'Allemagne^ est Fouvrage^ soyons explicite^ de M. Nor-
dau : je m'^tais interdit^ pour garder a des dires une
gen^ralit^^ de nommer personne et ne crois pas avoir,
pr^ntement, enfreint mon souci. Ce vulgarisateur
a observe un fait* La nature n'engendre le g^nie
imm^diat et complete il r^pondrait au type de Phomme
let ne serait aucun; mais pratiquement, occultement
touche d'un pouce indemne^ et presque Fabolit, telle
facult^; chez celui, a qui elle propose une munificence
contraire : ce sont la des arts pieux ou de matemelles
perpetrations conjurant une clairvoyance de critique et
de juge exempte non de tendresse. Suivez^ que se
passe-t-il? Tirant une force de sa privation^ croit^ vers
des intentions pl^ni^res, Finfirme ^u^ qui laisse, certes,
npres lui^ comme un innombrable d&het^ ses f r^res, cas
etiquet^s par la m^decine ou les bulletins d'un suffrage
le vote fini. L'erreur du pamphl^taire en question est
d'avoir traits tout comme un d^chet. Ainsi il ne faut
pas que des arcanes subtils de la physiologic, et de la
destin^, s'^garent a des mains^ grosses pour les manier,
de contremaitre excellent ou de probe ajusteur. Lequel
B^arrdte a mi-but et voyez ! pour de la divination en
BUS, il aurait compris, sur un pointy de pauvres et
sacr^ proc&l^s naturels et n'eftt pas fait son livre.

L^injure, oppos^, b^gaie en des joumaux^ faute de
hardiesse: un soup9on pr^t a poindre, pourquoi la
reticence? Les engins, dont le bris illumine les
parlements d'une lueur sommaire, mais estropient,
aussi a faire grand^piti^, des badauds, je m'y int^res-
^eraiSj en raison de la lueur — sans la brievete de son
enseignement qui permet au l^gislateur d'alleguer une

MALLARMlg 143

definitive incomprehension ; mais j'y r^use Padjonction
de balleB a tir et de clous. Tel un avis ; et^ incriminer
de tout dommage ceci uniquement qu^il y ait des
ecrivains & F^cart tenant, ou pas, pour le vers libre, me
captive^ surtout par de Ping^niosite. Pr^, eux, se
reservent, au loin, comme pour une occasion, ils
offensent le fait divers: que d€robent-ils, toujours
jettent-ils ainsi du discredit, moins qu'une bombe, sur
ce que de mieux, indisputablement et a grands frais,
foumit ime capitale comme redaction courante de ses
apotheoses : a condition qu'elle ne le d^crete pas dernier
mot, ni le premier, relativement a certains ^blouisse-
ments, aussi, que pent d^elle-m£me tirer la parole. Je
souhaiterais qu'on poussftt un avis jusqu^a d^laisser
insinuation ; proclamant, salutaire, la retraite chaste
de plusieurs. II importe que dans tout concours de la
multitude quelque part vers PinterSt, Pamusement, ou
la commodity, de rares amateurs, respectueux du motif
commun en tant que fa9on d'y montrer de Pindiff^-
rence, instituent par cet air a cdt^, une minority ;
attendu, quelle divergence que creuse le conflit f urieux
des citoyens, tons, sous Poeil souverain, font une
unanimity — d'accord, au moins, que ce a propos de
quoi on s'entre-devore, compte: or, pos^ le besoin
d^exception, comme de sel! la vraie qui, ind^fectible-
ment, fonctionne, git dans ce s^jour de quelques
esprits, je ne sais, a leur eioge, comment les designer,
gratuits, Strangers, peut-dtre vains — ou litteraires.

Nulls — la tentative d'^gayer un ton, plutdt severe,
que prit Pentretien et sa pointe de dogmatisme, par
quelque badinage envers Pincoh^rence dont la rue
assaiUe quiconque, a part le profit, th^saurise les
richesses extremes, ne les g&che: est-ce miasme ou

144 LA MUSIQUE ET LES LETTRES

que^ certains sujets touch^s^ en persiate la vibration
grave ? maia il aemble que ma pi^e d'artifice^ aliumee
par une concession ici inutile^ a fait long feu.

Pr^f^rablement.

Sans feinte^ il me devient loisible de terminer^ avec
impenitence; gardant un ^tonnement que leur cas,
iL tels poetes^ ait 6t6 consid^re^ seulement, sous une
equivoque pour y opposer inintelligence double*

Tandis que le regard intuitif se plait a discemer la
justice, dans une contradiction enjoignant parmi V€bBt,
a midtriser, des gloires en leur recul — que Pinterpiete,
par gageure, ni m£me en virtuose, mais charitablement,
aille comme mat^riaux pour rendre Pillusion, choisir ks
mots, les aptes mots, de Fecole, du logis et du marcb^.
Le vers va s'emouvoir de quelque balancement, terrible
et suave, comme Porchestre, aile tendue $ mais avec des
serres enracinees ^ vous. La-bas, oii que oe soit, nier
I'indicible, qui ment.

Un humble, mon semblable, dont le verbe occupe les
l^vres, pent, sdon ce moyen m^iocre, pas ! si consent
a se joindre, en accompagnement, im echo inentendu,
communiquer, dans le vocabulaire, a toute pompe et
a toute lumiere ; car, pour chaque, sied que la v€ritd
se revile, comme elle est, magnifique. Contribuable
soumis, ensuite, il paie de son assentiment Pimpdt
conforme au tresor d^une patrie envers ses enfants*

Parce que, peremptoirement — je Pinfere de cette
celebration de la Po^sie, dont nous avons parie, sans
Pinvoquer presqu^une heure en les attributs de Musique
et de Lettres ; appelez-la Mystere ou n'est^ce pas ? le
contexte ^volutif de Pld^e — je disais j^arce que • • •

Un grand dammage a iti causi a Passociation
terrestre, s^culairement, de lui indiquer le mirage

MALLARM]^ 145

brutal, la cit^, ses gouvemements, le code, autrement
que comme embl^mes ou, quant i notre ^tat, ce que
des uecropoles Bont au paradis qu'elles ^vaporent : un
terre-plein, presque pas vil. Peage, Sections, ce n'est
ici-bas, ou semble B^en r^sumer Papplication, que se
passent, augustement, lea formalites ^dictant un culte
populaire, comme representatives — de la Loi, sise en
toute transparence, nudit^ et merveille.

Minez ces substructions, quand Pobscurite en offense
la perspective, non — alignez-y des lampions, pour voir :
il s'agit que vos pens^ exigent du sol un simulacre.

Si, dans Favenir, en France, ressurgit une religion,
ce sera ^amplification H mille joies de Pinstinct de ciel
en chacun; plutdt qu'une autre menace, r^duire ce jet
au niveau dementaire de la politique. Voter, mSme
pour soi, ne contente pas, en tant qu'expansion d^hymne
avec trompetteft intimant Fallegresse de n'^mettre aucun
nom ; ni P^meute, suffisamment, n^enveloppe de la tour*
mente n^essaire a ruisseler, se confondre, et renaitire,
h^ros*

Js m^interromps, d'abord en vue de n'elargir, outre
mesure pour ime fois, ce sujet oii tout se rattache. Fart
litt^raire: et moi-mdme inhabile a la plaisanterie, voulant
^viter, du moins, le ridicule a votre sens comme au
mien (permettez-moi de dire cela tout un) qu'il y aurait,
Messieurs, k vaticiner.

1893.

146 NOTES

La transparence de pens^ B'unifie, entre public et
causeur, comme une glace, qui se fend, la voix tue: on
me pardonnera ai je coUectionne, pour la lucidity, ici
tela debris au coupant vif, omissions, cons^uences, ou
les regards inezprim^s. Ce sera ces Notes.

Page 131. • . • Comme partout ailleim, d'eapaoes
yagues. Discontinuity en lltalie, I'Espagne, du moins
pour I'oeil de dehors^ 4bloui d'un Dante, un Cervantes ;
I'Allemagne mdme accepte des intervalles entre ses
delate.

Je maintiens le dire.

P. 132, § 7. ... La B^aration. Le vers par filches jete
moins avec succession que presque simultandment pour
ridde, rMuit la durto h ime division spirituelle piopie
au sujet: diff^re de la phrase ou ddveloppement tem-
poraire, dont la prose joue, le disaimulant, selon mille
tour&

A Fun, sa pieuse majuscule ou cl6 alliterative, et la
rime, pour le rdgler: Tautre genre, d'un 6lan pr6cipit6
et sensitif toumoie et se case, au grd d'une ponctuation
qui dispose sur papier blanc, ddjlt y signifie.

Avec le vers libre (envers lui je ne me r6p6terai) on
prose k coupe m^it6e, je ne sais pas d'autre emploi du
langage que ceuz-d redevenus parallMes : excepts Taffiche,
lapidaire, envahissant le journal — souvent eUe me fit
songer comme devant un parler nouveau et Toriginalite
de la Presse.

Les articles, dits premier-Paris, admirables et la aeuk
forme contemporaine paroe que de toute dtemitd, sent
des po^mes, voilk, plus ou moins bien simplement ; riches,
nuls, en cloisonne ou sur fond k la coUe.

On a le tort critique, selon moi, dans les sallea de
redaction, d'y voir un genre k part

MALLARM£ 147

P, 133, § 4. ... A Pentoor d'nn instrument snrmen^,
est pr^oieuse. Tout h coup se ddt par la liberty, en
dedans, de I'alezandrin, ensure k yolont^ y compris Th^mi-
stiche, la yis^ oti resta le Pamasse, si d^ri6 : il instaura le
vers toonc^ seul sans participation d'un souffle pr^alable
chez le lecteur ou mtt par la yertu de la place et de la
dimension des mots. Son retard, avec un mtomisme
It peu pite d^finitify de n'en avoir pr6ds6 reparation ou
la po^tique. Que, I'agencement 6yolu&t k vide depuis,
selon dee bruits per^us de Tolant et de courroie, trop
imm^ats, n'est pas le pis ; mais, h mon sens, la pre-
tention d'enfermer, en Texpression, la mati^re des objeta
Le temps a parfait ToBuyre: et qui parle, entre nous, de
sdssion? Au yers impersonnel ou pur s'adaptera Tin-
stinct qui d^gage, du monde, un chant, pour en illuminer
le rythme fondamental et rejette, yain, le rMdu«

P. 133, § 4. • • • Serait d'emploi intermittent, Je ne
blftme, ne d^daigneles p^riodes d'^clipse oti Tart, instructif,
a ceci que Fusure diyu^ue les pieuses manies de sa trame.

P- 13^9 § 7* • • . En Tue qu'une attiranoe snpMeure
. . . I^rrotechnique non moins que m^taphysique, ce
point de yue; mais un feu d'artifice, k la hauteur et k
Fezemple de la pens^e, 6panouit la r^jouissance id^e.

P« 1399 § 4- • • • Bequiert la lucidity, du livre ezplicatif
et fiuoallier. La y^ritd si on s'ing^nie aux trac^, ordonne
Industrie aboutissant k Finance, comme Musique k Lettres,
pour circonscrire un domaine de Fiction, parfait terme
eompr^hensif.

La Musique sans les Lettres se pr^sente comme trte
subtil nuage : seules, elles, une monnaie si courante.

148 NOTES

n oonvenait de ne pas disjoindre davantage. Le titre,
propo66 k riaaue d'une cauaarie, jadia, devant le measager
ozonieny indiqua JfiMie amd LetterSf moiti6 de siyeiy
intaote: aa oontre-paitie aociale omiae. N<Bud de la
luurangue, me voici foamir oe moroeau, tout d'une pi^oe,
aux auditeura, aur fond de mise en aotoe ou de dra-
matiaaiion ap^ulatiyea: entre lea prdliminairea eunib
et la detente de comm6ragea ramen^e an aoad du jour
pr6ci86ment en vue de oombler le manque d'intdrdl
extra-eaih^tique. — Tout ae rteume dana I'Eathdtique et
r^Seonomie politique.

Le motif traits d'anaemble (au lieu de acinder et oArir
aoienunent une fraction), j'euaae 6vit6, encoie, de grdciaer
aveo le nom trte haut de Platon ; sana intention, moi,
que d'un modeme venu diiectement exprimer comme
Tarcane l^r, dont le vdt, en public, aon habit noir.

P. i^ § 5* • • • '^^ humble, men aemblable. Mythe,
r^temel: la communion, par le livre. A chacun part
totale.

P. 145, §3. • . . Exigent dn aol un aimulaore. Un gou-
vemement mirera, pour valoir, celui de Tunivera ; lequel,
eat-il monarchique, anarchique • . . Aux conjecturB&

La Gitd, ai je ne m'abuae en mon aens de citoyen,
reconatruit un lieu abstrait, sup^rieur, nulle part aitu^
ici s6jour pour lliomme. — Simple 4pure d'une grandiose
aquarelle, ceci ne ae lave, marginalement, en renvoi ou
has de page.

L'ESPAGNE
DU DON QUIJOTE

IL est particuli^rement agr^able d'avoir a parler de
Cervantes et du Don Quichotte devant un auditoire
anglais. Aucune nation ^trangere^ en effet, n^a ^gale
PAngleterre dans Pintelligence du m^rite de Cervantes
et de sa spirituelle fiction. Ceci n^est pas une flatterie
a votre adresse^ ce sont les propres paroles d'un savant
espagnol^ D. Martin Fernandez de Navarrete^ I'auteur
de la meilleure biograpbie que nous poss^ions du grand
romancier^.

Permettez-moi de vous rappeler quand le cervantisme
a pris naissance chez vous.

Vers le commencement du si^le dernier^ la reputa-
tion de Cervantes, assez grande de son vivant, avait
beaucoup baiss^ parmi ses compatriotes. Sans doute,
le Don Quiehotte trouvait encore de nombreux lecteurs
en Espagne et continuait de cbarmer la nation dont il
pr^nte a la f ois un portrait si fidele e^ une si piquante

X 'Ningana nadon extrangera ha igoalado A la Inglaterra en
apreoiar el m^rito de Cervantes y su ingenioea fibula del Qi^^ '
(Fida de Cnvaniea^ p. 509).

ISO L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

satire, il demeurait un des livres de passe-temps (entre^
teninUento) les plus gofit^s par toutes les classes de la
soci^t^; mais de Pauteur m^rne de ce chef-d'oeuvre
personne ne s'occupait plus : on ignorait en Castille les
incidents de la vie de Cervantes, si essentiels a connaitre
cependant, puisqu'ils se refletent souvent dans ses ecrits^
et de ses ouvrages, autres que le Don Quichotte et quel-
ques nouvelles, nul n'avait cure. Aussi les critiques
espagnols, qui alors r^gentaient la litterature nationale^
d^daignaient^ils cet amuseur et omettaient-ils de Tin-
scrire au catalogue des grands ecrivains de Pfige d'or.
Hors d'Espagne, au contraire ^, la gloire de Cervantes
ne faisait que croitre et le Don Quichotte^ adopte et
consacr^ gr&ce a une legion de traducteurs, avait con-
quis sa place dans ce petit groupe d'oeuvres de choix
que les AUemands appellent la litterature universelle.
De plus en plus, il supplantait toutes les fictions qui a
differentes ^poques avaient r^ussi a se frayer un chemin
a travers les Pyrenees, Amadis, Cilestines et romans
picaresques ; il tendait a devenir chez les nations ^tran-
geres Funique repr^sentant du genie litteraire des
Espagnols, et Montesquieu allait pouvoir risquer sa
f ameuse boutade : ^ Le seul de leurs livres qui soit bon *
est celui qui a fait voir le ridicule de tons les autres/

' An xvii* sitele d^k, W. Temple parle avec admiration de
Ceirantes {th$ makhless toriter of Don Quixole) et regarde son roman
comme la plus belle ceuvre d*imagination dee temps modemea
{The Works qf Sir WiUiam Ten^ Londres, 1757, t. iii p. 49a).
Temple nous rapporte aussi les propos d'un ' ingenious Spaniard/
de Bruzelles, qui pr^tendait que le Don Quichotte ruina la mon-
archie espagnole en jetant le ridicule sur lee prinoipes d*honneur
chevalereaque qui ayaient fait sa force (JbicL, p. 469). Opinion
d^fendue aussi en Espagne au zviii* sitele par D. Juan MangAn
(H. Mentodez Pelayo, Sietoria de las ideas eatHioas en StpaSta, t. iii. z,
p. 380).

MOREL-FATIO 151

Quand un ouvrage d'imagination acquiert une telle
notori^t^ et passe a ce point pour la quintessence de
Fesprit et du talent de tout un peuple, il n'est pas
surprenant qu'on cherche a le comprendre a fond, a en
elucider les passages les plus difficiles ou les allusions les
plus caches et qu^on s'efforce aussi de savoir ce que
f ut son auteur, comment il v^cut et quel rdle il tint dans
son milieu : curiosity bien legitime et a laquelle aucun
des premiers traducteurs n^avait ete en mesure de
r^pondre* II 6tait r^serv^ a FAngleterre de lui donner
satisfaction, et ce ji^est-pas un mince honneur pour
elle qu^un de ses hommes politiques les plus consider-
ables de la premiere moitie du xviii* siecle et des plus
lettr^s ait su prendre Pinitiatiye d'un grand travail
litt^raire au profit de Cervantes. En faisant publier
a ses frais a Londres, en 1738, une belle Edition du
Don Quichotte qu'il dedia a la comtesse del Montijo,
dont le mari avait et^ ambassadeur a la cour d^ Angle-
terre, en demandant a Don Gregorio Mayans, Pun des
meilleurs savants espagnolsde Pepoque, d'^crire speciale-
ment pour cette edition une biographic de Cervantes,
entreprise qui n'avait pas ^te encore tent^e et que
F^rudit valencien executa de sonmieux, lord John
Carteret a pour toujours uni son nom a celui du maitre
de la litterature d'imagination en Espagne et a contribu^
a fonder dans son pays F^tude critique et savante du
Don Quichotte.

L^exemple de lord Carteret devait porter ses fruits :
il suscita Fadmirable Don Quichotte du Rev. John Bowie,
que cet ancien fleve d^Oriel College publia en 1781, le
dediant a Francis comte de Huntington. Pour la pre-
miere fois, le cdebre loman trouvait im vrai commenta*
teur, pour la premiere fois ce livre ^tait expliqu^ histori-

152 L^ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

quement et grammaticalement et traits avec le mfime
reBpect qu'une peuvre de I'antiquit^ claitique. Ce JDmi
Qidchotte si doctement illustr^ n^obtint pai tout d^abord
en Angleterre le sucoia qu'il m&itait, car nul n'est
proph^te en son pays, mais il fut accueilli avec enthou*
aiaame par lea Eapagnola, tr^s flatt^ du splendide
hommage rendu a leura lettres. II piqua d'emulatian
divers ^rudita castOlanB, qui, un peu honteux de a'^tre
laiss^ devancer par un Stranger, ae mirent i Vosuvre
pour parfaire le travail de reccl^aiastique anglaia. On
ne aaurait aaaez le dire: la promotion de Cervantes a
la dignity de 'prince des ^crivaina' en Espagne et le
culte qu'on lui voua dans ce pays datent de Bowie dont
les notes ont lai^ement inspire les commentateurs
castillans, Pellicer, Clemencui^ qui n^ont pas toujours
reconnu les dettes contract^ envers leur pr^d^cesaeur,
Depuis Bowie, ^interpretation du Don Qidchotte a fait
des progres, mais le fond de Pex^se du roman teste
I'oeuvre de FAnglais, sans compter qu'tme partie accea*
scire mais fort utile de son livre, f entends le leadque de
la langue du Don Qmchotte, n'a 6ti remplacfe par rien
et conservera sa valeur, tant qu'on ne lui aura paa
substitu^ un repertoire plus complet et plus digne de
nos oonnaissances actuellea en matiere de philologie
castillane* B^ni smt done ce brave ecciesiastique, ce
Don Botak, comme Fappebdent volontiers sea amis qui
plaisantaient son savant amour pour le chevalier de la
Manche : il a ouvert la voie, il a 6t6, au aeaa propre
du mot, le premier des cervantistes.

L^int^rSt qu'inspire en Angleterre PcEUvre de Cer-
vantes, s'il ne s^est pas traduit dans notre siecle par
des travaux aussi considerables et meritoires que ceuK
de Bowie, continue cependant de se manif ester de tempa

MOEEL-PATIO 153

& autre par de nourellefl traductions ou dee essaia
litt&vurea qui viaeot, aoit & rendre de plug en plus
fidelement la pena^e de I'auteur^ soit a tenir le public
au courant dee rechercbes de F^rudition espagnole.

Celle^i traite maintenant Cervantes comme PItalie
mm Dante ou le Portugal son Camoens^ quoiqu'elle soit
loin d^apporter a F^tude du b^ros national le zele et la
critique dont font preuve les Italiens et les Portugais
quand ils s^occupent du leur. Le cervantisme en Ea-
pagne^ depuis une trentaine d^ann^es, oscille entre une
profonde apatbie et de soudains acc^ d'activit^ febrile
et mal dirig^ qui ne valent gu^re mieux que Pabstention
comply, car, i trop youloir exalter Phomme et Poeuvre,
beaucoup d^pasaent le but et s'^garent dans la decla-
mation ou les puMlit^s. Un culte, quel qu'il aoit, perd
de sa yertu, a'il toume a Pidol&trie.

Cervantes, qui, dana le domaine de Pimagination, de
Pbumour, de Pironie aimable, de la peinture vivante et
spirituelle dea moeurs nationales, d^passe de bien des
ooud^ tons sea compatriotea, n'a peut^tre paa droit
i toua lea bonneura qu^on a'est empreaa^ depuia un
slide i lui rendre, aana aaaez de diacemement. Aaaure-
ment lea Grftcea dana^rent autour de aon berceau et il
regut de la nature dea dona channanta ; mais quelquea
dona auaai lui manqudrent et il en est qu'il ne sut paa
d^velopper, faute d'une plua aolide Mucation litt^raire.
II n^y a qWk ouyrir le Dan Qutchotte, pour y trouver
dea faibleaaea de raiaonnement, des id^ mal exprim^
ou oonfuaea, toutes les fois que le r^t s'interrompt,
que Pauteur se guinde et se risque It prendre le ton du
philosopbe et du moraliste. Lui-m£me ne s'y est paa
tromp^, il a parfaitement d^fini le propre de aon talent
et ne a'eat ing^nilnient vantl que d'une aeule aup^riorit^

154 L'ESPAGNE DU DON OUUOTE

incontestable: le pouvoir crdateur^ le don de Finvention:
' Je Buis celui qui par Finvention Femporte but heau-
coup ^/ £t quand Mercure^ qui s^y connaiflsait, vient
a Ba rencontre^ c'est en ceB termeB qu^il Pinterpelle:
^Avance-toi^ rare inventeurV

Une f &cheuBe manie de quelques critiques modemes
a 6t£ de pr^tendre d^couvrir en lui un pr&urseur a vues
hardies en matiere de religion ou de politique, d'abuser
de certains passages de ses ceuvres en leur prfitant une
intention frondeuse, une signification proph€tique* Or,
nul ^rivain n'a ^t^ plus de son temps que Cervantes;
il ne Va pas devance d'une ligne. Bien certainement,
il n^a jamais eu a se contenir pour ne pas aborder cer-
taines questions d^cates qui pr^cupaient qudques-uns
de ses contemporains, car il s'y int^ressait peu; et
quand le hasard Fa mis en presence de graves problemes
sociaux qu'un esprit ind^pendant aurait peut-4tre r^lu
dans un sens assez conforme a nos id^ d'aujourd'hui,
lui les a tndt^s en pur Espagnol du xvii* siede.
Evitons done de f aire de Cervantes un g^nie universel^
un 6tre d^exceptbn, presque surhumain, dou^ de tons
les m^rites et de toutes les vertus, Evitons en particulier
d'en faire un esprit fort, Au lieu de le denaturav
effor9ons-nous de le comprendre, aimons-le pour ce
qu^il a ete : un tres habile conteur et un honnSte homme*
Certes, il demeure bien assez grand dans ses oeuvres^
telles qu'il a voulu les ^rire, et dans sa vie toute de
devouement et de sacrifices, sans qu'il soit n&ressaire
de Fdever sur \m pi^estal trop majestueux pour lui
et dont il aurait ^te le premier a sourire : mieux vaut

^ * Yo Boy aquel que en la invencion exoede & muchoe ' (Fm^ dU
PorruMo, cap. iy).
' * Paaai raro inventor, ptmh adelante ' (Jldd^ cap. t).

N

MOREL-FATIO 155

restreindre le champ de Padmiration et la concentrer
8ur les partdes de Fhomme et de Pauteur qui vraiment
sont sup^rieures.

De mSme que beaucoup d^ceuvres d^imagination qui
se sont v^ritablement empar^ du public^ le Don
Qidchotte est un livre de tous les ftges : il interesse et ]/-
amuse Fenfant^ il charme et fait refl^chir Fhomme mur.
La fable du roman et ses ^tonnantes fantaisies suffisent
aux uns ; d'autres goiLtent la philosophie et les id^
g^erales qu'on en peut extraire ou se plaisent a y
contempler comme dans un miroir les sentiments dont
s'inspindent et se nourrissaient les Espagnols de la
grande ^poque ; d^autres enfin cherchent Jl y d^meler
un sens cach^, a y d^hiSrer des ^nigmes, des allusions
aux ^y^nements contemporains, s'ing^niant a trouver la
clef de ce qu'un ^rnule de Cervantes appelait les
'synonymes volontaires^ du livre ^. Et dans ce vaste
tableau qu'on a si souvent regard^ avec amour et qu^on
croit connaitre^ il reste toujours de nouveaux details a
surprendre, lesquels n'apparaissent dairement et avec
toute leur valeur que lorsqu'un examen plus attentif les
a d^ag^ du fond oil ils se cachaient.

Quelle qu'ait ete la conception du livre^ conception
qui d^ailleurs a pu se modifier au cours ^e la composi*
tion^ que Cervantes ait eu en vue seulement, comme il
le laisse entendre^ de miner par im certain ridicule la
litt^rature chevaleresque^^ ou que^ sous ce convert, il ait
vis£ un autre but^ comme Font pr^tendu plusieurs de
ceux qui, de nos jours, se sont proposes de p^n^trer son
dessein, il ressort en tout cas de la lecture du roman

' Arellaneda dans le prologae de son Don QuieAotts.
' 'Ia mira puesta d derribar la miqwina mal ftuidada destos
eaballerefloos libros.' (Prologae da 2>. Q.)

y

156 L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

que 9on cadre . primitif n'a pas tard^ a s'^laigir et a
compiendre infinitnent plua de cfaotes qu^il ne devait en
contenir a Porigine. Du point de depart au point
d'arrivee, que de chemina parcourus ou il n'^tait pas
necessaire de nous conduire pour ajouter au discr^t de
ces pauvres livres de cheyaleries, que de m^andres et
de zig-zags ou nous perdons de vue compl^tement
AmaiM et sa secte!

'Je pensais,^ dit de son maitre le fidUe ecuyer
Sancho Panza, 'je pensais bonnement qu'il ne savait
que ce qui a trait a ses chevaleries, mais maintenant je
vois qu^il n'y a plat o& il ne pique et ne laisae de mettre
aa cuill^re^/ Cervantes, de mdme que son h^ros, a
piqu^ dans tons les plats. Sous sa plume vagabonde
et que gouveme I'inspiration du moment, son Don
Qttichotte, issu d'une id^ simple et dont on n'attendait
pas beaucoup de d^veloppements, est devenu peu a pen
le grand roman social de FEspagne du commencement
du XVII* si^le, oi!i tout ce qui marque cette ^poque,
sentiments, passions, pr€jug&, moeurs et institutions,
a fini par trouver sa place* De la le puissant int^rSt du
livre, qui) ind^pendamment de sa valeur conmie oeuvre
d'imagination et traits admirable de philosophic pratique,
possMe en outre Tavantage de fibcer F^tat de la civilisa-
tion d^un peuple a un moment precis de son existence
et de nous livrer le fond de sa conscience.

Ce cdt^ historique et social du Dan Qmchotte est
ce que je me propose d'examiner; je voudrais vous
montrer, si possible, ce que nous avons i. apprendre
dans ce roman c^^bre envisage comme une peinture

* 'Yo pensaba en mi inima que solo podia saber aqaello que
tooaba & siu eabaUerf as, pero no hay oosa donde no pique y d^je
de meter sn cncharada.' (D. Q^ ii. aa.)

MOREL-FATIO 157

fid^ de la soci^t^ i laquelle appartenait son auteur et
qu^il a d^rite ainsi que 8^ pouvait le faire un homme
dou^ d^une si large connaissanoe du monde et un artiste
capable de domier aux objets la couleur et le relief
voultts*

Le chapitre de la religion est un de ceux oil les
commentateurs ont le plus librement exerce leur
imagination, Une fois proclam^ esprit profond autant
qu^excellent ^crivain^ il restait a prater & Cervantes des
opinions avanc^es et frisant Fimpi^t^. On n'y manqua
pas. II n'est que de savoir lire entre les lignes et celui
que vous teniez pour le plus orthodoxe des romanciers
Chretiens se transformera ais^ment en un adversaire
d^d^ du fanatisme et de PInquisition, rnSme en un
philosophe Ubertin, au sens que le xvii* si^cle donnait
i ce mot. La these malheureusement s^effondre sit6t
qu^on renonce a solliciter les textes et qu^on examine
sans id^ precon9ue les quelques passages dont ces trop
ingenieux interpretes ont pens^ tirer bon parti. Bien
entendu, il s^agit de distinguer ici avee soin ce que
notre epoque^ devenue plus rigoriste parce qu'elle a
moins de foi^ confond volontiers: le dogme et la
doctrine de I'Eglise d'line part, et puis ce qui s'est
greff^ BUT le divin^ le prdtre et ses acolytes^ la gendar-
merie eccl^siastique qui en Espagne a nom Inquisition,
les ordres religieux, les associations pieuses^ etc.^ en
un mot tout ce qui sert et prot^e la religion et tout
ce qui en vit Or, sur ces accessoires du culte, maint
Espagnol, mdme au temps du plus lourd fanatisme^
eut parfois son franc-parler et la police du Saint-
Office, s&re de sa force, tolera nombre d^assez vertes
plaisanteries a Fadresse notamment du baa cl»*g^, aussi
m€pris^ en Espagne du vivant de Cervantes qu'il pent

WQ

158 L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

rStre actuellement en Russie. La mesure^ il est vrai,
qu'il convenait de ne pas d^passer dependait du
caprice du juge^ et tel qui avait pu risquer bien dea
hardiesses impunement, a pftti un jour d'un mot
imprudent, sans doute parce que le mot parut dirige
contre un des mandarins de la caste privil^gi^e: le
caractere personnel de I'injure en augmentait beaucoup
la gravity.

Comme nous allons le voir, Cervantes, en ces ma-
tieres, n'a pas ^ plus audacieux que tant d'autres;
I'eiit-il ^X/ky que cela n'autoriserait encore personne a lui
supposer une liberty d'esprit exceptionneUe et a douter
de son orthodoxie. Catholique fervent, d'autant plus
fervent qu'il avait eu i ^prouver la solidity de sa
croyance au contact de Finfidele et la precis^ment ou la
lutte entre les deux fois ^tait le plus vive, respectueuse-
ment soumis a la doctrine de FEglise comme tons les
Espagnols de son temps, sauf de bien rares exceptions,
Stranger aussi par temperament et par ^ucation aux
subtilit^s de la thfologie, qu^aurait-il pu ^rire qui sentit
le fagot ?

A Fendroit du clerge, Cervantes se montre assez
reserve ; mais cette reserve ne r^sulte pas de precautions
qu'il se serait cm oblig^ de prendre, car, a Poccasion^
ses sentiments ne t^moignent pas d'une grande bien-
veillance et d'un mot il sait marquer que I'habit clerical
ne lui impose pas. Le cure de village qui joue un r61e
important dans son livre en tant que conseiller et
redresseur du pauvre hidalgo d^traque, cet humble
repr€sentant de la grande hi^rarchie, Cervantes le traite
bien; il lui a donn^ quelque chose de mesur^ et
d'affable, avec cela un jugement sain^ un parler correct.
Jamais dans les propos du Ucenci^ Pero Perez,

MOREL-PATIO 159

n'apparaissent la p^danterie un peu lourde et le manque
de tact si frequents chez le prfitre campagnard. Sans
doute ce type agr^iit assez au romancier. En revanche,
Feccl^siastique qui ne vit pas dans sa cure et au milieu
de ses ouailles, Feccl6siastique qu^on rencontrait a tout
instant dans les antichambres et sur les chemins, parce
qu^alors la robe du prStre ^tait une protection et
assurait une foule de prerogatives, de celui-la il n'en
fait assur^ment pas grand cas. Dans I'aventure de ce
corps mort escort^ par des clercs que Don Quichotte
prend pour des fantdmes et que Sancho d^pouille
consciencieusement de leurs victuailles empil^es sur un
midet, il y a une petite phrase jet^ en passant a
Tadresse de ' Messieurs les eccl^siastiques qui rarement
oublient de se donner toutes leurs aisesV <lont il ne
faudrait pas exag^rer la port^e, mais qui prouve au
moins que Cervantes ^tait homme il tr^ bien discemer
le fond d'^goisme et de sensuality que pouvait recouvrir
une soutane. II savait encore que le voeu de chastete
ne s'observait pas toujours dans ce milieu-la avec la
ligueur voulue, et c'est pourquoi il laisse raconter sans
le moindre scrupule par Don Quichotte Fhistoire de
certaine veuve, assez d^ur^e, qui aurait pu se choisir
un amant parmi de savants th&>logiens de son entou-
rage, au lieu de s'adresser a un fr^re lai bien dodu, mais
qui pr^f^ra ce dernier, Pestimant, pour ce qu^elle en
attendait, tout aussi savant qu'Aristote ^.

Une variety d'eccl^siastiques que Cervantes n'a pas
m^nag^e, qu^il a mdme cingl^e avec la plus enti^re
satisfaction, est celle du parasite de robe longue, du

^ ' I1O8 te&ores d^rigos . . . que poeM veoee se dejan mal pMftr.'
(D. g., i. 19.)
' D. Q., U 95.

i66 L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

confesieur et factotum det maiflons de I'aristocratiey da
pr£tre intrus qui pretend gouverner le grand seigiiear
et lui apprendre mm metier, mesurant la lib€ralit£ da
maitre a F^troiteflse de aa propre ftme et rendant ce
maitre miserable i force de vouloir restreindre m
d^pense \ ' Que noua veulent^ a'^rie-t-il, oea gens qui^
nourris dana la mia^ d'une pensUm d'^tudianta, aana
aYoir vu plus de monde que n'en contiennent vingt ott
trente lieuea, penaent qu'il auffit de a'introduire dana
lea maiaona dea granda pour trancher de tout,' etc«^
L'homme d'^p^ reparatt id. Cervantea^ oomme la
plupart dea ^crivaina d^alora, avait dii chercber un appui
auprte dea puiaaanta et a'abriter it leur ombre, auaai ne
peut-il oontenir aa cotere i Faapect de cea &happ& de
coU^^ de cea a^minariatea pr^mptueux et pedants,
que leur &iucation et leur ignorance de la vie rendent
ai improprea au rdle qu'on leur donne k tenir. 11 ae
denumde pourquoi de tela emploia aont confi^a & de
tellea gena, quand il aerait ai facile d'en pourvoir dea
laiquea, dea hommea ayant acquia Pexp^rience dea
choaea, fray^ longtempa avec leura aemblablea, vu
dea paya etrangera, combattu et aouffert, dea hommea
oomme lui-m£me^ enfin ! Ceux-Ui aeraient capablea de
conaeiller le grand, de le rapprocher dea faiUea et dea
humblea et de le diriger dana Padministration judicieuae
de aon pouvoir et de aa fortune. Poaaible que cette
verte r^primande ait 6tS dict^ a Cervantea par quelque
reaaentiment peraonnd, poaaible qu'il ait via^ quel-
que eccl^aiaatique qui Paurait deaaervi auprte d'un
de aea protecteura: cela n^enl^verait rien a la port^
de aea parolea qui^ par-desaua Findividu, atteignent
Teap^e.

» D. Q.f u. 3X. « D. g., iu 3fl.

MOREL-PATIO i6i

De certains ordrea religieux assez decries en Espagne,
a cause des vices qui leur ^taient propres ou qu'on leur
prfitait volontiers, Cervantes n'a rien dit dans son
roman ; mais il n'a pas amis d^y f aire figurer un type
d'exploiteur de la religion fort r^pandu de son temps :
I'ermite^ sorte de malandrin a longue barbe v^n^rable,
fl figure b&te^ dont tant d^auteurs nous ont denonc^
les honteuses pratiques et la cynique existence. ' Nos
ermites d'aujourd'hui^ observe Don Quiciiotte, savent
se sustenter de volailles^ ils ne ressemblent pas a ceux
des d^rts d^^gypte qui se vStaient de feuilles de
palmier et se nourrissaient des racines de la terre^/
£t Cervantes a beau pallier cette critique en declarant
que, puisque tout va mal, mieux vaut encore Phypocrite
qui affecte la vertu que le pecheur qui ^tale son indi-
gnitiy il ne parvient pas a nous donner le change sur
ses sentiments; rien ne devait autant repugner ^ sa
nature droite et vaillante que I'oisivet^ vicieuse de cette
categoric abjecte de faux divots.

Ainsi, non seulement Cervantes n'a jamais rien ^crit,
touchant la doctrine, qui pr€t&t au moindre reproche
d^mpi^t^ ou de libertinage d^esprit, mais on ne pent
mdme pas dire qu'en s'en prenant occasionnellement a
quelques travers des serviteurs du culte, ou iL certaines
famous d'abuser de la religion et du caract^re sacr^
qu'elle conf^re, il ait eu la main tr^s dure ou le trait
particuli^rement ac^re. Au reste, divers incidents des
demi^res ann^ de sa vie accusent la sincerity de ses
convictions et mfime le respect dont il se croyait tenu
d'entourer telles pratiques devotes usit^es parmi les
mondains d'alors. Son affiliation, en 1609, i la con-
frerie de la rue de FOlivier^ qui lui valut le titre

^ D. Q., ii. 94.
M

i62 L'ESPAGNE DU IX)N QUIJOTE

d' ^ esclave du Tres Siunt Sacrementy' son entr^^ quatre
ana plus tard, dans le tiera-ordre de saint Fran9ois9
voila des d^monstratioiiB, a ce qu'il semble, significatives.
Je saia bien que beaucoup entraient dans ces confr^ries,
moins pour y accomplir des actes de contrition que
pour se donner de Pimportance^ pour y briller, Staler
leur train et leur f aste^ lorsque par exemple de grandes
c^r^monies offraient aux confreres I'occasion de d^er
processionnellement dans les rues de la capitale^ sous
les regards du public le plus choisi^ Une confr^rie
repr^sentait en Espagne au xvii* si^le ce que repr£-
sente aujourd'hui un club ; les gens d'un certain monde
appartenaient a telle cq/iradia, et Ton se qualifiait en
ajoutant a son nom celui de la coterie pieuse qui yous
avait admis. L'on se qualifiait ; en mSme temps I'on
se garantissait centre de f ftcheuses suspicions^ et, partoia
aussi, centre les coups de la fortune adverse. Lea
confreres ^taient en quelque sorte solidairea, oblig^
par point d^honneur de s'entr'aider : une cofradia bien
organisde devait tenir un peu de nos soci^t^ de secoum
mutuels. C^est ce qui explique pourquoi tant de gena
de lettres briguaient Fhonneur d^^tre re9us membrea
des congregations du chevalier de Oracia ou de la rue
de POlivier^ les plus connues du Madrid de PhUippe III.
Cervantes fit comme Lope^ comme Quevedo^ comma
Calderon et tant d'autres. Vieux, fatigu^ et pauvre^
il chercha un milieu oil rencontrer des protecteurs!,
coudoyer des personnages influents, ^tendre ses rela->

^ ^No puede ser danoeo tener pU^a en algona de las Gongre*
gaoiones y Eselavitades de la Corte, y en ella ofioio de mayordomo
o oonnliario, para poder en dias festiyos senalaros con mia pai^
iionlaridad oon el baston dorado o oon qaalqnier otra insignia
propria del cargo que tuyieredes.' (Suarez de Figaeroa, £1 Pamg&nf
aUyio iz.)

MOREL-FATIO 163

tions, le tout sous les plis d^une pieuse banni^re. Mais
quels qu'aient pu Stre les motifs int^ress^ de cette
determination prise sur le tard^ Facte m6me de Faffilia-
tion^ le fait qu'il se pr^senta et fut agr^^^ montre
surabondamment que ceux qui avaient a Padmettre ou
a P^carter et qui, jaloux de leurs droits, ne devaient
pas £tre enclins a Pindulgence, ne lui tinrent pas rigueur
pour quelques propos risqu^s de son Don Quichotte
et n^hesit^rent pas a lui d^livrer le dipldme de confr^
des mieux pensants.

Cette puissante machine gouvemementale, adminis-
trative et judiciaire, construite avec tant de peine par
les Rois Catholiques, renforc^ par les ministres de
Charles-Quint, puis amplifi^e et compliqu^e a Pexc^
par Philippe II, le prince meticuleux et paperassier,
qu'en pense Cervantes et comment la juge-t-il? II ne
s'agit pas de vues d'ensemble, d^appr^iations g^n^ralea
qtd, si elles avaient pu trouver place dans le Dan
Quichotte, seraient vraisemblablement des banality sans
int^t* Nous ne demandons pas a Cervantes de nous
exposer un plan de gouvemement et de nous d^uire
la meiUeure m^thode d'administrer im peuple en assurant
son bonheur; nous ne lui demandons pas une disser-
tation en forme touchant les myites et les inconv^nienta
du systeme mis en pratique par les maitres du jour.
Non, nous ne saurions r&damer de lui que des aper9us^
des unpressions personneUes sur certaines parties de la
machine qu'il connait pour les avoir visits de prte
et touch^ du doigt. Cela, nous le lui demanderons^
car U ne se pent pas qu'un homme qtd fut acteur, ou
figurant tout au moins, dans plusieurs scenes du grand
drame politique espagnol du xvi* sik;le et que le hasard
initia & quelques-uns de sea dessous, n^ait rien de

H 2

i64 L^ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

curieux a nous revder sur le fonctionnement de Pappareil^
lea complications et lea d^fauts de plus d'un de aes
rouagea.

La conTiction que le gouverneur et le magistrat sent
dea ennemis nea du (aible et du pauvre^ qu^ila appar-
tiennent corpa et &me au premier qui prend a t&che de
les suborner et que leurs actes n'ont d^autre mobile que
PinterSt; la conviction que les emplois ne se donnent
qu'a la faveur et a Pargent, qu'on entre dans une
charge uniquement pour s^y engraisser et qu'on s'eSorce
de n'en sortir que repu^ cette conviction 6tait ancree
chez Cervantes comme d'ailleurs cbez la plupart de
aes compatriotes. Un juge integre^ un administrateur
d&int^ress^^ cela n^existe qu'a titre d'exception. La
regie est la venalit^^ la corruption et aussi Tincapacit^,
car a quoi bon le m^rite^ puisque tout s'obtient sans
lui ? ^ Nous Savons, dit Don Quichotte, qu'il n'est pas
besoin de beaucoup d'habilete ni de beaucoup de lettres
pour Stre gouverneur, et tons nous en connaissons de
ces ministres qui peuvent a peine lire et gouvement
nonobstant comme des gerfauts^' Cervantes est si
tranquillement persuade que les fonctions publiquea ne
s'exercent qu'au detriment des vertus privees et qu'il
faut laisser a la porte, en y entrant, ce qui fait I'honnSte
homme et lui vaut I'estime de ses semblables, qu'on
n'aper9oit aucune acrimonie dans ses jugements sur les
divers suppdts de I'autorit^ royale: les choses sont
ainsi. MSme il est pr^s d'ajouter: sans doute elles
furent ainsi de tout temps et nous ne sommes pas pires
que nos peres. Aussi ne se montre-t^il nuUe part
laudator temporis acti; jamais il n'oppose s^rieusement
le pass^ au present, les vertus d'un age d'or aux moeurs

» D. Q., ii. 32.

MOREL-FATIO 165

de son ^poque. II croirait plutdt que son temps vaut
un peu mieux que les autres: n^oubliona pas qu^il a
servi sous Philippe II et qu'il n'a pas pu Stre insensible
a certaines mesures rigoureuses prises par ce souverain
poui^ redresser bien des torts. Philippe II eut une
sollicitude immense pour ses sujets, c^est le beau cdt£
de son action gouvemementale, et quand il r^ussit a
&tre exactement inform^ et a atteindre le mal^ jamais il
n'hesita a y porter la sonde. L^aisance avec laquelle
il sacrifiait les plus hauts dignitaires de Vlttat lorsqu'ils
avaient failli^ Pestinie dont il entoundt de modestes
fonctionnaires^ depuis les ^secretaires biscayens/ ces
bureaucrates accomplis^ jusqu^aux corridors des plus
petites villes, enfin de promptes ex^cutions^ des ch&-
timents exemplaires^ sans aucune consideration pour
la personne du d^linquant, quand I'injustioe avait 4t4
d^voiiee^ voila des faits singuli^rement m^ritoires et que
n^e&t pas d^savoues la grande Isabelle la Catholique.
Mais Fadministration de Pimmense empire ressemblait
assez au tonneau des Danaides. Philippe II avait beau
lire tout ce que ses agents lui ^crivaient de tons les
points du globe^ noirdr des rames de papier et annoter
de sa main des liasses de rapports^ il avait beau^ comme
un comptable surcharge de besogne, s'aider de la
reine et des infantes, ses fiUes, pour verser le sable sur
les lettres et porter les plis au fiddle Santoyo qui les
transmettait aux secretaires ^, cette prodigieuse activity

* Nous devons h rhiaiorien Cabrera ce joli tableau d*intdriear :
^ Le Boi Catholique yint paaser I'^t^ au monaat&re de Saint-Laurenty
et il s^y appliquait k I'ezp^ition des aitairee, gimndement aid^ par
la reine et les infantes. Lui toivait et signait, la reine jetait du
sable sur les lettres et les infantes les portaient k une table oil
S^baslien de Santoyo^ le yalet de ehambre oommis aux papiers,
fiddle, de grande diserdtion et bien tu du roi, fidsait les paquets et

i66 L'ESPAGNE DU DON GUIJOTE

d'administrateur et de scribe, dont il n'y a pas d'autre
exemple dans Phistoire, r^ultait vaine la plupart du
temps. Plus la chancellerie expediait d^ordres, et plus
elle recevait d'enquStes, de petitions et de m^moires;
les papiers s^amoncelaient sur les tables des commis qui
ne pouvaient suffire a la t&che effroyable. Le maitre^
renseign^ trop tard, ne prenait pas de decisions au
moment opportun, et, comme il £tait de sa nature
timor^ et hesitant, ce qu'il d^cr^tait manquait son but
et s'evanouissait en fum^e. A vrai dire, I'empire £tait
trop vaste, le travail trop au-dessus des forces humaines,
et, d'autre part, le mal trop profond, trop difficile
a extirper.

On a pretendu voir dans la description du gouveme-
ment de Hie Barataria par Sancho Panza une satire du
syst^me administratif de PEspagne au temps de Cer-
vantes; ce serait dans ce chapitre que I'auteur du
Don QuicAotte aurait exprim^ avec le plus de franchise
ses id^es sur le maniement des affaires publiques. Je
n'y contredis pas absolument* Toutefois, je ne re-
marque rien la qui caract^rise avec nettete le gouveme-
ment de Philippe II ou celui des premieres ann^ de
son successeur. La morale de Inexperience tentee par
le due au profit de F^cuyer de Don Quichotte est
conjue dans des termes tres g^n^raux et se resume a
peu pr^s en ceci : il n'y a pas de science politique, un
vulgaire bon sens suffit pour trancher les questions les
plus d^cates, et le premier paysan venu, avec son
flair naturel, en salt plus long que le juriste patente
de Salamanque; la volonte du gouvernant, son d6sir
d'op^rer des r^formes utiles succombent devant la

les plia et les enToyait aiix secretaires.' {Historia de Felipe IT, t. ii.
p. 198.) On se croirait ohez un notaire de province.

MOREL-FATIO 167

routine des bureaux et I'hostilite de Fentourage^ defen-
seurs obliges des vieux errements et des abus; le
d^sint^ressement^ vertu louable en soi^ n^a pas de raison
d^£tre dans ces situations^ car il ne vous vaut ni
estime ni reconnaissance; lorsque le gouvemeur sort
riche^ on dit que c^est un voleur^ mais en revanche
quand il sort pauvre^ on dit que c'est un niaisj etc. De
tels aphorismes s'appliquent a tons les tenips^ a ceux
qui ont pr^ced^ comme a ceux qui ont suivi Papparition
du Don Quichotte. Aucune des modifications appor-
t^es par Philippe II au r^me ant^rieur et aucune des
mesures qui signalerent Favenement de Philippe III et
le regne des favoris ne sont ici vis^* Au demeurant,
nul cri d^indignation, nul trait virulent, nulle aspiration
a unid^al quelconque, nulle Salente entrevue dans un
r^ve. Cervantes ne croit pas en principe aux innova-
tions en matiere d'economie sociale ou de politique, et
il est prSt a traiter d^utopiste quiconque cherche le mal
dans les institutions, au lieu de le chercher ou il est,
chez les hommes^.

Les r^formateurs lui font tons un pen Pimpression
de cet id^logue d'une de ses nouvelles qui, pour parer
au deficit des finances royales, proposait au roi de con-
traindre ses sujets a se nourrir une fois par mois de
pain et d'eau et a verser dans son tr^sor la somme
qu'ils auraient employ^ ce jour-la a se mieux sustenter.
Remede ingenieux sans doute, mais, dit le chien Ber-
ganza : ^ N'avez-vous pas remarqu^ que ceux qui pr6-
conisent de semblables panaches s'en vont tons mourir
dans les hdpitaux ' ? ^

^ ' Coheohe V. IL, senor tiniente, oohecLe 7 tendrA dineros^
y f¥} haga U808 nuevoa, que morird de hambre,* tel eat le conaeil de la
QltanUla qui en savait long. ' Ooloquio de loapema.

i68 L'ESPAGNE DU DON GUIJOTE

Un defl graves probl^mes de FEspagne du xvii* ri^le
fut, on le Bait, la ooi^uite a tenir via-a-vis de la popu-
lation d'origine muaulmane, a demi aasimilee depuia
longtemps au regime chr^tien, mais qui, aur certains
points du royaume, en Aragon surtout et dans le pays
de Valence, r^mbait encore contre Fardente propa-
gande des pr6tres et des administrateurs, maintenait
par une sorte de respect traditionnel beaucoup d^usaffes
particuliers a sa race et a sa religion et faisait ainsi
tache au sein du peuple ^lu, de la nation catholique.
Comment ensuite r^soudre une autre question d;roite*
ment li^e i la premiere, comment se comporter a regard
des £tats barbaresques de FAfrique du nord, ennemis
jur& de la monarchie espagnole, danger permanent
pour elle, puisque leurs corsaires entravaient joumelle*
ment les relations avec FItalie, d^vastaient le littoral
p^ninsulaire et t&chaient d^^tablir une oertaine corre-
spondance avec leurs anciens coreligionnaires demeur^
en Espagne ? Le due de Lerme, soutenu par le cleig€, mais
combattu par la grande noblesse territoriale qui comptait
de nombreux vassaux morisques, trancba la premiere
difficult^ en expulsant tons les musulmans d^Espagne^
maisillaissasubsisterlaseconde. L'E^pagneBepriva,en
quelques ann^, d'une population laborieuse et bonnfite
qu'elle exporta chez ses ennemis et ne put jamais rem*
placer par des ^^ments indigenes; d'autre part, eUe ne
r^ussit pas a assurer la s&urit^ de ses cdtes et a arr^ter
les progr^s de la piraterie barbaresque. De nos jours,
la conduite de Lerme a ^te severement jug^ en Espagne:
Fexpulsion des Morisques y passe pour une lourde &ute
^nomique, et Pabandon de toute politique expansive
en Afrique y trouve d^autant plus de censeurs que les
Espagnols ont bien souvent a regretter de n'avoir pas

MOREL-FATIO 169

assis solidement leur domination sur Pautr cdte du
d^troit quand iLs en poBS&laient lea moyens.

Sur le fait de cette lutte entre la croix et le croissant,
Cervantes se jugeait competent. II connaissait Finfi-
dele, il Pavait heurt^ les armes a la main a L^pante, il
avait subi son joug a Alger. Rentre en Espagne, la
t£te pleine de ses prouesses guerri^res et des penibles
incidents de sa captivite, il gardait au fond du cceur^
plus intense que beaucoup d^autres qui n'avaient pas
et6 soumis aux mSmes ^preuves, la haine sainte du
m^cr^nt, ce credo de la vieille Espagne. Le Turc est
le danger exterieur, le Morisque est le fleau du dedans.
Combattons le premier et extirpons le second. Dans
son ^pitre a Mateo Vazquez, le ministre de Philippe II,
ecrite alors qu'il se trouvait encore enchain^ au bagne,
il annonce Pintention, aussitdt rachet^, de se jeter aux
pieds du roi et de lui tenir le langage suivant : ^ Puissant
monarque, qui avez asservi mille peuples barbares, qui
recevez le tribut mSme des negres de FInde, comment
tol^rez-vous qu'une miserable bicoque vous r^siste?
Ses d^fenseurs sont nombreux, mais faibles et mal
^quip^s, et la muraille s^^croule. Qu'attendez-vous ?
Yous avez en vos mains la clef qui doit ouvrir Pobscure
prison oii gemissent dans les souffrances et les tour-
ments plus de vingt mille chr^tiens* Ecoutez-les, ils
vous implorent a genoux. Ah ! puissiez-vous accomplir
ce qu'a commence votre valeureux p^re ! Montrez-vous
et la seule annonce de votre intervention remplira de
stupeur et d^effroi ces bourreaux qui tremblent en
attendant leur ch&timent.^ L^floquente supplique ne
fut pas entendue. Philippe II avait d'autres soucis.
Au moment ou Cervantes Finvoquait, il pr^parait Fan-
nexion du Portugal, cherchait a ^ recoudre le lambeau

I70 L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

jadis arrach^ a la robe de Pillufltre Castille K' Apres^
il forma des projets plus ambitieux encore^ il pr^m^dita
une sorte de monarchie universelle catholique dont la
yision s'evanouit dans le dSsastre de FAnnada. Les
demieres annees du r^gne s'^oulerent sombres et
f urent traverse par beaucoup de difficult^ interieures*
II mourut ne comptant m6me pas que son faible sue-
cesseur tiendrait t^te aux ennemis du dedans et du
dehors ni ne r^ussirait a conserver intact Pimmense
heritage* La croisade tant d^siree par Cenrantes n'eut
jamais lieu^ les bagnes retentirent longtemps encore des
cris de douleur des captifs et les peres r^dempteurs
recommenc^rent leurs lamentables peregrinations.

Des Morisques^ Cenrantes a 6t£ amen^ a parler a
plusieurs reprises, dans le Don Quichottey dans les
NouvetteSf dans le Persiles ', et toujours il Fa fait sur
un ton de m^pris et de haine. Point de gr&ce pour
cette canaille moresque qui est notre vermine 1 Voyez-
les: ils sont sobres et engendrent beaucoup, car la
sobri^t^ augmente les causes de la generation; lis
travaillent et, comme ils travaillent, ils gagnent et
nous prennent tout notre argent monnaye ; leurs filles
n^entrent pas en religion et ne demeiuent pas conmie
les ndtres st^riles ; leurs fils ne vont pas a la guerre et
n^en reviennent pas comme les ndtres estropi^s ou
fourbus; ils n'^tudient pas, car qu'ont-ils d'autre a
apprendre sinon Part de nous voler, et cet art leiur est
inne. Benie soit I'heroique resolution de notre saint

' '£1 giron lusitano tan famoso,

Que un tiempo se oort6 de los Testidoa
Be la ilnstre Castillay ha de zorcine

De nuevo '

{Numanda, aote L)
' D. Q,f ii. 54 et 65 ; Cologpiio de loapwros ; PsnOes, liyre iii, oh. xi.

MOREL-FATIO 171

roi Philippe^ qui^ dans sa sagesse, a pris sur lui de
d^raciner cette plante venimeuse^ de purger PEspagne
de cette peste maudite 1 Un pere dominicain n^eiit pas
mieux dit* Pauvre Cervantes 1 Ce qu'il avait reclame
i juste titre contre le musulman d'Afrique n^eut aucun
echo et ne se fit point; ce qu'il conseilla et approuva,
au m^pris de F^quit^ et du bon sens^ contre le musul-
man d^Espagne ne se fit que trop completement^ helas !
et pour le plus grand mal de ceux-l& mSme qui esp€-
raient en tirer profit.

Mais n^est-il pas piquant de constater que cet ennemi
farouche de Pinfidele est parfois contraint de recon-
naitre loyalement la superiority de certaines institutions
des adeptes de Mahomet? Dieu sait s'il a raill^ les
pratiques de la justice de son pays^ son formalisme^
ses lenteurs^ ses atermoiements^ ses grimoires, ses frais
si lourds^ I'entente coupable entre avocats des parties^
sans parler de la v^nalit^ de ces juges dont il aimait
i. dire qu^ 'il faut savoir les oindre pour ne pas les
entendre grincer comme ime charrette a boeufs ^/ Et
truest le m6me homme qui nous confesse qu'il n^en est
pas de m^me chez les Mores ! ' Ici point de transf ert
a la partie^ point de plus ample inform^. • • « Le cadi
est juge comp^nt et souverain et il decide en prud^-
hommCj r^uisant les causes au minimum et les
jugeant en un clin-d'oeil^ sans qu^on puisse jamais
appeler de sa sentence ^/ Yoila un aveu qu^il a trop
oubli^ dans d'autres occasions et qui aurait pour le
moins dd temp^rer quelque pen sa feroce intolerance.

6r&ce pr^cisement au sceptidsme rSsigne dont je

^ 'Si no eatixL untadofl, gmnen mas que carretaa de bueyes.'
{La Uustrefregona,)
* D. g., iLa6; El Amante Uberal

172 L^ESPAGNE DU DON OUIJOTE

parlais tout a I'heure qui le portait a voir dans le
gouvemement^ Padminifitration^ la justice^ des insti*
tutionB dont les homines de tous lea temps abusent et
qu'il serait pu^ril en consequence de pr^tendre reformer,
Cervantes n'a pas eu de motif s^rieux de pressentir que
cette grande monarchic s'acheminait a son d^clin et
que la pourriture de certains membres non amput^i
a temps envahirait le corps entier. II avait vu Tapog^e
du syst^me et il aimait a vivre sur ses souvenirs. La
puissance militaire espagnole lui apparaissait toujours
dans le splendide d&;or de L^pante oii rayonnut le dieu
Mars lui-m6me sous les traits de ce f ougueux et fringant
Don Juan d^Autriche. Les iercios, lorsqu'il mourut,
faisaient ferme encore et les tambours n^avaient pas
battu la chamade. Le grand empire^ avec ses infinies
d^pendances, avait I'air de tenir debout^ les galions
continuaient d'apporter For des Indes a Seville, les
vice-rois r^gnaient toujours a Naples et en Sicile, le
Portugais n'avait pas pris sa revanche. Part et la litt^ra^
ture brillaient d^un vif &:lat. Comment e&t-il pr^vu
la d&^adence irr^m^iable et prochaine? II lui aurait
f allu pour cela une inquietude d'esprit en m^me temps
qu'une perspicacity rare qui n'^taient pas dans sa
nature. II mourut done convaincu de la grandeur de
sa nation, et ce dut lui £tre, dans ses heures demiferes,
une supreme consolation que de pouvoir se dire qu'il
s'en allait citoyen du premier empire du monde.

Voyons maintenant comment, au t^moignage de notre
^crivain, vit et s'agite, dans le cadre que lui a trac^
Phistoire, cette society espagnole, qui, au moment mdme
de la plus grande expansion territoriale de P£tat,
semble se r^tr^cir et s'^tioler sous la pression du fana-
tisme religieux, du pouvoir absolu et de certains prin-

MOREL-FATIO 173

cipes jadis vivifiants^ mais devenus avec le temps de
simples pr^jug^s.

Au sommet, une noblesse titr^e et a plusieurs Stages,
depuis la grandesse jusqu'aux anoblis par le roi, classe
sans signification politique et ne subsistant qu'en vertu
du prestige qu'elle s'est acquis^ des richesses qu'elle
a amass^ ou des faveurs qu'elle salt encore se faire
octroyer pour des services quelconques. Cette noblesse
ne peut se vanter d^appartenir a une race sup^eure
et dans ses vdnes ne coule pas un sang plus pur que
dans la masse du peuple : ici point de ces distinctions
tranch^es, de ces antagonismes comme il en existe
ailleurs entre Franc et Latin, entre Normand et Saxon.
Tout le monde est Goth ou croit P£tre.

Le trait caract^ristique de cette classe noble, ce que
montre bien le nom de ricohombre que se donnerent
d'abord ses membres, est la fortune, la possession d'lme
terre, d'un fief, la jouissance de faveimB royales. On
n'est reconnu noble et on ne peut le demeurer qu'a la
condition d'etre riche. Telle est bien I'opinion g^n^rale
et en particulier celle de la niece de Don Quichotte.
' Comment, r^pond-elle a son oncle, comment, yous qui
n'Stes qu'hidalgo, pouvez-vous vous dire chevalier, car
on voit a la v^rite des hidalgos le devenir, mais il faut
pour cela quails ne soient pas pauvres ^'

Selon les temps, cette premiere noblesse castillane,
a laquelle se mdlaient des b&tards de la maison royale,
a exerc^ dans r£tat une influence plus ou moins grande.
Elle a eu des moments de splendeur, par exemple au
XV* si^cle, ou ses turbulents chefs contrebalancent le
pouvoir royal et le sapent. Refren^e et tenue en laisse
par les Rois Catholiques, ces opini&tres restaurateurs

» D. Q.y ii 6.

X74 L'ESPAGNE DU DON OUIJOTE

du rigalisme^ elle reprend de Pimportance sous Philippe
d' Autriche et Charles-Quint, pour en perdre de nouveau
beaucoup avec Philippe 11^ qui Pabaisse tant qu^il peut,
la musele et la sacrifie a Phomme de robe longue, au
l^^te des university dont il peuple ses chancelleries
et ses conseils. Philippe III lui rend une partie de son
prestige et de son pouvoir^ et le xvii* siecle devient le
regne des favoris de grandes maisons. C'est alors> bien
mieux qu'au moyen fige, que le nom de riche homme
d^finit exactement Pespece : toutes les hautes dignitds^
toutes les charges profitables^ toutes les grasses vice*
royaut^B d'ltalie et des Indes^ tout ce qui rapporte et
enrichit lui appartiennent.

Cervantes a assist^ a la rentree en f aveur de la
noblesse titr^e et a P^norme cur^e qui marqua Pavene-
ment de Lerme au poste de premier ministre. II peut
sembler surprenant qu'il n'ait pas dessin^ qudques
silhouettes de ces grands cyniquement glorieux du
produit de leurs rapines^ si bouffis de morgue hautaine^
si mdignes pour la plupart des emplois qu'ils arrachent
a la faiblesse du souverain. C'est qu^il en avait besoin^
c'est qu^il £tait^ comme tons les gens de lettres d'alors^
leur domestique, c'est qu'il devait employer une partie
de son talent a solliciter leurs bonnes gr&ces. Tracer
des portraits trop ressemblants et ou Pun d'eux se serait
reconnu exit ruin^ le pauvre ^crivain. Aussi, quand il
s'est d^cid^ H pdndre un grand, a-t-il pris soin de
Pextraire de son milieu, de Peloigner de la cour, de
Pexiler dans ses terres. Le due et la duchesse qui
recueillent Don Quichotte et s'en amusent, pour tromper
Pennui d^une longue vill^giature rendue n&essaire peut-
Stre par quelque revers de fortune ou quelque disgrftce,
ces types de la grandesse espagnole sont pr^sent^s sous

MOREL-FATIO 175

tin jour aimable et enguirland^s de ces flatteries d^cates
n habituelles dans le langage courant de F^poque.
Qnelques piqfbres toutef ois 9a et la attestent que Pauteur
n'a pas ali^n^ son independance et ne renonce pas tout
a fait & son franc parler. Le bavardage m^disant de
la du^gne qui rev^e a Don Quichotte le secret du teint
de lis et de roses de la duchesse n'est qu'une drdlerie
sans cons€quence« Plus mordante est une autre con-
fidence de la mSme respectable commere. Sa fiUe,
s&luite par le fils d'un riche paysan^ n'obtient pas du
due qu'il intervienne pour contraindre le s^ducteur
a r^parer sa faute. Le maitre ferme les yeux et fait
la sourde oreille. Cest, dit la duegne^ que le pere
paysan, fort cossu, prSte de Pargent au due et le tire
de ses embarras souvent en se portant caution pour
lui \ La plupart des maisons de la grandesse en ^taient
1&. L'argent acquis par des malversations s'en allait
par Pincurie et le plaisir^ payait la representation fas-
tueuse^ s'6parpillait a Pinfini entre une domesticity
innombrablcy des commis rapaces, des administrateurs
infidMes. Alors il fallait recourir aux pr^teurs^ vivre
d^expedients, aligner ses droits il des agents inferieurs
qui en profitaient pour piller la terre^ pressurer les
vassaux, exercer une veritable tyrannic locale. Ce
gouvemement improvise de Sancho Panza dans Pile
Barataria, qu'on a pris^ je Pai dit^ pour une attaque
dirig^ contre le r^me politique int^rieur de PEspagne^
me parait £tre bien plutdt une parodie et une critique
du r^me seigneurial. L'aisance avec laquelle le due
entre dans le projet de divertissement imaging par la
duchesse^ trouve fort plaisant d'Sdre P^cuyer d'un fou
gouvemeur d^une partie de ses etats — autant celui-l&

^ D. Q., ii 48.

176 L'ESPAGNE DU DON aUIJOTE

qu'un autre, a-t-il I'air de se dire, — les incidents coim-
ques du rfegne de Sancho, depuis les dol&inces des
vassaux jusqu^aux ruses des courtisans pour ciroonvenir
le maitre, Pendormir dans une douce s&:urite, Fern-
p^her d'apercevoir les abus ou lui en d^montrer Fin-
^vitable n^cessit^, tons ces traits habilement groups
forment une caricature tr^ complete de Padministration
f &>dale telle qu'elle florissait en Espagne au xvi* siede
et justifient pleinement cet adage castillan si populaire:
^En terre de seigneur, ne fids pas ton nid/

Chacun voudrait 6tre noble, c'est la grande maladie
de PEspagne. On veut £tre noble pour vivre noMe-
ment, c'est-a-dire, en somme, pour ne pas payer Pimpdt
personnel, lequel retombe de tout son poids sur les plus
infimes, sur ceux qui, ayant quelque tache originelle,
trop d'ascendants juifs ou mores, n'osent revendiquer
une place parmi les flus. U existe m£me des provinces
qui se sont anoblies de leiur propre autorit^, ou tout le
monde nait noble, la Biscaye, les Asturies, berceau de
la monarchic chr^tienne restauree: ^Hidalgo comme
le roi, parce que montagnard,^ dit de son mari la
due'gne D* Rodriguez ^. En Castille on ne ya pas si
loin, aussi toutes les villes, les villages et les hameaux
sont-ils encombr^g de proces, car ici pour se soustraire
aux pharges du commun, il faut prouver sa noblesse,
€tablir sa g^n^alogie. Quand le postulant est riche,
FenquSte marche vite, des t^moins recrut^s avec soin et
convenablement subom6s affirment tout ce qu'on veut
et le tour est joue. Aprte le proces, Fhidalgo Te9oit
son brevet, une e^ecutoria, gros cahier en parchemin,
decor^ de ses armes et ou sont longuement d&luites en
beau style de proc^ure les preuves de sa noblesse.

^ 'Hidalgo oomo el rey, porque era montan^* (D. Q., ii. 48L)

MOREL-FATIO 177

Le pauvre est moins heureux; son enquSte traine et
comme il ne peut pas payer les temoins, ceux-ci diseni
la v^t^. Des taches apparaissent que le temps avait
recouvertes de sa mousse^ des marques d'infamie sont
mises au jom*, de gios scandales ^clatent« La victime
rc^gimbe et, pour se venger, salit a son tour ceux qui,
pounrus du brevet, se croyaient d^finitivement class^
nobles* De la de terribles rancunes, des haines de
famille que les peres transmettent aux enfants, des
partis hostiles qid se guettent et se combattent en toute
rencontre^ au grand prejudice naturellement du bien
public.

A la cour, dans les grandes villes, Phidalgo r^ussit
a peu pres a soutenir son rang. II y a des metiers qui
ne font pas d^rc^er et nourrissent leur homme, par
exemple la domesticite chez les grands, Pemploi d'^cuyer
porte-respect, et, pour les femmes, celui de duegne.
Mais a la campagne, rien. L'hidalgo vit chichement
sur un lopin de terre oisif et glorieux. Glorieux, car
il est beau de se sentir noble ; oisif, car il est d^shono-
rant de travailler. Et de cette orgueilleuse fain^antise,
r^sultait n^cessairement ime misere lamentable. Cer-
vantes, qui Favait souvent ressentie, mais Favait digne-
ment combattue gr&ce a son intrepide ^ergie, — ^ Adieu,
f aim p^n6trante de Phidalgo, pour n^y pas succomber,
j^aime mieux sortir de mon pays et de moi-mSme,'
s'ecrie-t-il dans son Voyage au Parfias8e\ — Cervantes
^tait port^ par le sujet mSme de son livre a y fadre bien
des fois allusion. L^hidalgo d^chire et d&ousu, qui

^ 'Adiot, hambxe aotil de algun hidalgo,

Que, por no Terme ante ins puertas muerto,
Hoy de mi patria y de mi mismo salgo.*

(Chant L)

N

178 L'ESPAGNE DU DON OUIJOTE

cire 868 8oulierB avec de la 8uie, reprise 868 baa noirs
avec de la aoie verte et 86 cure lea denta pour donner
a entendre qu'il a din^ alora que aon ventre eat creux
comme un tambour ^^ Phidalgo 'insipide a force d'etre
gueux V cet exemplaire de parent pauvre de la noblease
caatillane^ revient d'autant plus fr^uemment chez
Cervantea qu'il eat, a tout prendre, un peu le portrait
de aon h^ros.

Ce ne saurait £tre par haaard qu^il a fait de Don
Quichotte un hidalgo de campagne. D fallait que le
chevalier de la Manche appartint a cette classe sociale,
dan8 ce milieu-lil seulement pouvait prendre naiasanoe
et 86 d^velopper le genre sp^ial de folie que Pauteur
entendait nous d^crire. Le d&KBUvrement abaolu et la
pauvret^ dans un hameau perdu de la province la plus
d^l^ d'Espagne, joints a I'^tat d'&me du petit gen-
tilhomme qui se croit form^ d'un limon sup^rieur, se
mire tout le jour dans le brevet qu'il a accroch^ au mur
de sa chambre et s'enfonce dans la rfiverie &nta8tique
pour ^happer, ne fiit-ce qu'en pens^, a la f Acheuse
reality, tels sont les facteurs essentiels de la terrible
manie chevaleresque, Cervantes a rendu ^vidente la
cause de la maladie de Don Quichotte, sans forcer le
trait, sans rabaisser son h^ros jusqu'aux parodies gros*
sieres des farces populaires. Don Quichotte est pauvre;,
mais non miserable, il soigne sa personne, s'habille cor-
rectement, et quand Sancho lui recite les propos qui
circulent a son sujet dans le village, les reproches qu'on
lui adresse de le porter bien haut pour un hidalgo r&p£

' D. Q., it 9 et 44. Le trait du eare*dent a 4t6 empront^ an

' * Paee ya por pobres son tan en&dosoe IO0 hidalgoa.' {EiUnm€9
ddjvttM de loe divorcio$,)

MOREL-FATIO 179

de son espece, il se r^crie : ' Ces critiques ne m'attei-
gnent pas ; mes vStetnents sont toujours convenables et
lion raccommod^s^/ Souvenez-vous aussi quelle poi-
gnante tristesse Penvahit quand chez le due il dicouvre,
un soir en se couchant, que ses bas sont trou^s^ que
leurs maillea s'^chappent. Que n'eiit-il donne alors
pour tenir un ^cheveau de sole verte ou poss^er Fonce
d'argent qui en est le prix ^ ! En le pr^servant ainsi
des souillures particulieres a Phidalgo tomb^ dans la
mis^re sordide^ en Felevant moralement tres au-dessus
des gens de sa condition, Cervantes d^abord nous oblige
a Faimer, malgr^ ses ridicules, et il le rend ensuite
plus vraisemblable. Voila bien, en effet, ce qu'etaient
exposes a devenir, dans leur solitude, leur ennui et leur
d^nuement, ces gentill&tres de province, quand, comme
Don Quichotte, ils avaient, avec le respect d'eux-mSmes
et la correction de la tenue, F&me haute, des sentiments
delicats, des aspirations g^nereuses; ils devenaient
maniaques. Et combien il est facile alors de concevoir
qu'une lecture habituelle de fictions merveilleuses suffit
pour d^traquer a jamais ces etroites cervelles naivemeut
eprises d^un id&l inaccessible de vertu et d'honneur!
C'est en r^fl^chissant a la condition de Don Quichotte
et en le repla9ant exactement dans son centre qu'oii
arrive a dem^er ce que je pense Stre Fintention princi-
pale du livre : la critique de Vhidalfftdsme, cette plaie
de la soci^t^ espagnole dont Cervantes mieux que
beaucoup d'autres a su mesurer la profondeur; critique
d^autant plus forte qu^il ne Fa nuUe part formellement
enonc^, qu^il Fa mfime dissimul^ d^une fa90n tres
habile en parant son h^ros de qualit^s de cceur exquises
et de traits de caract^re adorables. Cervantes a entre-

» D. g., ii. a. • 2>. Q., ii. 44,

N 2

i8o L^ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

prifl de tuer Vhidalgtnsme en nous faisant douoement
lire du plus sympathique des hidalgos.

A Fhidalgo ^cuyer r^pond, dans Fautre sexe^ la
du^^e, personnage que le th^fttre a popularise hors
d^Espagne ou 11 est devenu un emploi. Vieille fiUe ou
veuve noble, qui a la garde du gyn^c^, la surveillance
de la domesticity feminine et ^autorise^ par sa presence
et sa coiffe le salon de la dame du logis^ la duegne
a pass^ je ne sais combien de fois par les baguettes
de la critique la plus malicieuse, mais jamais die n'avait
encore send de plastron a une moquerie aussi impitoy-
able et bouffonne que celle qui fait Fenchantement de
plusieurs chapitres du Don Quichotte^. Ici Cervantes
s'est surpasse et a prodigue les tresors de son ^tonnante
fantaisie. Sa Dona Rodriguez de Grijalba ne sort plus
de la m^moire; c'est une caricature immortelle aussi
achev^ dans son genre que les portraits de Don Qui-
chotte et de Sancho. Ses pretentions nobiliaires, car
elle descend, vous le pensez bien, d'un haut lignage des
Asturies d^Oviedo ; le recit qu'elle conte a voix basse
de sa jeunesse indigente dont elle cherche avec toutes
sortes de jolies precautions a attenuer les faiblesses et
les erreurs; ses minauderies vieillottes et ses afiPecta-
tions de pudeur effarouch^e quand elle se trouve en
presence de Don Quichotte gravement assis sur son
lit et qu'elle lui demande sur un ton inexprimable :
^ Suis-je en siiret^ ? ' les petites perfidies qui peu a peu
se glissent dans ses confidences, gouttes de fid que
distille son cceur aigri et tout gonfle de rancune, la
m^isance hesitante d'abord, puis bardie, ^clatante et
qui s'achame sur sa victime, le tout couronn^ par cette
memorable ^ vapulation,' infligee de main de maitresse

^ D, Q.y ii. 31 k 33, 37 et 48.

MOREL-PATIO i8i

et dant 9 semUe qu'oii entende- aMsere letentcr ks
claques dans le fiilence de la mnitr qudr. eaaemble de
nuances fines et adroitement superposees !

lyautres ridicules propres a ce prurit de noblesse qui
d^vore la nation ont encore 6t6 signales par Cervantes t
la manie par exemple de prendre le Don. Rigoureuse-
ment un hidalgo n'avait pas droit & ce titre honorifique
et le Dan que s^octroyait le sieur Alonso Quijano^
changeant son nom en Don Quichotte^ ne plaisait qu'a
demi aux gros bonnets de Fendroit^ notamment aux
autres hidalgos qui entrevoyaient la une intention de les
primer. ^ On voudrait bien savoir qui lui a donn^ ce
Dan que n'a port^ aucun de ses parents ni ancdtres/
dit la Therese Panza a son mari Sancho K A quoi Don
Quichotte aurait pu repondre qu^il ne se donifiaii qu^en
chevalerie et pour se conformer aux usages etablis par
les plus illustres ' errants ' dont il f aisait profession de
suivre jusqu^aux moindres pr^ceptes* Au reste, peu
lui importaient les criailleries des m^isants et des
jaloux; son esprit large planait au-dessus de pareilles
miseres. Sancho lui se montre plus circonspect; il
salt ce qu^il en coiite de s'affubler de litres trop
pompeux, mdme quand un tour de roue de la
fortune nous a €iev€ au-dessus de notre condition. II
se m^fie^ il craint les risles de ses proches. ^Qui se
nomme ici Don Sancho Panza ? ' demande-t-il au
majordome de Pile qui Pa respectueusement salu^ de
ce titre. ' Sachez^ ami, que je ne porte pas le Dan et
que personne dans ma famille ne Pa port^. Je me
nomme Sancho Panza tout court; mon p^re s'est nomme
Sancho, et mon grand-pere Sancho, tous furent Panza,
sans addition de Dans ni de Donas. J'imagine qu^ici

* D. Q., ii. 5.

i82 UESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

il doit y avoir plus de Dons que de pierres ; mais suffit
et & bon entendeur^ salut. Si je dure plus de quatre
joum dans ce gouvemement, peut-fitre m'occuperai-je
a ^hardonner ces Dans ^/ etc. Ainsi faisait justice de
ce tic pu^ril le sens droit et avis£ du paysan. Son avis
ne fut pas &x>ut^ alors et la donificatwn continua de
fleurir et de prosper; mais I'Espagnol finit par donner
raison a Sancho. En ^tendant a tout le monde, comme
il Pa fait, ce titre, devenu il la longue une simple f ormule
de courtoisie, il lui a du mSme coup retir^ ce qu'il avait
de pr^tentieux. Quand chacun est Don, il n^ a plus
de jaloux.

Uhidalguisme cependant n'a pas tout envahi. Si peu
que ce soit^il est des Elspagnols qui s'occupent, se donnent
de la peine, travaillent de leurs membres ou de leur
cerveau. Les nobles pauvres mSme ne se resignent pas
tous a croupir dans Foisivet^ miserable de la vie rurale ou
& tapisser & la cour les antichambres des grands seigneurs.

Aux hidalgos s'ouvre la carri^re des armes, le metier
noble par excellence, que Cervantes embrassa dans sa
jeunesse, moins de propos d^b^r^ que par occasion.
Se trouvant en Itidie, oii il avait suivi le cardinal
Acquaviva en qualite de cam^rier, il fut s^duit par le
clinquant de la soldatesque, s'enrdla et fit sous Don
Juan les m^morables campagnes de la Sainte Ligue.
II ne faudrait pas juger de ce que Cervantes pense du
metier militaire seulement d'apr^s son c^^bre parallele
entre les armes et les lettres qui conclut & la preemi-
nence absolue des premieres sur les secondes'. Ce
parallele n^est qu^un morceau de bravoure, comme
Cervantes aimait a en ^crire de temps a autre, afin de
montrer qu'il n'^tait pas incapable de haute litt^rature

» D. Q., ii. 45. > D. ^, i. 37 et 38.

MOREL-FATIO 183

et savait s'flever aux idees g^n^rales. Sans doute il
professait pour la milice Pestime que lui en avaient fait
concevoir lea chefs glorieux sous lesquels il servit,
Don Juan^ Alvaro de Bazan, Lope de Figueroa;
P^pisode de Li^pante^ il Fa toujours tenu et avec raison
pour Phonneur de sa vie. En plusieurs occasions il
s'est noblement vant^ de sa blessure et a r^duit au
silence par une riposte d'une gen^reuse indignation
celui qui avait eu la bassesse de la lui reprocher ; mais
en mSme temps il ne se meprenait pas sur les d^boires
nombreux du m^tier^ et les f umees de la gloire ne lui
ont jamais cach^ les injustices et les vilenies dont avait
tant a soufErir de son temps le soldat de fortune. M£me
dans ce parall^le^ que d'ameres reflexions sur le sort
precaire du soldat compare a la bonne vie paisible du
magistrate confortablement assis dans son fauteuil d^ou
il gouveme le monde^ quelles plaintes a propos de ceux
qui ont cent fois risque leur vie dans la tranch^e ou sur
la br^he et n'ont jamais obtenu la plus maigre recom-
pense ! La Cervantes ne pouvait parler de lui-mdme^
mais on sent bien qu'il pense a ses propres m&x>mptes9
se rememore ce qu'il a pein£ pendant ses ann^ de
campagne et constote tristement combien peu lui a
servi d'avoir partidp^, en vainqueur^ a la plus fameuse
joum^ des temps modemes. On sent qu'il est sur le
point de s^^crier comme ce soldat d^une chanson: ' Je
ne me plains pas d'avoir tout perdu pour mon roi^ pour
la loi et Madame Isabelle^ mais je me plains de rentrer
vieux, pauvre, estropi^ et de mourir aux mains des
secretaires^/ Le beau temps de la milice est pass^^
celui de la paperasse commence. Le grand empereur
n'est plus la pour d^fendre et r^compenser ses com-

^ Carta dd mddado, Ghanaon incite du xvi* sidole.

i84 L'ESPAGNE DU DON ftUIJOTE

pagnons d'armes. Philippe 11, malheureusement,
n^h^rita pas de son pere ses vertua guerriirea; il ae
aeirait dea soldata, mala ne lea aimait point. Quant
au troiai^me Philippe, aorte de moine couronn€, il ne
comprit m£me jamaia qu'il eat du devoir d'nn roi
d'affecter au moina quelque peu d'eaprit militaire. Soaa
aon r&gne, aenl le noble titr^ et le cadet de grande
maiaon pouvaient eap^rer faire dana I'ann^ une car-
ri^re, obtenir de Favanceinent et, apr^ dea campagnea,
recevoir oomme remuneration un habit de Saint-Jacquea,
de Calatrava ou d' Alcantara. C'eat P^poque oil lea
grandea routea aont infeat^ea de militairea en cong^
ou licenci^a, qui trainent leura guenillea et imploient
la charite dea paaaanta en exhibant dea bleaaurea vraiea
ou feintea, quand ila ne Fextorqnent paa brutalement
en lea couchant en joue; F^poque ausai oHl lea aecr^-
taireriea dea miniat^rea aont aaaieg^ea par dea troupea
fam^liquea d6 aoldata en haiUona, tons tendant en sup-
plianta leura '^tata de aendcea^ au commia qid paase
aana seulement lea r^arder. Cervantea avait 6t£ temoin
de beaucoup de cea miaerea ; et il avait aouvent pasa^
devant lea marchea de Pegliae de Saint-Philippe a
Madrid^, rendez-vous de cea victimea de la bureaucratiie
triomphante, qui, pour tromper la faim, exhalaient
bruyamment leura plaintea, a'excitaient lea una lea
autrea, et, au grand ebahiBaement dea dvila attir^a
par leura vocif^rationa, enumeraient pompeuaement dea
proueaaea qu'aurait eu de la peine a accomplir le Grand
Capitaine en peraonne^. II a'eat aouvenu de tellea

' ' Adio6 e San Felipe el gran paseo. . .' ( Viqf$ dd Panuuo, chant L)
'Mil estropeados capitanes
Que ruegan y amenazan todo junto,
Cuando noa enoarecen sub afanes.'

(Bart Leonardo de Argenaola.)

MOREL-FATIO 185

scenes en ^crivant^ et c'est pourquoi le sefior soldado
apparait surtout dans ses oeuvres sous les traits du
miles ffloriosus ou du vieux militaire d^penaill^^ souffre-
teux et tristement ridicule. Voyez ce Vicente de la
Roca^ qui, de retour au pays, parade dans son uniforme
^clatant dont il renouvelle sans cesse les galons, frise
sa moustache, conte qu^il a tu^ plus de Mores que n^en
ont jamais vu naitre Alger et Tunis, d^couvre des
egratignures qu'il donne pour des arquebusades, tutoie
les hommes et s^uit les fiUes \ Voyez, a la porte de
Phdpital de la R&urrection, cet enseigne Campuzano,
appuy^ sur son 6p6e qui lui sert de b&ton, amaigri et
jauni ; il paye cher son allure bravache, ses ^l^ances
soldatesques {galas de soldado) et les plumes de son
cbapeau dont une f riponne madr^e a feint de s'eprendre
pour le planter la promptement, sans sou ni maille et,
qui plus est, sans cheveux et sans dents \ Voyez le soldat
gueux de la Gnarda cuidadosa: celui-la sacre et jure,
exhibe vingt-deux certificats de vingt-deux g^n^raux sous
les ^tendards desquels il a send, ^rit a sa beUe sur le
revers d^une petition accord^ et qui lui vaudrait bien
quatre ou cinq r^aux s'il la presentait au grand-aumdnier
(notable sacrifice !), poursuit son aventure amoureuse en
capitaine Fracasse, bousculant tout sur son passage, et
se heurte k un sacristain, aussi gueux mais plus heureux
que lui, qui se fait agr^r et lui souffle la demoiselle.
De tels croquis, qui rappellent par moment, quoiqu'en
moins noir, les Misires de la guerre de Callot, t^moignent
a coup s&r d^une grande disillusion sur le compte de
cette carri%re des armes que Cervantes avait d^abord
vue si brillante, mais dont beaucoup d^amertumes et de
criants passe-droits Favaient ensuite d^ofit^.

^ D.Q.jL 51. ' El caaamiento mgaSUm^ nouTolle.

i86 L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

A cdt^ de la noblesse militaire^ il y a celle de robe.
Les lettres aussi qualifient, mais il faut y entrer par
certaines portes r^aervieB: les grands colleges notaui-
ment dont les membres doivent faire leurs preuves;
en second lieu^ les university, car le clerc gradu^ est
encore une fa9on de noble, tout au moins c'est un
privilegi^^ Cervantes, nul ne Fignore, ne fit pas
d^^tudes universitaires, il ne passa point par Salamanque
ou Alcali, il ne se baigna point, comme on dit a
I'espagnole, dans les ondes savantes du Tonnes ou du
Henares. II etudia dans un coll^ municipal et apprit
le pen de latin qu'il sut jamais sous la ferule de maitre
Lopez de Hoyos, un professeur d'humanit^ entretenu
par la ville de Madrid. Plusieurs de ses contemporains
ont censur^ sa culture trop laique. Font exclu du
bataillon sacr^ des scientifiques, Pont traite de profane
{ingenio lego). Par un retour naturel des choses, les
cervantistes, a partir de la fin du xviii* siede, se sont
elev^s contre le d^dain des universitaires et n^ont pas
eu assez de sarcasmes a Padresse de ces pedants, de ces
cuistres dont les pretentions leur semblaient ridicules.
Assur^ment, ceux qui ont attaqu^ Cervantes sur le fait
de son ^ucation ne le valaient pas et tons leurs grades
ne les ont pas rendus capables d^ecrire un seul chapitre
du Don Quichotte. he g^nie a des prerogatives que ne
remplaceront jamais des Etudes quelles qu'elles soient,
a plus forte raison des Etudes poussees dans le sens
scolastique espagnoL Ce qui est gonial dans Fceuvre
de Cervantes ne depend pas de ce qu'il a pu apprendre

^ * £1 estado medio ooupan los hidalgos que viFen de sa rent*
breve, y los oiudadanos y esouderos diohosoe, y los hombres de
letras y annas constituydos en dignidad : digo, «n las kiratj log
gradoBj y, en las armas, los ofioios/ (Alonso Lopez Pinetano,
PhUiMophia aniigua poeHcOf Madrid, 1596, p. 953.)

MOREL-FATIO 187

et n'aurait pas ^t^ meilleur si^ au lieu de s'initier aux
bonnes lettres a Madrid^ notre Miguel s'^tait imbu de
la doctrine enseign^e dans les university. Je dirai
mdme que parmi les docteurs ou licencies qui ont pris
des airs de superiority vis-a-vis de Cervantes, on en
trouverait difficilement un qui f&t exempt de la plupart
des faiblesses reproch&s aux non-scientifiques, aux
ecrivains insufiSsamment pourvus d'humanit^s. Toute-
f ois, il ne f audrait pas que cette protestation legitime,
et a laquelle il convient de s'associer, contre certaines
attaques de contemporains fort inaptes a ce rdle de
censeurs, nous dissimul&t les lacunes ^videntes de
Feducation litt^raire de Cervantes. De plus fortes
humanit^s, ime connaissance plus approfondie du
latin, — sans parler du grec qu'on apprenait a peine
en EUipagne et dont Lope de Vega, qui n'en voulait
pas pour son fils, disait qu'il ^rend les hommes or-
gueiUeuxV — ^^ lectures plus ^tendues d'auteurs
anciens n^auraient nui en rien a cet esprit si richement
dou^, bien au oontraire I'auraient poli, affin^, Pauraient
pr^muni contre certaines fautes de goiit et de style.
Arioste n'a rien perdu de sa fantaisie charmante pour
avoir su ^crire de jolis vers latins. Mieux instruit,
Cervantes aurait, je le crois, dans quelques occasions,
mieux raisonn^ et mieux ^crit, et comme il poss^dait ^
pr^cis^ment ce qui faisait defaut & ses d^tracteurs, le
genie, une plus ample culture litt^raire lui aurait assure
cette sup^riorite incontestable en tout et sur tons qu'on
lui souhaiterait, mais que P^quite empdche de lui re-
connaitre absolument.

Lego^ dans le monde ou il vivait, pouvait passer pour
une insulte ; il la ressentit ^videmment et n'oublia pas

i88 L'ESPAGNB DU DON QUIJOTE

d'y r^pondre. La gent unirenitaire^ bniyante et en-
combrante, foumiaaait maint pretexte i sa critique et
il n^eut pas de peine a en placer plusieura specimens
8ur le chemin de son hidalgo. lyabord quelques
gradu^s des petitea univereites provinciales, Ucendea
de pacotille^ qu^on ne prenait pas au s^rieux, fix^ qu'on
^tait sur la valeur de leurs dipldmes. Td le cur^ du
village de Don Quichotte^ ^Iiomme docte, gradu^ de
Sigiienza^;^ tel le pensionnaire de Fhdpital des fous
de S^ville^ ^gradue en canons de I'universit^ d'Osuna
et qui^ dit Cenrantes^ s'il Favait ^te de Salamanque,
n'eiit pas 6t6 moins fou^ a ce que beaucoup pre-
tendent^;' tel encore le medecin de I'ile Barataria,
docteur d'Osuna^ qui present a Sancho cette fameuse
diete dont le bon gouvemeur est si navre. Ces mots^
gradu^ de Sigiienza^ licencie ou docteur d'Osuna ne
manquaient jamais leur effet et amenaient en ce temps-la
un sourire sur toutes les levres. Puis ce sont certainea
pratiques relatives a Fobtention des grades que Cervantes
souligne d'lm trait: ^Je vous conseille/ dit Don Clui-
chotte a un jeune poete qui se proposait de prendre
part a quelque concours litt^raire^ ^ je vous conseille de
pr^tendre au second prix, car le premier se donne
toujours a la faveur ou a la qualite de la personne;
le second revient au merite: telles les licences qui
s'octroient dans les universitis ^/ Pareillement, il n'a
garde d'omettre les petites supercheries dont se rendaient
coupables des universitaires en se decorant de titres
auxquels ils n'avaient point droits usage si r^pandu que
Pautorit^ comp^tente decida de le sanctionner: c'est
ainsi que le Conseil de Castille delivrait^ moyennant
finances^ des brevets permettant a un bachdier de signer

> D. g., i I. • D. ^, iL I. » D. g., ii. i8.

MOREL-FATIO 189

licencie ^. Apparemment le pauvre Alonso Lopez^ Pun
des clercs de Fescorte du corps mort, avait oubli^ de
se pouiToir d^un brevet de ce genre^ car^ lorsque
renverBe de sa monture^ il sent la lance de Don Qui-
chotte s'enfoncer dans sa poitrine^ son premier cri est
pour nous confesser qu^il a eu grand tort de se dire
licencie^ n^etant en fait que simple bachelier '•

De P^tudiant^ de cet ^tudiant fam^ique qui desho-
nore la science par sa mis^re, sa crasse^ ses haillons^ ses
exp^ients, ses escroqueries^ il restait peu de chose
a dire apr^s les pieces du th^&tre populaire : Fetudiant
galeux, querelleur et fripon est un des emplois de
Ventremes ou du sainete, comme Palcade villageois^ le
medecin^ le greffier^ le biscayen ou Paveugle. Cervantes
ne fait que Feffleurer dans le parallele entre les armes et
les lettres qu'il place dans la bouche de Don Quichotte^.
La il parle des soufErances de ces pauvres heres, de cet
aller d la soupe qui les assimilait aux mendiants des
carref ours^ aux loqueteux de la demi^re cat^gorie^ mais il
ne les entreprend pas sur leur depravation et leurs vices:
c^est qu'il se trouve en presence de malheureux et que le
malheur^ quel qu'il soit^ impose silence a sa critique.
De tons les repr^sentants de la carri^ universitaire,
F^tudiant pauvre^ qui^ pour vivre, quand il vivait honnSte-
ment, devait s'accrocber aux basques de F^tudiant noble,
du cadet de f amille et lui servir de valet, ce f amidus a
la soutane r&p^, bftve et d^fait, est le seul pour lequel
Cervantes con9oive quelque sympathie. De bon coeur,
F^crivain lego pardonne au sopiata la faim et la gale,

^ ' Liceneia i& un bachiller para que ae pueda firmar lloenoiada*
Pormulalre du xvx* si^le (A. Morel-Fatio, VEspagne ou zvi* et au
jrw siide, p. ao6).

• 2). g., i. 19. » D. Q., i. 37.

190 L'ESPAGNE DU DON aUIJOTE

ses inseparables compagnes^; il le pr^f^re encore au
docteur bien rent^ et infatu^ de son grade ou au pre-
somptueux et pedant tcieniifigue.

L'universite potirvoit a bien des carri^res; elle forme
surtout des m&Iecins et des juristes. Cervantes n'a
mis qu'une seule fois les m^decins sur la sellette, mais
cette fois-la suffit. Sa raillerie vaut celle de Moliere,
elle pioduit mfime un plus grand effet, parce qu'eUe est
plus concentre. Le docteur Pedro Recio de Agiiero^
natif de Tirteafuera, — ce qui signifie * Mets-toi dehors' —
lieu situ^ a main droite entre Caracuel et Almodobar
del Campo^ est m^ecin ordinaire de Son Excellence
Don Sancbo Panza, gouvemeur de llle Barataria. Son
emploi consiste a assister aux repas du maitre et ^ lui
prescrire le regime appropri^ a sa complexion. Et il
se prend au s^rieux. Tout ce qu'on apporte sur la
table est impitoyablement renvoye : les fruits, parce que
la substance aqueuse est indigeste; tel mets tr^ cuit
et fortement ^pice^ parce que les Apices provoquent la
soif et que celui qui trop boit tue et consume le radical
humide d'ou procede la vie ; les perdrix bien rdties, les
lapins bien saut&, le veau en daube, tout est mis a
I'index. Absitl absit ! crie I'bomme docte a Pentree
de chaque service. Sancbo, persuade lui que I'emploi
du gouvemeur est de manger a sa faim, voudrait bien
retenir quelques-uns de ces plats dont le fumet seul le
ravit d'aise: il n'ose, car les terribles aphorismes du
praticien s'abattent sur lui comme gr^le et le r^uisent
au silence. Mais quand apparait VoUay la vnde otta
podrida, bourr^ de tons les bons ingredients qui en
font le mets divin qu'on sait, et que le gradu^ d'Osuna,

' ' SI la Barna y la hambre no fbeaen tan unas oon Iob estudiantee,
en las vidas no habria otra de maa gusto.' (Cbtoguio rfa lotptmt,)

MORELrFATIO 191

reprenant sa cantilene, explique que le pot-pourri^ d'ail-
leurs indigne de la table d'un gouvemeur^ est un aliment
fort dangereux vu sa nature ^minemment compost,
Sancho n'y tient plus. Su£Foqu£ de col^re^ il se ren-
verse sur sa chaise^ et^ se toumant vers le m^decin^
lui envoie en plein visage cette bord^ retentissante :
' Monsieur le docteur Pedro Recio de Mauvais Augure^
natif de Mets-toi dehors^ lieu situ^ & main droite^ quand
on va de Caracuel a Almodobar del Campo, gradu^
d^Osuna^ dte^vous de devant moi^ ou sinon^ je jure
par le soleil de prendre un b&ton et d'en assommer tous
les m^ecins qui se pourront trouver dans cette ile et
que je saurai £tre des ignorants^ a commencer par
TOUS • • • Oui^ docteur Pedro Recio^ dtez-vous de ma
prince, ou bien je prendrai cette chaise sur laquelle
je suis assis et vous Paplatirai sur la t£te. Et qu'on
m^en demande compte, aprte ma gestion ! Je r^pondrai,
pour ma d&;harge^ que j'ai rendu service a Dieu en
tuant un m^chant m^decin^ bourreau de la r^publique.
Et qu^on me donne a manger ou qu'on me retire le
gouvemement, car un emploi qui ne nourrit pas ne
vaut pas deux f^ves ^/ II est permis de supposer aprfes
cela que Cervantes n'avait pas eu a se louer des dia-
gnostics et des soins qu'il avait r^clam^s des Esculapes
de son pays: pas plus qu'il n'etait ^difie sur leur
desint^ressement et leur d^catesse^ & en juger du moins
par un passage du Persiles oii il est question de chirur-
giens pen scrupuleux qui se font payer deux fois leurs
consultations \

Du juriste en tant que magistrate du lettr4, comme
on disait jadis en Castille, pourvu de quelque office
important de judicature, nous avons d€}iL vu ce que

^ A ^, ii. 47. ' PtrHUa, liyre iii. ch. xv.

192 L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

Cervantes en pense ; mais il est dans les rangs inf erieurs
de la carri^re, tout pr^^ quoique un pen au-dessus de
Fhuissier et du recors, un humble robin qui ne pouvait
^chapper & la lunette braqu6e par recrivain sur la
soci^t^ de son temps : ce robin est le greffier ou notaire.
Veritable bouc ^missaire de la haine et du m^pris
qu'inspire aux Espagnols le ministere de la loi en
general, le pauyre escribano est vilipende comme pas
im^ on le met a toutes les sauces. II a re9u au the&tie
certainement autant de coups de bAton que Falguazil^
et les plaisanteries qu'excitent toujours ses man^pes
et ses rubriques sont devenues^ a force d'etre repet^s^
des lieux communs insipides ^. Cervantes aussi a mal*
traits ^ce satrape de la plume/ comme il le nomme^,
moins toutefois dans le Dan Quickotte que dans une de
ses nouvelles, le Coloquio de lo$ perros^ ovl, apres en
avoir laiss^ dire pis que pendre^ il feint de se chaiger
de sa defense, ce qui est une maniere de lui porter le
coup de grftce. ^Oui^ il y a beaucoup de notaire%
beaucoup^ vous dis-je^ qui sont bonndtes^ oonsdencieux
et loyaux^ dispose a Stre agreables sans f aire tort au
prochain; oui^ tons ne trainent pas les proems en
longueur^ n'avisent pas les parties^ n'^pient et n^espion*
nent pas la vie des autres pour y trouver matiere a
instrumenter ; tons ne s'entendent pas avec le juge:
passez-moi la rhubarbe et je vous passerai le s&i^.'
Enum^rer ainsi soigneusement les vilenies dont pertains
notaires ne se rendaient pas coupables, n^est-ce pas
nous d^noncer^ par un detour habile et avec une crueUe

^ Un juriste espagnol a r^uni une oolleotion de oee quolibets ;
Toy. IL Torres Camposi Estudios de bibliografia etpcokia y ^ jU i w^n
dd dervcAo y dd natariado, Hadridi 1878, p. 1561

' PtnOes, liyre iii. ch. iv.

MOREL-FATIO 193

pr&nsion, celleB que tous lea autres commettaient habi-
tueUement ?

Des r^ons sup^rieures de la aoci^t^ ou habitent
kfl Espagnols classes soit par leur naissance soit par
Pexercice de quelque profession honorable ou au moins
avouable^ descendons^ i la fagon de Dante, dans les
cercles inf^rieurs ou vit la gent ch^tive, allons jusqu'aux
bas fonds. Le Don Quichotte n^est pas une revue
critique dans le genre, par exemple, des Songes de
Quevedo. Chez. Cervantes on ne pent s'attendre a voir
d^er une a ime, comme des penitents en procession,
toutes les espies sociales que le moraliste de metier
aime i, pousser sous sa loupe pour les dissequer a loisir.
Ijd Don Quichotte est un voyage fantaisiste i travers
la soei^te espagnole que nous faisons guides par
Pimagination capricieuse de son auteun Celui-<;i ne
nous m^ne que U oil il lui plait de promener son hiros.
Comme d'aUleurs les aventures du chevalier se passent
en plein champ et dans les parties mSme les plus desertes
du pays, les plaines sans fin de la Manche, il en r^sulte
que bon nombre de tjrpes, et entre autres Inhabitant des
villes, ne figureront pas dans le livre. Nous y verrons
flurtout ce qu^on rencontre sur les routes, quand on les
suit comme Don Quichotte et Sancho, & petites joum^,
et qu^on se plait, comme eux, i questionner les passants;
nous y verrons des hdteliers, des muletiers, des filles,
des pages en qu^te d'un mattre & servir, des gendarmes,
des brigands, des com^diens ambulants, des montreurs
de marionnettes, des pelerins, des vagabonds et mfime
des gal^riens.

Examinons de plus pres quelques exemplaires de ces
tenanciers du grand chemin et de ces nomades.

L'hdtelier^ d^abord^ seigneur dans son auberge comme

o

194 L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

le chevalier P^tait jadis dans son donjon ; la route est
son fief, personne n'y passe qui ne lui paye sa dime et^
bon gri mal gr^, qu^eUe plaise ou non, il f aut s'arrftter
dans sa demeure. Notez aussi que Fhdtelier d'Espagne
est une niani^re de fonctionnaire ; affili^ il la Sainte-
Hermandad, il tient du gendarme et quiconque a la
conscience lourde et la bourse trop l^ere pour acheter
son sUence se sent surveill^ par lui. Le voici sur le
pas de sa porte^ flanqu^ de sa Maritome : les deux font
la paire. Lui epais, bourru^ grondeur^ parfois auasi
jovial, bruyamment ^panoui, quand il a r^ussi a ^triUer
consciendeusement des voyageurs de quality ; die, la
Oalidenne, trapue et d^bordante, aussi laige que haute,
les petits yeux ^carquilles, la bouche fendue jusqu'aux
oreilles, le nez ^cras£, sale, d^pdgn^ et encore ruisse*
lante de qudque gros labeur accompli, au demeurant
brave fiUe, compatissante au pauvre monde, de moeurs
faciles, ce dont ne se plaignent pas les charretiers.
Voyez-les, ceux-K;i et les muletiers qui traversent lente*
ment ces terribles d^rts de la Castille ou le soldi,
dardant tout de ses rayons, rend Fhomme colereux,
brutal, sauvage. lis arrivent H la venia, ayant en
croupe qudque ^train^^' recudUie a la prfo&iente
etape. L'aubeige retentit de leurs cris et de leurs
jurons ; puis vient Fheure du souper et puis du jeu qui
jamais ne s'ach^ve sans qudque dispute furieuse, que
Phdte calme en jetant ces forcen^ sur les b&ts de leurs
mulcts oft ils s'endorment du lourd sommeQ de la brute
avinfe et harass^.

Autre rencontre : les com^ens de la troupe ambu-
lante d'Angulo le M^hant, empil6s dans une charrette;
ils vont i la ville voisine repr^senter Vauto des ' Assisea

1 'Traidas j Uevadiw.* (IX Q^ i, a.)

MOREL-FATIO 195

de la mort.' Tous ont revdtu, pour s^epargner du
tempfi^ les habits de leur emploi. Le cocher est costume
ea Diable. Demure lui se pressent la Mort^ a la face
trop rejouie et qui dement le r61e^ un ange dont on voit
pointer les longues ailes^ puis un empereur couronne ;
dans le fond surgit un petit Cupidon qui a enlev^ son
bandeau^ mais qui tient embrass^s son arc^ son carquois
et ses fishes. Ctuelles figures et imaginez ce qu^elles
Tont sugg^rer de t^n^breux et d^effroyable a Pesprit
toujours en Ebullition de Don Ctuicbottel Dieu soit
lonil il accepte les explications des comediens^ il
les prend pour ce quails sont^ il ne les pourfendra
pas. Mais laissons cette aventure qui finit mal
d'ailleurs.

Passons au faiseur de tours^ au montreiur de marion-
nettes. Celui-lil nous le connaissons d^jil, C'est
I'aincien for9at Gines de Passamonte, a Pastnoe duquel
le pauvre Sancho dut d^^tve prive longtemps de son ftne
cheri: un type de ces 'forains/ comme, au dire de
Cervantes^ on en voyait tant en Espagne, qui avaient
Fair de vivre du metier qu'ils avouaient^ mais qui^ en
realit^^ couvraient du voile de ce metier toutes sortes
de friponneries dont ils s'entretenaient grassement en
joyeuse compagnie^. Gin^ put paraitre mal inspire
le jour ou il choisit dans son repertoire les aventures
de la belle Melisendre pour les repr^senter devant Don

^ ' Efito del ganar de comer holgando tiene muchos afieionadoB
y goloaoe : por esio hay tantos titereros en Espafia; tantos que muee>
tran leiabloa, tantos qae venden alfUeree 7 coplaa, que todo au
caudal, annque le yendieeen todo, no Uega A podene suatentar un
dia ; 7 con esto loa unos 7 loa otros no aalen de lea bodegonea 7
tabemas en todo el a&o, por do me do7 £ entender que de otra
parte que de la de sua oflcios sale la corriente de bus borracheras,'
(Ootoguio de lotperroi.^

p2

^96 L'ESPAGNE DU DON GUIJOTE

Quichotte. Ces noma de Don Gaiferos, de Marsile^
de Charlemagne et de Paris^ tons ces souvenirs de la
grande ^pop^ carolingienne devaient f atalement reveiller
la folie du cheyalier et la reveill^rent en effet, en lui
mettant V6p6e a la main. De 1& le massacre de tant
de belles marionnettes ; un roi Marsile decapite, im
Charlemagne fendu de la t£te aux pieds^ une Meli-
sendre avec mi oeil en moins^ desastres qu'il fallut
r^parer argent comptant, au grand d^sespoir de Sancho,
mais non point au detriment du maUn Gines qui sut
tirer parti de la fureur intempestive du fougueux re-
dresseur de torts.

Enfin Fecume sociale^ I'armee du vice et du crime,
dont un abreg^ suffisant nous est offert dans cette
chaine des for9ats, que Don Quichotte rompt avec la
superbe assurance d'un homme qui croit accomplir
Faction la plus g^n^reuse et la plus equitable. Qe
morceau a une belle allure et jamais Fironie.de Cer-
vantes ne s'est jou^ avec autant de hardieaoti et de
gr&ce tout a la fois. La mise en scfene d^abord est des
plus reussies* La chaine s'avance, escortee par lea
gardes. Don Quichotte raper9oit de loin. Ces gens-la
apnt enchain^ et ne peuvent I'Stre de leur propre
volontl^ se dit-il ; il ne voit que .cela : une nouvelle
HI justice. Et di» lors cette idee fixe Tabsorbe, malgre
les objurgations de Sancho^ malgre les remontranoes
breves et nettes des gardes. II s^approche et demande
a chacun des for9ats les motifs de sa condamnation.
Les r^ponses de pes gens^ les unes plaisantes et fan-
faronnes assaisonn^es de mots d^argot de voleur que
Don Quichotte ne comprend pas et se fait expliquer,
ks autres tristement embarrassees et qu'il faut presque
arracher a la honte et au desespoir;^ ces reponses et

r s}

MOREL-FATIO 197

Finterpr^tation que Don Quichotte, de plus en plug
enfonc^ dans son id^^ en donne; la conviction qui
peu i peu ae forme en lui que ces hommes sont^ sinon
innocents, au moins injustement pers&!Ut^, que Pun
a sans doute manqu^ d^argent pour corrompre son
juge, Pautre de protection pour Padoucir, bref que la
plupart sont certainement victimes de Parbitraire d'un
magistrat peut-4tre inique: tout cela combing determine
sa Yolont^, arme son bras. II fond sur les gardes et
detivre les gal^riens qui le payent comme on sait«
Les principales vari^t^s de Pinfamie en g^n€ral et des
vices plus particuli^rement espagnols ont 6t6 habilement
group^s par Cervantes dans cette chaine: depuis le
mmple voleur, qid, mis a la question, a eu la naivete et
la faiblesse d^avouer son delit, jusqu^au recidiviste
endurci, au bandit de haute vol^ dont les forfaits
cflifebres sont chant^s dans les romances et que ses
compagnons admirent et v^n^nt comme un maitre,
jusqu'a -Pabject vieillard proxen^te, Valcakuete^ dont la
confession sugg^ H Don Quichotte cet Strange paradoxe
sur la vertu et Putilit^ du metier d'entremetteur. Malgre
ce d^ploiement d'ironie et de cynisme plaisant qui
d^route im peu, on d^m^le fadlement que Cervantes
etait, au fond, de Pavis de Don Quichotte, j^entends
qu'il n^^tait point persuade que les plus coupables
fussent toujours ceux qu'on traSnait aux galores : & ses
yeux la criminality d'un acte ne d^pendait nuUement
d'une condamnation prononc^e par des juges tels qu'il
en avait vus a Poeuvie en maintes occasions. Nouvelle
et demiire confirmation de ses id^ trte arr£t^ en
mati^ de justice p^ale.

Cervantes n'a gu^ montr^ de types provinciaux:
quelques Biscayens au parler maladroit pareil a celui

198 L'ESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

des n^gres et au jugement si bom£ {carta), quelquecl
arrieroB andalous^ qudques Bouillons galiciennes, sans
parler du paysan de la Manche, dont Sancho est Finou-
bliable modele. En somme, rien de saillant dans les
descriptions de ces diff^rentes esp^ces d'homme, nulle
intention d'indiquer par des details appropri^s de phy-
sionomie, de costume et de moeurs ce qui distingue les
E^pagnols des diverses parties du territoire. II est vrai
que Cervantes n^a pas men^ son chevalier dans la
province d'Espagne qu^il connaissait le mieux apres
la sienne, cette grande Andalousie qu'il avait parcourue
en long et en large pour y recouvrer Fargent du fisc,
et qu'il a racont^ et fouill^ avec un art si consomme
dans plusieurs de ses nouvelles. Peut-^tre, par coquet-
terie d'auteur et pour ne pas se r^p^ter, a-t-il voulu
promener Don Quichotte de pr^f^rence dans d'autres
regions moins fr^quent^ et moins connues des Elspa-
gnols du centre. Mais que n'a-t-il d^peint leurs habi-
tants, comme il avait fait les Andalous et en particulier
les S^villans ? Quand Don Quichotte quitte la CastiUcy
entre en Aragon, puis en Catalogue, il ne semble pas
qu'il change de milieu : nulle part les hommes de ces
provinces ne nous apparaissent marqu^ du cachet de
leur sol et de leur race. En Catalogue, le chevalier ne
rencontre que des bandouliers, un produit du terroir a la
v^rite et qu'il d^rit assez heureusement : aussi bien ce
banditisme a allures chevaleresques, ces voleurs de grand
chemin qui ont des fa9ons de gentilshommes, ces hors
la loi qui se piquent de point d'honneur ^ n'^taient pas
pour d^plaire a I'historien de Don Quichotte. Mais

^ * Lob bandoB de Cataluna, de Aragon j de Valencia, en todo el
mundo se sabe que aalen A la sierra de puro honradosJ (Zapata,
MiBodaneOf p. 469.)

MOREL-FATIO I99

c'eflt tout. A Barcelone, ville qu'il connaissait et aimait
particuli^ment^ qu'il a nominee ^ fleur des belles cit^s
du monde ^y il ne voit que lea dehors et la superficie
des choses: les galeres du port^ Faffluence du peuple
dans les rues, la richesse des habitants. Comment u'a-t-il
pas cherch^ a nous initier un peu a la vie mouvementee
de ces actifs et laborieux Catalans, si differente de
^existence monotone, figee, presque contemplative du
CastUlan ? Comment n^a-t-il pas extrait du fourmille-
ment de la grande cit^ industrielle et commerpante
quelques types parlants et significatifs qui lui eussent
foumi une merveilleuse antith^ aux deux heros de
son livre et sugg^r^ peut-Stre de nouveaux et fort
r^joidssants Episodes ? A vrai dire^ ce s^jour de Don
Quichotte & Barcelone laisse une assez p^nible impres-
sion. Le cdt^ ridicule de sa manie s'accentue trop au
contact de la vie civilisee d'une ville ; ses divagations,
si d^cieuses sous le ciel de la Castille et dans les
steppes de la Manche, d^tonnent ici et toument au
grotesque; ses chevauch^es et ses coups de lance ont
un air de camaval qui n'amuse que les gamins accourus
|k>ur voir passer cette triste figure de masque. II semble
que Cervantes aurait pu corriger Fimpression fftcheuse
que nous cause cette degradation de son heros en
restreignant ici son rdle, en peignant surtout le milieu,
de fa9on a noyer en quelque sorte la personne du noble
chevalier sous des details descriptifs et de couleur locale.
Nous y aurions gagn^ quelques scenes de moeurs cata-
lanes d^un prix inestimable.

Reste a d&;rire un gioupe a part qui n'a pas de place
fixe dans la hierarchic sociale, pas de compartiment a
soi, je veux parler des gens de lettres. La litt^rature

^ L9» doB dmedUu^ noiiTelle.

doo L'ESPAONE DU DON QUIJOTE

qui n^est pas aoit la th&>logie^ aoit la acience pure on
appliqu^, la littirature d'agr^ment n'eat paa une
carri^. Alora, le po^te ou le romander^ le dninat-
uige ou reaaayiate^ Phiatorien mfime, quand il iie
remplit paa I'emploi d'hiatoriographe officiel, ne peut
a'adonner a son art que par occasion^ c'eaUardire a'tt
exerce en m6me temps quelque metier lucratif, s*!!
jouit de quelque benefice ou si un grand le protq^ et
Pentretient. En un mot, la litt^rature ne nourrit paa ;
tout au plus aide-t-elle a vivre. Ajoutez que Phomme
de lettres n'a pas en Espagne la resaource qu*oSrent
les pays libres d'&rire sur les matieres politiqueSy da
louer sa plume aux partis qui altemativement dirigent
les affaires de P£tat et d^tiennent les defs du tr^r.
Le pouvoir abaolu ne a'accommode guere de ee genre
de litt^rature et quiconque a Faudace de oontr61er aea
actes et d'y trouver a redire est pri€ de prendre domidle
en HoUande ou ailleurs. Si qudque pamphlet politique
circule, car la compression a ses limites et ne peut tout
atteindre, c'est sous le manteau ; or^ un tel moyen de
publicity n'a jamais rapport^ que des coups de bftton^
plusieurs ann^s de s^jour dans un prAiide mar^cageux
ou Pexercice prolong^ de la rame il bord des galeres du
roi. Seul, de tons les genres litteraires cultiF^ en
Espagne, le th^&tre^ au moment de la plus grande
vogue de la comedia, a 6t£ presque une profession, mais
uniquement pour le tres petit nombre de ceux qui
exerc^nt un veritable sacerdoce, comme Calderon,
nanti longtemps du monopole exdusif des aniM de la
F6te-Dieu a Madrid, comme Lope de YegtL dont la
manufacture dramatique, toujours fumante, appio-
visionnait largement les impresarios de PESspagne
entiere. Encore Pun et Pautre ont*ils dt tirer plus de

MOREL-FATIO 201

profit de leurs pr^bendea ou de la g^n^rosit^ de leurs
patrons que de leurs droits d'auteur,

Cervantes n'a pas ^t^ plus favoris^ que tant d'autres:
sea nouvelles> son Dan Quiehotte, son th€&tre n'ont
jamais suffi i pourvoir a ses besoins. Des sa premiere
jeunesse^ lorsqu^U quitta PEspagne pour suivre un
cardinal en Italic^ jusqu'a ses derniers instants^ il dut
ou seryir^ ou peiner dans quelque emploi. Tour a tour
cam^rier^ soldat, commis des finances royales ou agent
d^afiaires priv^es^ il ne prenait sa plume de contetur
que dans ses moments perdus et ne sacrifiait aux Muses
qu'apres avoir fourni le labeur quotidien et fort terre
fi terre qui lui assurait le pain de sa famille. N^ayant
jamais eu beaucoup a se louer des grands, il ne s'est
pas g£n£ pour leur dire ce qu'il pensait de leurs devoirs
envers les hommes de lettres. Dans sa pens^e, il y a
comme un contrat tacite entre Pauteur d^iant son
ouvrage au prince et ce prince qui b^neficie de I'encens
br&l^ en son honneur. Donnant donnant: une dedi-
cace vaut une pension, et le grand lou£ et qui ne paye
pas manque au contrat^. Apres tout, Pillustration
que tire le patron de Foeuvre de son client, quand eUe
a r^ussi, est une valeur appreciable et dont le prix se
laisse d^battre. II va plus loin : la litt^rature ne sub-
sistant qu'en raison de la faveur qui lui est ainsi
octroy^, les grands sont en une certaine mesure re-
sponsables du sort des oeuvres, ils orient les reputations,
dirigent le godt du public port^ a recevoir de confiance

^ ' No qnieren admitirlot (1m onvrmges dddi^) por no obligane
i la Mitlflfaooion que se debe al trabigo 7 oortesia de sua autores.'
(2). Q., il. 04.) Yoyez auasi le passage de la Oototoa (livre vi) 011
Cerrantes deplore la poea estimacion dont jouissent les meilleurs
ingmiot aupr^s des princes et du public.

202 L'ESPAGNE DU DON aUIJOTE

ce qui lui vient recommand^ de si haut lieu, Aux
grands done de bien choisir, de ne pas repousser les
hommages des gens de m^iite^ de ne pas accueillir les
m^hants ^^rivains et les pontes crott^, Ainsi cette
mani^re de parasitisme, que les n^cessit^ de la vie
imposaient alors a beaucoup de litterateurs, pouvait
fort bien ne pas s'accompagner de formes d^^radantes
et serviles, elle s'accommodait mfime parfois d'une
franchise non d^poumie de noblesse et de nature a nous
r^concilier avec ces moeurs dont nous avons de la peine
jt ne pas £tre aujourd'hui un peu froiss^.

La critique litt^raire, oomme c^^tait a pr^voiry occupe
une assez grande place dans le Dan Quichotte, Cer-
vantes ayant profit^ du va-et-vient des personnages de
son roman, de leurs rencontres et de leurs conversa-
tions, pour ^mettre certaines theories litt^raires qui lui
tenaient au cceur et pour dire sa pens^ sur quelques
contempondns. Critique litt^raire, non pas telle que
nous la concevons depuis qu'elle est devenue un art et
une science, critique un peu trop dogmatique ou trop
sommaire, mais non d^pourvue d'int^rSt assur^ment*
A r^poque de Cervantes, les arbitres du goAt, les
donneurs de pr^ceptes, les distributeurs de palmes aux
plus m^ritants, ou bien commentent Aristote, d^yent
surtout les commentateurs italiens du maitre, ou bien
composent des arts po^tiques sur le patron de celui
d'Horace, ou enfin ^crivent des pan^gyriques, des
Temples de nUmoire. Ce dernier genre a la vogue.
On loue les autres pour fitre lou^ a son tour, on soigne
sa propre reputation en prdnant celle du voisin. Cer-
vantes s'y est cssaye dans le Chant de Calliope de la
GalatSe, Rien de plus fade que ces coups d'encensoir
donnas a tort et a travers, que ces pluies d'epithetes

MOREL-FATIQ 203

laudatives qui finissent par n'avoir plus de sens tant
elles sont prodigu^s. Aucune nuance dans P^oge qui
s'abat indistinctement sur tous^ le plus mediocre comme
le plus illustre ^tant toujours admirable^ excellent, divin.
Qu^apprenons-nous de precis dans ces stances, ou dans
^interminable rapsodie de Lope de Vega intitul^e Lavrier
d^ApoUofiy sur les qualites propres des pontes d^alors,
sur la marque de leur invention, la facture de leur style,
le rjrthme de leurs vers ? Bien peu de chose. Le Voyage
au Pamasse vaut mieux ; ici le ton burlesque, la ten-
dance satirique autorisaient Cervantes a mSler la critique
a Teloge, a cacher quelques serpents sous des fleurs, a
aiguiser des traits contre les personnes. Mais la per-
sonnaUt^ dans la critique est un autre ecueil. Trop
souvent la dispute litt^raire d^^nere en une diatribe ou
Padversaire seul est vis£ : ce ne sont plus les f antes de
r^crivain, ce sont les travers de Fhomme qu'on d^nonce
et qu'on persifle. Aujourd'hui m£me un Stranger
s'^tonne de la place considerable que les questions
personnelles, les piques entre ^crivains de partis poli-
tiques ou religieux opposes prennentdans les discussions
Utteraires en Espagne ^.

Les divers morceaux de critique inseres dans le Don
Qidchotte n'ont pas tons une ^gale valeur. Tel roman
de chevalerie lou^ ou d^pr^ci^, telle pastorale ou tel
po^me ^pique dont Cervantes explique les merites ou
les faiblesses ne nous occupent pas. Ces oeuvres fan^es
nul ne les lira plus; partant ce qu'en pense notre auteur
nous importe infiniment peu. Les jugements de Cer-
vantes qui ont conserve leur int^rdt sont relatifs au
tbe&tre; mais, avant de les examiner, il convient de
jiotts rendre compte de sa doctrine. Cervantes est

^ Yoyez, par ezemple, les Ripioa de Valbaeniu

ao4 UESPAGNE DU DON QUIJOTE

ayant tout un disciple de Pltalie^ un Seve enthousiaste
de cdui qu'il nomme le divin Arioste K Ce maitre lui
a enseign^^ avec certains artifices de style^ le proc^^
qui a fait sa force et sa gloire et dont vit le Don
Quichottei Pironie aimable^ enjou^, presque indul-
gente, I'oppos^ de cette ironie froide^ cruelle^ accablante
des premiers picaresques espagnols. Cervantes est
tout p^n^tr^ d'ltalie^ les citations des grands auteurs
• italiens se pressent sous sa plume, Pitalien, si Pon peut
ainsi dire, lui sort par tous les pores. U s'est moqu€,
en un passage du Dan Quichotte, des traducteurs de
son temps qui calquaient les livres toscans au lieu de les
transposer'; mais lui-m£me n^e9t pas exempt d'italian-
ismes, comme Pont d^ja not^ ses commentateurs. Et
ritalie a non seulement transmis & Cervantes tout le
sue de ses meilleurs prosateurs et poetes, elle lui a par
surcrott d^couvert Pantiquit^: il ne possede vraiment
des auteurs anciens que ce qui en a pass^ dans la circu-
lation gr&ce surtout aux nombreux mlgarisatewrn ita-
liens qu'on pratiquait extraordinairement en Espagne.

A propos du th^&tre, il Spouse naturellement les
opinions de ceux qui en Italie interpretent la Poitigue
d'Aristote et la riduisent en formules a Pusage des
poetes non versus dans les lettres savantes; il se soumet
respectueusement, comme Lope, au Minturne, au Castel-
vetro, il Robortello d^Udine; il croit au dogme des
unites & peu pres autant qu'y croyait Comeille. En
th^rie; mais la pratique donne un dementi flagrant
a ces belles speculations*

Cervantes a 6crit pour le th^fttre a deux reprises, une
premiere fois a PAge de trente-cinq a quarante ans, — et
les pitees qu'il composa alors furent, dit-il, repr^sent^

> GakUsOf livre vi. ' D. Q,, u. 6a.

MOREL-FATIO 205

avec Bucces^ — une seconde fois dans lea demieres ann^es
de sa vie et longtempa apres que Lope^ reconnu souve-*
rain maitre du thefttre, ' eut mis sous sa juridiction tous
les com^diens d'Espagne^/ Des drames de la premiere
^poque, il ne nous reste que la Numancia, belle d&la-
mation patriotique dialogu^e, et la Vie a Alger, sorte
de tableau cmieux et parfois ^oquent de la captivitd
et des bagnes, Fune et Pautre plutdt des tragedies de
salon, interessantes a lire, difficiles a representee Le
vnd the&tre de Cervantes consiste done essentiellement
dans les huit camediae et les huit interm^des de la
seconde ^poque qui furent publics en 1615. Ces pieces,
et j'entends ici exclusivement les huit comediaSy ^tant
a mettre au nombre des productions les plus extra*
vagantes de la Thalie espagnole, en mSme temps qu'au
nombre des plus contraires aux r^les admises et recom-
mandees par Cervantes dans ses ^rits, on s'est de-^
mande comment il avait pu les composer d'abord, puis
les imprimer, les garantissant bonnes ou au moins pas*
sables. D^ireux de r^soudre ce probleme, im ecrivain
fantasque du xviii* siecle, Bias de Nasarre, a soutenu
que Cervantes avait agi & I'egard du th^&tre de son
pays comme il P^gard des livres de chevaleries, qu'il
s^^tait propose de le tuer sous le ridicule, en le paro^
diant*. Boutade que personne n'a prise au serieuxw
Une parodie demande a Stre spirituelle, amusantey
comme le Don Quichotte, et quelle parodie que huit
pi^es mortellement ennuyeuses et absurdes ou pas un,
trait n'avertit qu'il s'agit d'une plaisanterie et qu'on set
moque de nous ! Non, la v^rite est que Cervantes les

* Prologae des OomedUu de Gerrantea. ^

. ' Voyez 1a prdfkoe qu'il a miae h ration dee Omediai de Ger^'
vantes public en X749.

ao6 L'ESPAGNE DU DON ClUIJOTE

a ^crites telles quelles et sans se aoucier le moins du;
monde des regies^ — pas plus de celles d'Aristote que
de celles du bon sens et du goiit^ — parce qu'il n^a pas
eu le loisir de les ^crire autrement^ et qu'il les a
vendues a un libraire parce qu'il avait besoin d'aigent.
On ne pent pas demander beaucoup de logique a un
artiste qui a une famille a nourrir et des dettes a payer.
Au reste^ le fameux Lope avait deja donn^ I'exemple
d'une contradiction aussi choquante, plus choquante
m£me, vu sa quality d'inventeur de la comedia nouvelle,
en condamnant sans remission dans son Art po^tique,
au nom des principes de I'ecole^ toute sa litt^rature
dramatique, a I'exception de six pieces qu'il jugeait
compost selon Part.

A tout prendre et sauf quelques observations judi-
eieuses sur les copies pu^rilement exactes de details
historiques et de couleur locale ^^ ou sur les tours de
force que devaient accomplir les auteurs pour accom-
moder leur sujet au cadre immuable de la comedia et
a ses emplois obliges ', sauf cela la critique dramatique,
expos^ dans le chapitre xlviii de la premiere parlie
du Dan Quichotte et qu'il faut completer par quelques
passages des Nouvelles, du Perriles et du Voyage a»
Panuuse, est singuli^rement ^troite et born^. Cer>
vantes n'a pas d^mSle les vraies causes des faiblesaes
flu th^tre espagnol dassique ; il a cm que ces faiblesses

1 Voyez ee que le po^ie ridionle du Coloquio de los perrm dit dn
jBOstume de ses oardinaux : ' Y aai en todas maneras eonviene para
guardar la propiedad que estos mis oardenales salgan de moradOt
y eate es un punto que haoe muoho al ease para la oomedia.'

' Bon gr^ mal gr6, toute comedia doit avoir son oonlldent plaiaant
{graeioeo) : ' Lo que mis le fiiilgaba era pensar oomo podria eno«jar
un laicayo eonsejero y graoioso en el mar y entre tantas islaa,
foego y nievet/ {PereUee, livre iii. eh. ii.)

MOREL-FATIO 207

tenaient a Pinobservance des regies^ alors qu'elles
raiultent essentiellenient d'une psychologie insuffisante^
d^une ^tude trop sommaire des caracteres et des pas-
fiions, d'une composition beaucoup trop rapide et
negligee, IVautre part, il n'a pas senti la force et la
grandeur de ce th^fttre, il n^a pas vu qu^il repr^nte
la manifestation la plus puissante du sentiment national
qu'ait connue la Utt^rature espagnole depuis la grande
epoque des romances.

Telles sont les principales ^chappees que Cervantes
nous a ouvertes sur son temps et sur sa nation.

Assur^ment^ Q ne nous fait pas tout voir et ne nous
conduit pas partout ; il butine de droite et de gauche,
il choisit, parmi les figures et les faits qu'il a sous les
yeux, ceux qui s^encadrent le mieux dans sa fiction et |
il neglige les autres; mais ce qu'il peint ressort avec ]
tant de relief et de vie qu'on supplee volontiers & ce
qu^il laisse dans Fombre et qu'on retient de la lecture
de son roman une image d'ensemble de TEspagne du
XYi* et du XVII* si^le dont il n'y a pas lieu de sus-
pecter la ressemblance. A lui seul le Dan Quichotte
vaut beaucoup de livres de moralistes ou d'historiens
qui ont pretendu juger ou decrire ex professo cette
Espagne, et Pon a pu dire, sans trop d'exag^ration,
que, si de toute la litt^rature castillane de la grande
Epoque il ne nous restait que le Don Quichotte, cet
incomparable livre nous instruirait suflBsamment de
tout ce qu'U nous importe le plus de savoir de ce
monde disparu.

La valeur historique d'une oeuvre d'imagination
n'apparatt pas toujours a la premi^ lecture; on se
laisse d^abord captiver par le cdt^ romanesque^ on suit

2o8 L'ESPAGNE DU DON GUIJOTE

avec passion les incidents de la table, on ne pense
qu'au h^roB lui-m£me et a ses aventures. Mais
revenez-y et vous comprendrez alors Pint^rSt que pr^
sentent les parties accessoires, le fond tr^ reel et tres
historique sur lequel se d^tache la fiction. Le Don
Quichotte est done un roman qu^il faut retire, relire
souvent, si Von veut jouir pleinement de tout ce qui
constitue sa haute valeur litt^raire, morale et sociale.
Certes, il n^est pas besoin de pr^texte pour rouvrir ce
liyre et s'en delecter a nouveau; si cependant les
aper9us qui viennent de vous £tre presentes sur Cer*
vantes, en tant que peintre et critique de son pays^
ravivaient votre curiosity et rechauSaient votre admi-
ration, je n'aurais pas a regretter de vous avoir un peu
longuement entretenu du charmant &;rivain, et vous-
mfimes me sauriez peut-Stre quelque gre de vous avoir
fourni Foccasion de relire une fois de plus son immortei
chef-d^ceuvre.

1894.

PAOLO SARPI

THERE is a Scotch proverb which says^ If 8 ill work
chapping at a dead man's yatt. Whatever may
have been the intention of the man who framed that
aphorism, its truth will come home to all who, out of
the fragmentary records bequeathed by contemporaries,
and the voiceless pages of epistolary correspondence,
have endeavoured first to recover and then to display
the living portrait of a man long dead and gone. The
proverb is peculiarly true in the case of Fra Paolo
Sarpi^ for not only is he dead and buried nigh upon
three hundred years, but during his very lifetime he
suffered a species of burial. He entered a monastery
at the age of thirteen, and made open profession of
his vows before he was twenty. Under the rigid rule
of monastic life one day resembles another, and we
are deprived of all those little touches of humour,
of temper^ of sentiment which, in the early lives of
distinguished persons^ so clearly indicate the manner
of men they will come to be.

Nevertheless with the help of his own writings, his
official opinions presented to the Government in his

p

2IO PAOLO SARPI

capacity of Counsellor to the State^ his informal letters
to friends, in which, as he himself declares, / tarite as
I would gpeak^y in the current opinions about him
expressed by contemporaries, above all, thanks to that
labour of loving hands, Fra Fulgenzio's life of his
friend and master, we may reconstruct for ourselves
some likeness of the great Servite friar.

Sarpi was born on August 14, 1552. His father
was Francesco Sarpi, of San Vito, in Friuli, who had
migrated to Venice; his mother, Elizabeth Morelli,
a lady of good, though not of noble, Venetian family.
Sarpi took after his mother; was a delicate child^
thoughtful, silent, studious. His father died when he
was young, and his mother entrusted the boy's education
to her brother, Don Ambrogio, a priest who kept
a school. Here the boy was worked too hard for his
slender constitution, and suffered in consequence. He
grew shy, retiring, melancholy. His companions called
him ^La Sposa,' and paid him the compliment of
avoiding loose conversation when he appeared, but he
was not popular. At the age of twelve Don Ambrogio
could teach him no more, and he was passed on to
Gian Maria Capella, a Servite friar, master in theology,
mathematics and philosophy. Under Gian Marians
teaching young Sarpi discovered the real bent of his
intellect, towards mathematics and the exact sciences,
and doubtless acquired that liking for the Servite Order
which led him, in spite of his mother and his uncle, to
take the habit in November, 1566.

A period of close application to his studies was
followed by a journey to Mantua, where Sarpi won the

^ ' Sorivo . . . il mio oonoetto oome lo parlerei a bocca/ Uitare di
lYa Paolo Sarpi, i. 112. Firenze, 1863.

BROWN 211

favour of Duke William, who was never tired of putting
difficult and Bometimes ridiculous questions to the
young student (though Sarpi soon wearied of the game).
Under this powerful patronage, however, he became
Theologian to the Duke, and the Bishop of Mantua
gave him the chair of Theology with a readership in
Casuistry and Canon Law. And here, in the process of
teaching, Sarpi learned the use of those weapons with
which he subsequently made such sprightly play.

His studies continued at a high pressure. Eight
hours a day of Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, Mathematics,
Medicine, Anatomy, Botany. The pile of his note-
books grew in height. He never allowed a difficulty to
escape him ; he would follow it up till he was able to
say, Pve beaten ity now Fll think no more on it ^.

His sojourn at Mantua was not spent entirely among
books, however. The bishop, Boldrino, was his personal
friend ; so was Fra Girolamo Bemerio, the Dommican
Inquisitor ; so was Camillo Oliva, Secretary to Cardinal
Gonzaga. But the death of Boldrino, the perpetual
questions of the Duke, and the buffoonery of his
attendants, rendered life at the Court of Mantua
distasteful ; and in 1574 Sarpi left that city for Milan,
where he found the great Carlo Borromeo engaged in
reforming his diocese.

Sarpi was soon in high favoiu* with the Cardinal
Archbishop ; but that did not shield him from the first
of the many attacks which he was destined to experience
in the course of his life. He was accused of heresy
because he confessed that he could not find the
complete Trinity in the first verse of Genesis. His

1 < L'ho pur vinta, or piii non oi yogUo pensara' Vita del Padre
Paolo Sarpi, Opere, vi 6. Helmstat, 1765.

212 PAOLO SARPI

defence is characteristic and noteworthy, showing
a legal rather than a theological turn of mind. He
alleged that there was connivance between his accuser
— a jealous friar — and his judge, the Inquisitor of
Milan; he asserted, and proved, that the judge was
incompetent, through his ignorance of Hebrew. On
these grounds he refused to answer in Milan, and
appealed to Rome, where the case was quashed.

In the following year Sarpi received a call to teach
philosophy in the Servite monastery in Venice. He
set out. It was summer ; on the way, between Vicenza
and Padua, along those hot and dusty roads, he was
seized with heat apoplexy. He sent for a barber to
bleed him: the man refused without the presence of
a doctor ; Sarpi said, ^ Go and fetch one ; but just let
me see if your lancet is sharp.^ When the man
returned the operation was over.

For the next four years Sarpi continued to lecture
and study in his monastery at Santa Fosca, where he
steadily won for himself a foremost place in the ranks
of his Order. In 1579 he was elected Provincial, and
named to serve on the committee appointed to bring
the rules of the Order into unison with the Tridentine
decrees. This necessitated a journey to Rome to
consult with the Cardinal Protector of the Order and
with the Pope. Sarpi drew up the chapter on Judge-
ments. The work was considered a masterpiece, and
one dictum in it has attracted the attention and
admiration of jurists. Sarpi declares, and perhaps for
the first time, that the prison ought to be reformative,
not merely punitive.

The new constitutions were approved, and Sarpi
returned to his duties as Provincial of his Order. His

BROWN 213

rule was severe^ incorruptible^ sound. No judgement
of his was ever reversed on appeal, and the Cardinal
Protector, Santa Severina, declared to an appellant that
' the findings of your Provincial admit of no reply/

During these Roman visits Fra Paolo made the
acquaintance of many distinguished persons, of Farnese,
of Santa Severina, head of the Inquisition, of Castagna,
afterwards Pope Urban VII, of Dr. Navarro who had
known Loyola, above all, of Cardinal Bellarmine, with
whom he was subsequently brought into violent
controversial relations. But the two men personally
liked each other, and Bellarmine did not fail in the
offices of friendship when, much later on, he warned the
Venetian ambassador that plots were being laid against
Fra Paolo^s life. It is a pleasure, moreover, to record
that on the appearance of a scurrilous biography of
Sarpi, Bellarmine expressed to the Pope the following
opinion : ^ Holy Father, this book is a tissue of lies.
I know Fra Paolo; I know him for a man of irre-
proachable Habits. If such calumnies are allowed to be
published by us, all the dishonour will be ours ^.^

Indeed Sarpi made for himself a very strong position
in Rome. It was even thought that he might reach the
purple. Bellarmine, at all events, believed that his
services might have been retained for the Curia by the
gift of unfiore aecco — a dried flower, as he called it — by
which he meant a see without emoluments. But Sarpi
was not ambitious, he took little pains to conciliate,

^ 'Beatiaaimo Padre, questo libello h un tessaio di menzogne.
lo conosco Fra Paolo, e lo conosco uomo da bene e d'intemerati
eostumi; e se calunnie coal fatte si lasoiassero publicare da noi,
tutto nostro sarebbe il disonore.' Bianchi Giovini, Biogrc^fioj &c.,
ii. 174,

214 PAOLO SARPI

and the jealousy of more persistent aspirants easily
blocked his path. He was in Rome for the last time
in i5$7* From this^ his fifth journey, he returned to
Venice^ which he seldom quitted again tUl his death.

And now that we have our Frate safely in his cell,
now that he is on the very threshold of the larger field
of European ecclesiastical politics, let us see how much
of his daily life, his habit of mind and of body, we can
recover from the testimony of his contemporaries. He
was a man of medium height, with a large forehead,
arched eyebrows, a long nose, a broad nasal bone —
remarked by Lavater — a strong, large hand and thick-
set body, eyes very black and piercing. He was exces-
sively thin, and his health was seldom good. He had
his own peculiar way of doctoring himself ; he believed
in violent changes of food, of hours, of habits. When
out of sorts he would turn day into nighty night into
day. His medicines were cassia, manna, tamarind —
the same that the Venetian popolo still consumes* His
ailments, which he called his ^ notices to quit,^ he treated
lightly, and fought them chiefly by the vigour of his
spirits. His high courage was his best medicine.
Courage and coolness he possessed in a singular degree,
and he had abundant need of both. He was a fidgetty
patient, asking his physicians many questions, and fre*
quently declaring that he knew more about his illness
than his doctors did — which I dare say was true. The
frailness of his body, and the austerity of his habits,
preserved to his senses an extraordinary delicacy of per-
ception. He always declared that his enemies would
never succeed in poisoning him through his food ; and
he refused the Governments proposal to appoint an
official taster. His memory had been well trained in

BROWN 215

his youth^ and was prodigiously retentive. It seems to
have been largely what is called a visual memory — he
recalled the look of a page^ then what was on the page.
To Sarpi it seemed a mechanical quality^ and he always
spoke of it as that ^ excellent weakness.^

He suffered much from cold, and tried to combat it
by holding warm iron in his hands ; but I suspect that
chilblains had the better of him. His friend. Sir Henry
Wotton, the English Ambassador, describes him as
sitting in his cell ^ fenced with a castle of paper about
his chair and over his head when he was either reading
or writing alone, for he was of our Lord of St. Albans^
opinion that all air is predatory, and especially hurtful
when the spirits are most employed.' This cell was
extremely bare — a table, a box for his books, a bench,
a crucifix above a human skull, a picture of Christ in
the garden, a little bed, to which he preferred a shake-
down on his book-box — that was aU» His diet was
spare as his lodging — vegetables, hardly any meat^
a little white wine, toast — his fine palate appreciating
the great varieties of flavour obtained by that excellent
method of cooking. His old friend^ Frate Giulio,
attended to him, saw that he was washed, dressed,
brushed, &c. From the convent registers we learn
that two pairs of sheets lasted him twenty years — thanks,
no doubt, to the shake-down. He was a devourer of
books, and he had them bound before he read them.
I suppose most of them were like modern German
editions. Mathematics were his pastime, and these he
kept for the afternoons. Sir Henry Wotton adds some
further touches : ' He was one of the humblest things
that could be seen within the bounds of humanity, the
very pattern of that precept: Quanta doctior, tanto

2i6 PAOLO SARPI

submissiorj and is enough alone to demonstrate that
knowledge, well digested, non inflat. Excellent in
positive, excellent in scholastical and polemical divinity ;
a rare mathematician even in the most abstruse parts
thereof, and yet withal, so expert in the history of
plants as if he had never perused any book but Nature.
Lastly a great canonist, which was the title of his
ordinary service with the state, and certainly in the
time of the Pope's interdict they had their principal
light from him/ Sarpi's manner was excessively cere-
monious and urbane. Times were dangerous, and polite-
ness is an excellent weapon of defence. He talked
little, but possessed the gift of making others talk.
When he did join in the conversation his tone was per-
suasive, not dogmatic. He cared most, as Fra Fulgentio
says, to know the truth — una gran curiosita dHntendere
come realmente le cose fosaero passate. And this gave to
his attitude a certain air of aloofness, indifference, dis-
dain, irritating to those who were defending sl parti pris,
and led Sarpi to say that nothing so much as the truth
rendered superstitious men obstinate (Osservo questa
esser la proprieta della veritc^ che fa piti oatinati gli
animi auperstizioai ^). It also induced him to lay down
a rule for his own guidance : ^ I never,^ he says, * tell
a lie, but the truth not to everybody (Non dico mat
bugffie, ma la verita non a tutti ^)/ not because it is not
well to tell it always, but, as he remarks, because not
everybody can bear it.

The temper of his mind was scientific — mathematics
were his favourite study — and the scientific method is
apparent throughout all his work. ' I never,^ he writes,
^ venture to deny anything on the ground of impossi-

^ LetL, ii. i6o. * See Eneyc, Brit,, &.▼. Saipi.

BROWN 217

bility, for I am well aware of the infinite variety in the
operations of Grod and Nature (lo mat non or disco negare
cosa alcuna riferta sotto titolo d? impossibilita, sapendo
molto bene V infinita varieth delle qpere della natura
e di Dio ^)/ In respect of this scientific quality Sarpi
is a very modern man. He is talking about the merits
of the various writers of his day, and whom does he
select for praise as the only ^ original authors ' ? Vieta
and Gilbert, two men of science' — ^just as we might
say that Darwin and the scientific writers were, in a
sense, the only original authors of our day.

Linked with this genuine love of discovery for dis-
covery's sake— this curiosity as to how things really
were, which is perhaps the essence of the scientific
spirit — Sarpi also possessed an exquisite modesty. He
never displays one iota of jealousy, and is absolutely
without desire for notoriety. Yet Galileo acknowledges
assistance in the construction of the telescope from mio
padre e maestro Sarpi. The famous physician Fabrizio
of Acquapendente exclaims, ' Oh ! how many things
has Father Paul taught me in anatomy.' The valves
in the veins were discovered by Sarpi. Gilbert of Col-
chester ranks him above della Porta as an authority on
magnetism. In his treatise on ' L'arte di ben pensare,'
the Method of Thinking Correctly, he certainly antici-
pates the sensationalism of Locke.

Many of his curious inventions, and more of his ideas,
were freely placed at the disposal of his friends, and no
acknowledgment in public ever sought. Indeed Sarpi,
in this respect, lived to the height of his own generous
maxim. Let us imitate God and Nature; they give,

1 LOLj 1. 399. * See Quart Rev,, No. 359, p. 379.

2i8 PAOLO SARPI

they do not lend. Twice only does he assert his
priority. It is important to note the occasion, for it
affords some clue as to Sarpi's personal estimate of the
relative value of his works. Writing to a friend in
France on two different occasions, he exclaims, ' I was
the first to affirm that no sovereign had ever freed the
clergy from allegiance to himself {lo prima del Barclay
gcrissi che sebbene quasi tutti i principi avessero con--
cesso esenzioni ai cherid, mai perb non ri potrebbe
trovare che essi/osseroper alcuno liberati ; and again : /o,
pelprimo in Italia, Jui oso bandire che niuno imperante
sciolse i cherici dal suo potere ^y Sarpi is right to
guard his reputation here, for it is precisely on the point
of ecclesiastical politics, and not in the region of science,
however brilliant his accomplishments may there have
been, that his real distinction rests.

Thus far I have endeavoured to represent some of
the qualities which characterized the mind of Paolo
Sarpi. But let us press a little deeper, and discover,
if possible, his fundamental views of life, his inner
religion, the faith by which he lived. He was a strict
observer of outward forms and ceremonies; so strict,
indeed, that his enemies were unable to fasten upon
him any charge which they could sustain. The cut of
his shoes was once impugned by a foolish but trouble-
some brother; Sarpi, however, triumphantly demon-
strated their orthodoxy, and it became a proverb in
the Order that even Fra Paolo^s slippers were above
suspicion.

But beneath the surface of these formalities, I think
that Sarpi was essentially sceptical as to all human
presentations of the truth, outside the exact sciences.

* X0eU,f i. 313, ii. 414.

BROWN 219

And; as so often happens^ this scepticism was accom-
panied by a stoical resignation to fate^ and a profomid
belief in the Divine governance of the universe. It was
this scepticism which kept him inside the Church of
Rome^ in spite of his dislike to its excessive temporal
claims and worldly tendencies. He never showed the
smallest inclination to change his native creed for any
of the various creeds which the chaos of Reformation
bestowed upon Europe. . The temper of his mind —
eminently scientific — prevented him from enjojdng that
strong externalizing faith which allowed Luther to
believe that he had engaged in a personal conflict with
the devil. Sarpi was Italian^ not German ; he was not
superstitious, and an Italian who is not superstitious
is very frequently sceptical. This scepticism, however,
did not leave him without a religion, its corrosive power
could not reach further than the human formulas in
which men endeavoured to confine the truth. Below
all these lay the core of his faith. In his letters no
phrases occur more frequently than those which declare
his conviction that all is in the hands of God. While
in constant danger of his life he refused to adopt the
precautions recommended by his friends, being con-
vinced that he would not be killed before the appointed
time. When he sees the course of events taking a turn
destructive of his hopes, again he affirms his confidence
that the issue will be for good. 'What human folly
is this to desire to know the future! To what pur-
pose? To avoid it? Is not that a patent impossi-
bility ? If you avoid it, then it was not the future ^.'

^ LetLf i 970: 'Che miseria d queata umana di voler sapere U
faturo I A che fine ? per sohifarlo ? Non 6 qUesta la piii espressa oon-
traddizione che possi esser al mondo ? Se si schiferk non era future ! '

220 PAOLO SARPI

^Fate guides the willing/ he said, ^but compels the
reluctant^,' an aphorism which we may parallel with
Dante's noble line^ In la sua voUmtade i nostra pace,
or with that simpler and diviner formula of submission.
Thy will be done.

But there was a further principle in the religion
of Fra Paolo, a principle which saved him from the
dangers of fatalism. He was perfectly convinced that
men were the agents of the Divine will, and that it
was man's first duty to act, to take advantage of the
fitting occasion which presented itself almost as a
Divine injunction to use it. This doctrine of the Kaipos,
of the fitting opportunity, is repeated again and again
throughout the letters'. In all human actiony he
writes, opportunity is everything. It is well to do
God^s service without regard of consequeitteSf but only
if all the circumstances are propitious. Without that,
such action cannot merit the name of good, and may
even be a hindrance to successful action in the future,
when the season is ripe. Again: As for myself
being well aware that to use an unpropitious occasion
is little pleasing to the Divine Majesty, I never cease
to make myself more able and more ready to act when
the right moment arrives; and, like the artificer, I
gather material when not at work. If the time should
never come for me, what I have gathered may be of
service to another.

It is a cold religion, perhaps, but a very strong one ;
with a deep taproot of faith and an abundant field for
the play of human practical judgement, for the develop-

^ LeU.y ii. 196, 499 : ^ I fati conducono chi vnole, e chi non vuole
strascinano.'
* Lett,, i. 369.

BROWN 221

ment of human action. And this is a proof of its
goodness, that in spite of all Fra Paolo suffered — in
body, from ill-health and the assassin's dagger; in
mind, from calumny^ from apparent failure, from
isolation — his religion was strong enough to sustain and
strengthen his whole life, and a contemporary observer,
Diodati, was forced to admit that Every blow falls
paralyzed and blunted on that sweetness and maturity
0/ affections and spirit, which raise him to a height far
above all human passions ^.

And now, before proceeding to an account of Sarpi's
life-work — to a narrative of what he found to do in the
field of ecclesiastical politics, it will be as well to see
what his views upon this subject were, and what
weapons of offence and defence were at his disposal.

We must bear in mind that throughout the contro-
versy upon which Sarpi was about to engage, it is
not the Church which he is attacking but the Roman
Curia, and the new tendencies which it represented —
new, that is, in so far as they gave a new form to the
mediaeval claims of the Papacy. Sarpi observes that
the Curia would like to give to the Pope not the
primatus but the totatus^ in the world of ecclesias-
tical politics. He has a distinct name for the policy
which was represented by Spain, the Jesuits and the
Inquisition — he calls it the Dia-catholicon. For the
Jesuits, whom he conceived to be the life and spirit of
the Dia-catholicon, are reserved his most pungent irony,
his most crushing attacks. He hated them because he

' Mor. Ritter, Bri^e u. Aden tvr Oeack, des Dniasigjdhngen KHeges,
ii. 13Z : 'Tutti i oolpi vengono al ammorzani e rintuzzand in
queUa ma dolcezza e maturitk d'affetto e di spirito ohe lo tiene
quasi fuori di ogni oommovimentl.* ' IML^ i. 975.

222 PAOLO SARPI

thought they were not only a serious and unwarranted
danger to temporal princes, and destructive of good
citizenship, but even more^ because he was convinced
that they were leading the Church upon a false track ;
confounding the things of earth with the things of
heaven^ and introducing disorder into a divinely ordered
world ^.

The political situation stood thus : the Curia could
always rely on the dread of Spain to enforce its supre-
macy upon an unwilling Italy; France was the only
counterpoise to Spain; England and the Protestant
princes of Germany were too far off, and as Sarpi said^
they were quite unknown in Venice; and this com-
bination of Spain and the Curia was developed by the
Jesuits for the furtherance of their special ends. Sarpi
was convinced, as he says^ that ^if the Jesuits were
defeated^ religion would be reformed of itself ^/ And
what his aspirations were in the direction of reform
can be gathered from his letters, from such explicit
passages as this : / imagine^ he writes^ that the
State and the Church are two separate empires —
composed^ however, each of them, by the same human
beings. The one is entirely celestial, the other terres^
trial; each has its proper limits of jurisdiction, its
proper arms, its proper bulwarks. No region is common
to both • • • How, then, can those who walk by different
roads clash together F Christ has said that He and
His disciples were not of this world, and St. Paid has
declared that our citizenship is in heaven \ Ag^n

^ Lett,, ii. 6 : 'mescolare il cielo oolla terra/ ' Lett., ii. 917.

* Lett,, i. 31a : < lo immagino che il regno e la chiesa siano due
stati, oompoBti per^ degli stesai uomini; al tutto celeste uno, e
terrene I'altro ; ayenti propria sovranit^ difeai da proprie arm! et

BROWN 223

Sarpi argues that the Churchy being a divine institution^
cannot ever be really injured by the State^ which is
a human institution ^. He wishes to mark the two as
entirely distinct from one another^ moving on different
planes. If asked^ what then is the field of action left
to the Churchy if she* is to interfere in no matters
secular and temporal^ Sarpi replies that to the Church
he leaves the wide field of influence^ through precept^
through example3 through connction. Religion is the
medicine of the mind. As the doctor to the body^ so
the cleric to the soul'. Let the Church make men
good, voluntarily, freely, of their own accord, through
conviction, and they will not govern wrongly, nor will
they ever run counter to their nursing mother. The
phrases are such as we might expect in the mouth of
a reformer, and yet I think it certain that Sarpi was no
Protestant, in spirit or in form. Diodati, the translator
of the Bible, who had come to Venice with high hopes
of winning Fra Paolo and his followers to an open
secession from Rome, reluctantly admits that Sarpi is
rooted in that most dangerous maoAm that God cares
nothing for externals^ provided the mind and the heart
are in pure and direct relation with Himself. And so
fortified is he in this opinion by reason and examples,
ancient and modemy that it is vain to combat tvith
him^. That is the true word about Sarpi. The

fortificazioni ; di nuUa posseditori in oommune ; impediti di muo-
Yenif comecchessia, scambievolmente la guerra. Come s'ayrebbero
a oozzare se prooedono per ai diyena via ? Criato ebbe detto che
Esao e i disoepoli non erano di quesio mondo ; e Paolo aanto di-
chiara che II nostro oonversare d nei cieli.'

* Lett., i. 375.

' Arte di benpenearBj MS. Mardanay d. a, Ital. Cod. 199.

' Bitter, ut aup., 131 : * Sarpi ^ fisso in una perioulosisfiima

224 PAOLO SARPI

outward forms were ao indifferent to him that he would
never have abandoned those into which he was bom.
But that did not prevent him from lending his aid to
the party who wished to establish a reformed Church in
Venice. It is impossible to deny that he did so after
reading Dohna's^ most explicit reports. Sarpi would
gladly have seen perfect freedom for all forms of
worship, provided that the worshippers remained good
citizens. No wonder that, with these principles at
heart, he dreaded every success of the Jesuits; no
wonder that the Jesuits hated and pursued him alive
and dead. Whether Sarpi can be considered a good
churchman or not, depends upon the view we take of
what the Church is and what its functions, the answer
we give as to the headship of the Church. Certainly
he was no churchman at all in the sense intended by
the Curia and the Jesuits, certainly not one of those
qui filii sunt legitimi. And yet Bossuet's assertion
that under the frock of a friar he hid the heart of
a Calvinist, is quite untenable. And the opinion here
expressed is confirmed by a letter to Cardinal Borghese
from the Nuncio, Bentivoglio, no friend to Fra Paolo,
in which he says that, though Sarpi displays a great
alienation from the Court of Rome, and holds views
diametrically opposed to the authority of the Holy See,
yet he shows no inclination to embrace the new heresy ^
And there we must leave it ; he had his own ideal of
a Church, and expressed it in the passages just quoted.

massima che Iddio non ouri 1* estemo, pur che 1' animo e *1 cuore
habbia quella pura e diritta intenzione e relazdone a lui . . . £t
in quella d in maniera fortificato per ragioni e per eaempli antichi
e modemi che poco a'avanza combatterglielo.*
^ Bitter, %a sup,, 75-89. * Balan, Fra Paolo Sarpiy 39.

BROWN 225

I think that, if he had given himself any name at all,
he would have called himself an Old Catholic.

As to the weapon at Sarpi's disposal, his inimitable
and individual style, something must be said before we
come to the actual struggle with the Curia« We have
seen that the bent of Sarpi's mind was pre-eminently
scientific, and scientific is the chief quality of his style.
His manner was precise, parsimonious, hard, positive,
pungent. Never was there a more complete lack of
adornment, a more thorough contempt for rhetoric, in
a writer of so powerful a pen. And yet the whole is
vivified by a living logic, and the reader is caught, and
held delighted, by the compulsion of a method which
is never explained but always felt. That is why Sarpi
may be called the historian^s historian; that is why
Gibbon, Macaulay, Hallam, Johnson, agree in placing
him in the foremost rank. Sarpi is chiefly concerned
in saying his say so directly and simply, that the
comments, the deductions, the lessons become obvious,
are implicit in the very narration. Let me take an
example. Fra Manfredi (one of his colleagues in the
struggle with the Curia) was enticed to Rome upon a
safe conduct, which guaranteed the inviolability of his
person and his honour. This notwithstanding, he was
tried, forced to an ignominious public recantation, hung
and burned. How does Sarpi narrate this event?
^ I know not what judgement to make,' he writes ; ^ the
beginning and the end are clear — a safe conduct and
a pyre^/ This is what Sarpi meant by Parte del colpire,
the art of striking. The effect is obtained by the
simplest juxtaposition of the facts, and no rhetoric

^ Lett, ii. zoa: 'lo non so ohe giudlcio fare; benchd il principio
e il fine aiano manifesti, dob un salvo oondotto e un inoendio.

226 PAOLO SARPI

could have more eloquently expressed the writer's
intention.

It is a masculine^ athletic style ; a style of bronze^
polished and spare. Only one decorative yariation
breaks the rigid outline of its simplicity: Sarpi possessed
a dry, ironical humour with which he made great play.
Referring to James I's commentary on the Book of
Revelation, and laughing at his pretentions as a theo-
logical controversialist, Sarpi sajns : ' I never claimed to
understand the Apocalypse^ but then — Pm not a king^/
When asking for information as to the views of a man
he was about to meet, he says : ' I should like to know
whether one God in heaven is enough for him, or must
he have another on earth \ like those good gentlemen j
the Jesuits ? ' Again : ' Our adversaries are of such a
kidney that they claim to be believed without proof, while
they deny to us what is as clear as the sun in heaven,
and we have to light a candle at midday to let them see
it.' Yet again, ' There is a Scotchman here, who says
he imderstands the Jesuits : he must be a very clever
fellow.' And, indeed, this incessant slashing at the
Order becomes a little wearisome, and seems exag-
gerated, perhaps, to us who know the course events
have taken, though Sarpi had it firmly in his mind that
his great duty to Church and State was to thwart the
Order, and defeat its policy.

Such was the man who .was caUed upon to defend
what may be considered a test case in the interests of
temporal sovereigns against the persistent claims of
the Papacy. The question at issue has never really

* Xeft., ii. 99: 'lo non sono tale che profess! pablicamente d*
intendere 1' Apocalissi, perohft ne pur son Re/

* Lettj i. 210 : ' Ho molto desiderio di sapere . . . se gli basta Tin
Die in oielo, oppure ee lo vuole anche in terra.*

BROWN 227

been absent from the field of European ecclesiastical
politics. It is a vital question to this day.

Not many weeks ago the waUs of Venice were
covered with large advertisements * Ewiva Paolo Sarpi/
and Signor Crispi, the Italian prime minister^ while
commemorating the completion of Italian unity by the
capture of Rome, delivered a speech upon the relations
of the Church to the State which was inspired through-
out by Sarpian sentiments. Baedeker, recording the
statue of Paolo Sarpi, remarks with a brevity and
dryness worthy of Sarpi himself, that ^this monument
was decreed by the Republic of Venice in 1623 and
erected in 1892'; and were Austria in possession of
Venice, I believe the monument would be wanting still.

Why was a monument decreed to Sarpi ? Why has
he waited for it so long ? Why are his sentiments the
inspuing sentiments of a modem European Government?

Doubtless Fra Paolo Sarpi is best known to general
fame as an author, as the historian of the Council of
Trent — not, I imagine, because that work is often read,
but because its writer has received such high commen-
dation from competent judges, — Gibbon, Johnson,
Hallam — that his name has become a name which
people ought to know. But it certainly is not his fame
as an historian which won for the obscure Servite
friar the devotion of his contemporaries, of Wotton,
of Bedell, of Sanderson among Englishmen, of Philip
du Plessis-Momay, Leschassier, Casaubon, Galileo, in
France and Italy; and has made his name a living
watchword to the present day.

Sarpi has suffered, I think, from being considered
as an isolated phenomenon, as a figure which appears
upon the stage of history, acts vigorously, even pictur-

a2

228 PAOLO SARPI

esquely^ and disappears again^ without any obvious
connexions in the past^ with no very definite effect
upon the future. His biographers tell us who he was and
what he did, but they say little to explain his attitude,
they make no effort to place him in his true historical per-
spective. The consequence is that his figure loses some
of its significance for us ; we are at a loss to understand
the weight of his name, the importance of his career.

As a matter of fact Sarpi represents one very definite
line in ecclesiastico-political history, in that struggle for
national independence out of which modem Europe has
been evolved. An analysis of his intellectual parentage,
a statement of his political descent, will help us to realize
his place in the procession of thought; and the course of
this inquiry will explain the devotion of some contem-
poraries, the animosity of others, the reverence and the
hatred with which posterity has surrounded his name.

To understand Sarpi^s politico-ecclesiastical position
we must go back for a moment to the origin and
development of the temporal power in the Church.
During the early centuries of the Christian era, the
idea of imperial Rome as the unit of society had been
growing weaker, while silently, and almost unknown
to the temporal rulers of the world, the idea of Christian
brotherhood was gaining in strength. The removal
of the capital from Rome to Constantmople, the con-
version of the imperial family to Christianity, the
failure of the Emperors and the success of the Popes
in withstanding the barbarian attacks; the separation
of the Church from the Empire, brought about by the
iconoclasm of Lea the Isaurian — all these events con-
tributed to establish in men^s minds the idea of the
Church as an earthly power at least concurrent with

BROWN 229

the Empire. Then came the union of the Pope and
the Franks; the coronation of Pepin as King; the
protection he afforded to Pope Stephen ; the donation
of lands won from the Lombards; the crowning of
Charles the Great as Emperor in Rome; and there
we have mediaeval Europe established with its twofold
basis of society^ the Pope and the Emperor — a scheme
which satisfied the aspirations of mankind by preserving,
in an outward and visible form^ the ancient grandeur
of the Roman name, while including the new factor of
Christian brotherhood.

But this beautiful and orderly disposition of the
world — a Catholic Church to guide the soul, a Universal
Empire to protect the body — was an idea only, an
unrealizable dream, practically ineffectual. In the
intellectual sphere this double headship of society
brought confusion to the mind, and introduced a double
allegiance. In actual politics the existence of two
coequal sovereigns — both human — at once raised ques«
tions as to the exact boundaries of their power, their
jurisdictions inevitably overlapped. In a rude society,
and with widely scattered territories, the appointment
of bishops was an important consideration for the
Emperor no less than for the Pope. The bishops
were political factors in the government of mankind,
as weU as spiritual shepherds of human souls ; — who
was to exercise the right of appointment, the Emperor
or the Pope ?

But the clash of Pope and Emperor over such a point
as this laid bare the inherent defects in the mediaeval
conception of society. The Emperor was absent, he
did not reign in Rome, the Pope possessed no temporal
weapons. The Emperor, at war with his spiritual

230 PAOLO SARPI

brother the Pope^ ordered his vassals in Italy to attack
the ecclesiastical head of society; and the Pope^
at war with his material protector the Emperor^ was
forced to provide material protection for himself by
the creation of a personal territory^ the States of the
Church. The beautiful and orderly ideal is shattered ;
the material chief has attacked the spiritual^ the
spiritual chief has made himself a material prince.
He is no longer Pope only, he is something more, he
is an Italian sovereign besides. Two great Popes,
Hildebrand, Gregory YII, and Lothario Conti, Innocent
III, achieved and carried to its utmost conclusion this
change in the idea of the Papacy. Gregory stated his
object and formulated his claims in no uncertain tones.
The Church, he said, ought to be absolutely indepen-
dent of the temporal power; that it might be so in
fact, it claimed supremacy over the State. The Pope
was infallible ; he had authority to depose emperors ;
princes must do him homage; he was competent to
release from their allegiance the subjects of a rebellious
sovereign. As we read the words we seem to hear the
voices of Bellarmine, Baronius, Mariana or Suarez,
and to catch an echo of the Bull ^ In coena DominL'

Innocent carried on the Hildebrandine tradition and
realized it in fact. He changed the title ^ Vicar of
Peter* for * Vicar of Christ,' and paved the way for
that more ambitious style of ^Vice-Dio' which was
applied to Pope Paul V. He created the States of the
Church; and dreamed of a spiritual empire over
Europe, a temporal sovereignty over Italy.

But the consequences of this papal expansion did
not correspond to the hopes of these great prelates. The
abasement of the Empire led, not to the transference

BROWN 231

of European temporal allegiance from the Empire to
the Papacy^ but to the discovery of strong national
tendencies among the various races of the Continent.
And, further, inside the Church itself, from this time
forward two distinct lines of thought are visible, two
opposite tendencies in the spiritual and political region.
The one line, continuing the tradition of Hildebrand
and Innocent through Thomas Aquinas and the bril-
liant series of anticonciliar and secularizing Pontiffs;
through Bellarmine, the Jesuits, the Inquisition and
the Council of Trent. The other, voiceless as yet,
but soon to be proclaimed by a phalanx of illustrious
writers, Dante, John of Paris, William of Ockam,
Marsilio, Barclay, Sarpi. And this double opposition
to the Hildebrandine theories, the national opposition
outside the Church, the intellectual opposition inside
the Church, frequently joined hands and worked
together towards the development of modern Europe
as a congeries of independent States.

Here, then, I think, we find Sarpi's intellectual
pedigree. Thomas Aquinas asserted the supremacy of
the Church over the State, and his spiritual offspring
are living to this day, in all who hold idtramontane

views.

Dante maintained the rights of the Empire as against
the Papacy, but his client was moribund, and his De
Monorchia died sine prole.

Egidio Colonna and John of Paris enunciated the
doctrine that the Church and the State are absolutely
distinct one from another, both divinely constituted,
both with independent spheres of action; and from
these men, by a direct descent through Ockam and
Marsilio of Padua^ comes Paolo Sarpi.

232 PAOLO SARPI

Let us look for a moment at Marsilio of Padua — the
greatest Italian political thinker of the fourteenth
century; perhaps of any century.

Dante had declared that qua men. Pope and Em-
peror were equal, but qua Emperor and Pope they
were incompatible, irreducible to a common denominator
in the world of politics. Of course he is seeking, as
the schoolmen always sought, the universal which
includes the particulars. He argues accordingly that
the resolution of these incompatible factors of the body
politic must be sought outside the world, in God.
Marsilio of Padua says: Yes, Dante is right. Only
I must not introduce into the world of politics a factor
which is not there. I must seek the resolution of
these incompatibles inside the political sphere. He
then announces his doctrine, surprisingly bold, astonish-
ingly modern when we remember that the year is
1324. For him the resolution of the Pope and Em-
peror, the universal which contains the particular in
the world of politics, is the People. The People is
the true divine on earth because it is the highest uni-
versal, because God made the first revelation of Himself
not to the rulers but to the People; because out of
the bosom of the People come the various appellations
of the body politic — citizens, faithful, lay, cleric. For
Marsilio the People presents a double aspect ; it is the
universitas civium, but it is also the universitas ere"
dentium. From the People, in one or other of these
aspects, emerge all the phenomena of the politica-
ecclesiastical world.

Marsilio called his book Defensor Pacisy Defender of
the Peace, but he might with greater truth, as regards
its results, have named it Gladtus furena, the flaming

BROWN 233

Brand — for the ecclesiastical party which represented
the Hildebrandine tradition never for a moment sub-
scribed to his bold speculations^ and such theories must
have sounded but little less distasteful to the ears of
the Imperialists. And yet Marsilio's doctrines sowed
seeds which have lived — are indeed more living now
than ever before — and I have dwelt upon them because
I think that, in some ways^ Sarpi was nearer in politico-
ecclesiastical thought to Marsilio than to any other of
his predecessors.

When I say that Sarpi was intellectually descended
from Marsilio of Padua, I do not mean that their
views were identical. There was a wide difference
between them, the result partly of their age, partly of
their temperament : Marsilio, eminently scholastic, con-
structive, boldly speculative ; Sarpi, on the other hand,
coldly scientific, not discumve, occupied in answering
definite problems as they are presented to him, not
dealing with Utopias. But in spite of all differences,
both Marsilio and Sarpi belong to the same order of
political thought — to that party which was called into
existence by the excessive expansion of papal claims,
the party whose task it was to defend the just liberties
of the individual and the State.

In order to appreciate the services which Sarpi ren-
dered to his cause, we must first obtain some view of
the position which papal pretensions had assumed at
the date of his birth.

The temporal claims of the mediaeval Papacy, con-
ceived by Hildebrand and carried to their extreme
conclusion under Innocent III, induced the Hohen-
staufen Emperors to an attack, in which their greatest
representative — Frederick. II — ^was worsted, it is true.

234 PAOLO SARPI

but the Papacy itself suffered in the conflict^ both in
moral prestige and temporal power. To support itself
against the later Hohenstaufens it called the Angevine
Princes to its aid. A crippled Papacy was no match
for the growing national tendencies championed by
France. The struggle between Boniface VIII and
Philip IV ended in the capture and maltreatment of
the Pope. The victorious Philip was able to place
a creature of his own upon the papal throne^ and to
remove that throne and its occupant for safety to
Avignon.

But if the mediaeval conception of the Papacy had
proved a failure^ the same fate had likewise befallen
the mediaeval Empire. They had destroyed each other
in the struggle for supremacy. The capture of Boniface
at Anagni and the tragic end of Manfred are parallel
events, each of them closing an epoch in the history
of the Church and of the Empire.

There was no comparison possible, however, between
the vitality of the Empire and the vitality of the Papacy*
The waning power of the Empire allowed the growing
national instincts to make their way in the formation
of modern Europe. The waning prestige of the Pope
left no one to take his place. However weak he might
temporally be, he was still the spiritual head of
Christendom. It is true that a national Church, like
the GaUican Church, gained in authority by the abase-
ment of the Papacy; but no one had been audacious
enough to carry the idea of a national Church to its
logical conclusion by declaring the head of the State
to be head of the Church. The spiritual headship of
the Papacy remained, however impaired its temporalities
might be; and those temporal claims, though abased

BROWN 235

for the present^ lay dormant only until the Papacy was
strong enough to assert them once more^ not against
the Emperor^ it is true^ but against the growing nation-
alities which took the Emperor's place in the field
of European politics.

The Papacy had struggled with the Empire^ and
strangled its opponent. Its next conflict was with
the nation^ as represented by the conciliar principle —
the principle that the Universal Church — Universitas
credentium — when represented by a General Council is
superior to the Popes.

The results of the struggle are notorious. The
apparent triumph of the conciliar principle at Constance
by the election of Martin V; its real failure^ owing to
Martin's unexpected independence of action^ the moment
he became Pope. The patent incapacity of the Council
of Basel to command Eugenius IV^ and its fiasco with
its own nominee Felix V. As far as the power of the
Papacy was concerned, it seemed that the conciliar
movement had achieved nothing except to make the
Popes strong again by sending them back to Rome.
The Papacy rejoiced in the return to its native seat.

Three strong Popes, Eugenius, Nicholas, and Pius II,
successfully defied the conciliar movement, and gave
a new and purely Italian character to the Holy See.
The crown was set upon this revival by the famous Bull
which, beginning with the word Execrabilis, declared
all those damned who should venture to appeal from
a Pope to a future Council. And the Popes had
achieved their new position by the help of the national
instinct, that very instinct which had called up the
conciliar movement against them. It was the support
of Italy which enabled Eugenius to defy Basel. It was

\'

236 PAOLO SARPI

the patronage of Italian art and learnings and the
restoration of Italian towns^ which made Nicholas
popular. In Aeneas Sylvius^ a humanist Pope sat on
the Chair of St. Peter.

The restored Papacy^ thus established once more in
Rome, its independence asserted by Eugenius^ its
splendour by Nicholas^ its superiority to Councils based
upon Execrabilia, began to assume that aspect under
which Paolo Sarpi came to know it. Three powerful
temporalizing Popes confirmed the worldly tendencies
of the Petrine See as an Italian sovereignty. The
system of family aggrandizement, begun under Sixtus I V^
and continued through Alexander VI and Julius 11^
laid those pontiffs open to the charge of cynicism.
Men were shocked to see spiritual weapons employed
for the secular ends of a papal family. And by the
beginning of the sixteenth century we find a revival of
that line of opposition to the Curia Romana which
made itself first heard as the result of the Hilde-
brandine theories. The spirit is the same^ the tone
is different^ no longer scholastic^ speculative^ theoretical^
but rather spiritual, religious, with something in it of
the coming Reformation. ^ Whoever,^ writes Francesco
Vettori from Florence in 15^7, 'Whoever carefully
considers the law of the Gospel, will perceive that the
pontiffs, although they bear the name of Christ's Vicar^
yet have brought in a new religion^ which has nothing
Christian in it but the name; for whereas Christ
enjoins poverty they desire riches, where He commands
humility they flaunt their pride, where He requires
obedience they seek universal domination.' This is
language very similar to that which is often found in
the mouth of Sarpi — a little more rhetorical, less coldly

BROWN 237

impersonal than Sarpi's style^ but, in that essential
phrase, una nuava religione, a new religion, containing
the whole of what the opposition felt, the break in
divine order, the confounding of earth and heaven*
Their protest and their spirit are preserved to this
day in the term Old Catholics.

The course of events in Europe, no less than in
Italy, tended to accentuate the quality of the new
Papacy. The rise and spread of the Reformation
beyond the Alps led the Roman Curia to furbish its
spiritual weapons of excommunication and of interdict.
However lightly we may think of such things now,
there was a time when papal thunders were no mere
bnUum Jvlmen, The Venetians had learned that lesson
to their cost when, in 1309, the Republic was placed
under interdict and excommunication, with the result
that her merchants in England, in Italy, in Asia Minor
were threatened in their lives, despoiled of their goods,
and Venetian commerce was ruined for a time. She
had felt the effect later on, when the attack by the
league of Cambray opened with an interdict and excom-
munication from Rome. It is thanks to the action
of Venice and to the guidance of Fra Paolo Sarpi
that these weapons lost their point, that they have
ceased to be used, that Europe can contemplate them
now with no greater alarm than we should feel at the
threat of a Star Chamber prosecution.

But further, the revolt against authority which was
taking place beyond the Alps, served only to emphasize
the papal claims in Rome. A noble and genuine effort
at reconciliation was made by the yielding Bucer, the
gentle Melanchthon, and the winning Cardinal Contarini
in the conference of Ratisbon. But behind these

J

238 PAOLO SARPI

dreamers of peace was Luther^ on the one hand,
declaring that whatever formnlas might be agreed upon
at Ratisbon, nothing would induce him to believe that
the. Catholics could be sound upon justification, and
Paul III, vowing that he would accept no concordat
whose terms should leave the papal authority open to
a moment's doubt.

The conference of Ratisbon was a failure, and merely
resulted in more positive assertions of the papal position
and more active and even violent measures for the
maintenance thereof. And two instruments were ready
to hand. The Bull Lictt ab initio, which founded the
new Inquisition on heretical depravity , was published
in 1542. The Society of Jesus was definitely established
111 ^543^ ^i^c years before the birth of Paolo Sarpi.
Nor was it long ere the world perceived that the
Inquisition and the Society of Jesus were bent on
attacking freedom of thought, liberty of action, national
independence, in the interests of papal supremacy.
And the Papacy, or at least the Curia Romana, came
to be identified in many minds — among them Sarpi's —
with the action of the Inquisition and the teaching of
the Jesuits.

In the face of this aggressive attitude of the Papacy
temporal princes began to look to the defence of their
rights. Cardinal Baronius challenged the validity of
the Spanish claim to Sicily, and even such a Catholic
sovereign as Philip III caused the book to be publicly
burned. His father declined to accept the Roman
Index, and declared that he was competent to make his
own. The Catholic rulers of Europe were hostile to
the papal claims. But it was reserved for Venice and
Sarpi to champion the just rights of secular princes, to

BROWN 239

defend single-handed a cause which was common to all
sovereigns. This constitutes Sarpi^s claim to recogni-
tion by posterity. His action in this great cause^ his
coolness^ his courage, give us the reason why he has
had to wait 270 years for the erection of the monument
decreed to him by the Republic, why his name is
venerated by all lovers of national liberty, execrated by
those whose policy he helped to crush.

And now let us return to Paolo Sarpi himself, to the
man who was called upon to face and largely modify
the politico-ecclesiastical conditions of the civilized
world. We must remember that it would hardly have
been possible for Sarpi to embark on a struggle with
the Roman Curia in any State save Venice. In any
other Catholic country he would have been surrendered
to the Inquisition; had he retired to a Protestant
country his arguments would have lost much of their
weight, his books would have been prohibited, he him-
self would have been represented as the servant of
a Protestant prince. It is precisely because the defence
of secular princes came from a Catholic living in
a Catholic State that it made so deep an impression
upon Europe.

Sarpi and the Republic were singularly at one in
their external attitude towards Rome. The Republic
had, from the earliest times, maintained a more
independent position than was generally assumed by
the other princes of Italy. Yet Venice always remained
Catholic. When the Pope alluded to reforming
tendencies in the Republic, the Doge Donato, Sarpi^s
personal friend, broke out. Who talks of Calvinists ?
We are as good Christians as the Pope, and Christians
we will disy in despite of those who wish it otherwise.

240 PAOLO SARPI

It was this attitude of Venice, a defence of temporal
freedom whUe admitting a spiritual aUegiance, which
Sarpi was to proclaim and to defend.

The events which immediately led to the rupture
between Venice and Rome had been ripening for many
years before the protagonists, Sarpi and Pope Paul,
appeared upon the scene ; and relations were strained
at the moment when Camillo Borghese was raised to
the papal throne in 1605, as Paul V. Borghese, member
of a Sienese family, bom at Rome, had been auditor of
the Apostolic Chamber, was a strong churchman, and
believed himself a great jurist. He was so amazed at
his own elevation to the Papacy, that he considered it
to be the special work of heaven, and determined to act
accordingly. The Pope ^was scarce warm in his chair/
before he plunged into controversies right and left.
Genoa yielded; Lucca yielded; Spain was pliant.
But when the Venetian ambassadors, sent to congratu-
late His Holiness, were admitted to audience, they
referred in no doubtful terms to the attitude of the
Republic on the questions pending between Venice and
the Holy See. The Pope answered by complaining of
two laws, lately renewed by the Republic; both of
them affecting Church property. -In the course of a
pacific reply to the Pope, the senate enunciated its
fundamental principle: 'We cannot understand how
it is possible to pretend that an independent principality
like the Republic, should not be free to take such steps
as she may consider necessary for the preservation of
the State, when those measures do not interfere with,
or prejudice other princes.' It seems a reasonable
reply, but the difficulty lay in this, that neither party
would condescend upon a definition of what was or

BROWN 241

what was not to the prejudice of another prince. That
depended upon what the other prince claimed. And
the Pope was a prince. The need for such a definition
led Sarpi to formulate precisely what he considered the
boundary line between temporal and spiritual rights.
The dominion of the Churchy he says^ marches along
celestial paths ; it cannot therefore clash with the
dominion ofprinces, which marches on paths terrestrial.
Could he have obtained subscription to a dichotomy of
this nature the quarrel would have been at an end.
But the Roman Curia never dreamed of making such
a renunciation of its substantial authority.

While the question was still pending, two criminous
clerics were arrested in Venetian territory, and im-
prisoned. The Pope considered this act a violation
of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. He sent two briefs to
the Nuncio at Venice, one demanding the repeal of the
obnoxious laws, the other the persons of the two
prisoners, and threatening excommunication in case of
disobedience. The briefs reached Venice; but before
the Nimcio presented them the Doge died. The
Nuncio declared that no election to the dukedom was
valid, as the State was under excommunication till it
had satisfied the papal demand. This, of course, did
not stay the Venetians, who proceeded to elect Leonardo
Donato, Sarpi's friend, to the vacant chair. The
election was no sooner over than the senate desired the
counsels of a doctor in canon law, and Sarpi was
invited to express an opinion on the case. He gave it
verbally. The cabinet asked for it in writing. Sarpi
declined. The senate saw the reasonableness of this
refusal, and issued an order by which they took Sarpi
into the service of the State and under its protection.

R

242 PAOLO SARPI

In answer to the question : ^ What are the proper
remedies against the lightning of Rome?' the newly-
appointed theologian replied: ^Forbid the publication
of the censures, and appeal to a counciL' This
position was supported in a document of fifteen pages,
in which the whole question of appeal to a future
council is argued with profound learning and perfect
limpidity of thought. The brevity, strength and clear-
ness of this written opinion gave the highest satisfac-
tion, and the reply to the Pope was dictated by Sarpi.
It was still pacific in tone; the senate declares that
Princes by divine law have authority to legislate on
matters temporal toithin their own Jurisdiction. There
was no occasion for the admonitions administered by
His HolinesSyfor the matters in dispute were not spiritual
but temporal. The Pope was furious. He declared to
the Venetian cardinals that 'This discourse of yours
stinks of heresy' — spuzza dWesia — and dictated a
monitorium, in which he allowed the Republic twenty-
four days to revoke the objectionable laws and to
consign the ecclesiastics to the Nuncio ; if obedience
were refused, Venice would be placed imder an
interdict.

The monitorium was published in May, 1606. The
senate replied by two manifestoes, one appealing to the
cities of the Veneto for support, the other commanding
the clergy to ignore the monitory, to continue divine
services, and to affix this protest in a public place.
There was a disposition on the part of the clergy to
disobey; but an example or two were sufficient to
secure compliance. A vicar refused to say mass ; the
Government raised a gibbet before his door and he was
given his choice. At Padua the capitular vicar, when.

BROWN 243

ordered to surrender dispatches received from Rome^
replied that he would act in accordance with the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit^ to which the governor
replied that the Ten had already received that inspiration
to hang all who disobeyed. The rupture with Venice
was complete. The Nuncio and the ambassador were
recalled from their respective posts.

The question now was whether the Republic would
yield as she had done before, as other more powerful
states had often been compelled to do. Pope Paul
never doubted the issue. But, at Venice, now inspired
and guided by Paolo Sarpi, there was an unwonted
spirit of resistance to the papal claims, which found
expression in the Doge's farewell to the Nuncio.
^ Monsignore,' said Donato, ^ you must know that we
are, every one of us, resolute to the last degree, not
merely the Government but the nobility and the popula<
tion of our State. Your excommunication we hold for
naught. Now just consider what this resolution would
lead to, if our examples were followed by others';
a warning which the Pope declined to take. Tet this
spirit of resistance in defence of temporal rights was
accompanied by a remarkable attention to ecclesiastical
ceremonies. The churches stood open day and night,
and were much frequented. The procession of the
Corpus Domini was conducted on a scale of extra*
ordinary magnificence. The Republic desired to make
her attitude clear : it was the claims of the Curia, and
not the Church, which she was opposing.

Meantime the controversy assumed a literary form ;
Venice was attacked in books, in pamphlets, in the
confessional, from the pulpit. The attention of Europe
was soon attracted to the surprising spectacle of a

244 PAOLO SARPI

temporal sovereign succeflsfully defending his temporal
rights against the Pope, while still endeavouring to
remain inside the pale of the Church. France was
friendly ; England promised support ; Spain alone was
openly hostile. The mass of controversial literature grew
rapidly, especially in Venice, where all adverse criticism
was studied, not burned, as at Rome. The Government
appointed a committee to deal with this side of the
contest, and Sarpi was its ruling spirit. An attack by
BeUarmine drew Sarpi openly into the controversial
arena; and instantly he became the mark for the
arrows of the Curia. His works were prohibited and
burned ; he was cited before the Inquisition, and refused
to obey on the double ground that he had already been
judged illegally, becaiise unheard in defence ; and that
BeUarmine, one of his adversaries, would also be upon
the judicial bench. His phrase was, / defend a Just
cause. The Pope prepared for war; and Venice too
armed herself. But the pontiff found that even his
ally Spain was not willing to support him in a cause
which was so hostile to the temporal interests of
princes, and likely to be opposed by all the powers in
Europe.

The interdict had now lain upon Venice many months
without effect, the ceremonies of the Church were per-
formed as usual, the people were not deprived of the
sacraments, they could be baptized, married, buried, as
though no interdict had ever been launched. That
terrible weapon of the ecclesiastical armoury hung fire.
Each day discredited it still further. Venice was
demonstrating the truth of Machiavelli^s observation
that these instruments were powerless unless backed by
force ; like bank-notes with no metal reserve, current

BROWN 245

as long as the credit of the institution lasted^ as long as
people took them on faith.

At Rome it was becoming evident that the Pope
would be compelled to retire. The only question was
how to yield with as little loss as possible. Both
Spain and France were ready to mediate. France
proposed terms of an agreement. But the Venetian
Government, after taking Sarpi's opinion, modified
these terms beyond all recognition. The Pope might
be entreated, but not in the name of Venice; the
prisoners would be given to the King, not to the Pope ;
nothing would be said about withdrawing the Protest,
and as for the controversial writings in favour of Venice,
the Republic would do with them whatever the Pope
did with those in favour of the Curia. The position
of Venice was that she had done no wrong : her cause
was just. From this firm attitude the Government
would not move. The Pope raised objections, hoped
for help from Spain, implored the intervention of the
Grand Duke of Tuscany, changed his mind a hundred
times. But the scandal of the powerless interdict
grew daily more serious; the cardinals protested
against the injury to the prestige of Rome; and the
Pope was forced to yield.

France undertook to mediate, and for that purpose
the Cardinal de Joyeuse came to Venice. The various
steps in the ceremony of reconciliation were carried
out with the utmost punctiliousness on the part of the
Republic. The terms of the proclamation withdrawing
the protest were framed so as to allow no word to
escape which might imply that Venice acknowledged
an error.

The surrender of the prisoners was made to the

246 PAOLO SARPI

ambassador of France as a gratification to His Most
Christian Majesty, and without abrogating the right to
try ecclesiastics. The ambassador handed over the
prisoners to the cardinal as a present from the King.
The cardinal then proceeded to the cabinet, which was
sitting, and announced in the Pope's name that ^ all
the censures were removed/ Whereupon the Doge
presented him the proclamation which recalled the
Protest. And so the celebrated episode of the interdict
came to an end.

The victory remained with Venice, and Sarpi was the
hero of it. It was a great achievement to have resisted
the temporal assertions of the Curia without breaking
from the Church. And Sarpi himself makes it quite
clear that he was aware of the effect of his handiwork.
He writes : The Republic has given a shake to papal
claims. For whoever heard till now of a papal interdict^
published with all solemnity, ending in smoke F And
whereas the Pope once raised a wasps^ nest about our
ears for wishing to try two criminotis clerics, Jrom that
day to this a good hundred have been brought to justice.
Our differences with the Curia continue just as beforCy
but they have never ventured to use an interdict again :
its power is exhausted. An appreciation confirmed
by so cautious an historian as Hallam, who says:
^Nothing was more worthy of remark, especially in
literary history, than the appearance of one great
man, Fra Paolo Sarpi, the first who, in modem times
and in a Catholic country, shook the fabric of papal
despotism.^

It was not likely that the Roman Curia would ever
forgive such a blow. Sarpi was quite right in sapng
that it left the Republic alone for the future, but it

^

BROWN 247

pursued the men who had been the Republic's advisers.
It was the object of the Curia to induce Sarpi and his
colleagues to come to Rome; it could then have
represented them as erring children returning to the
bosom of the Church, wrung recantations from them,
and undone most of the benefits secured by their
courage. Sarpi refused to leave Venice, and pleaded an
order from his sovereign which forbade him to go.
Others, less cautious, yielded to the promises of pro-
tection and of honours, and failed to detect what
Sarpi called the poison in the honey. Their fate was
pitiable. Sarpi alone his enemies could not get, though
he wrote to a friend : They are determined to have us
ally and me by the dagger. And he was right. He
had received several warnings that his life was in danger.
Caspar Schoppe, on his way from Rome, told him that
it was almost impossible for him to escape the vengeance
of the Pope. The Government also begged him to take
precautions. Sarpi refused to change any of his habits.
He continued his daily attendance at the Ducal Palace^
passing on foot from his monastery at Santa Fosca
through the crowded Merceria to St. Mark's, and back
again when his work was done.

On October 5, 1607, he was returning home about
five o'clock in the evening. With him was an old
gentleman, Alessandro Malipiero, and a lay brother,
Fra Marino; the people of the Santa Fosca quarter
were mostly at the theatre, and the streets were
deserted. As Sarpi was descending the steps of the
bridge at Santa Fosca, he was set upon by five assassins.
Fra Marino was seized and bound, while the chief
assailant dealt repeated blows at Fra Paolo ; only three
took effect, two in the neck, of small consequence, and

248 PAOLO SARPI

one in the head which was given with such violence that
the dagger, entering the right ear, pierced through to
the cheek-bone and remained fixed there. Sarpi fell
as though dead, and the assassins, believing their work
accomplished, and being disturbed by the cries of
Malipiero and some women who had witnessed the
assault from a window, fired their harquebuses to
terrify the people, who were running up, and made off.
Sarpi was carried into his monastery, where he lay for
long in danger of his life. The Republic insisted upon
calling in all the celebrated doctors and surgeons of
Venice and Padua — ^though Sarpi himself desired to be
left to the care of Aloise Ragozza, a very yoiuig man
in whom he had confidence. The multitude of doctors
nearly killed their patient. But at length the wound
healed, and Sarpi resumed his ordinary course of life.

He had never any doubt as to the quarter whence
the blow came; and the flight of the assassins to
papal territory, their triumphal procession to Rome,
the protection they received there, all point to one
conclusion.

The Republic was lavish of its attentions to its
famous Councillor. Sarpi was offered a lodging for
himself and two others on the Piazzo, and the senate
voted him a pension of four hundred ducats. Sarpi
declined the money and refused to leave his monastery.
All that he would accept was the construction of a
covered way and a private door, so that he might reach
his gondola without passing through the streets. These
precautions were by no means unnecessary, for his life
was never safe. At least twice again plots were laid
against him. The one which was discovered in the
monastery was a real pain to him. He writes: ^I have

BROWN 249

just escaped a great conspiracy against my life ; those
of my own chamber had a part in it. It has not pleased
God that it should succeed^ but I am deeply sorry that
the agents are in prison. lAfe ia no longer grateful to
me when I think of the difficulty I have to preserve it.'

That is the first note of weariness which we come
across in Sarpi's letters ; it is a note which is repeated
and deepened during the later years of his life. Those
years were passed in constant and active discharge of
his duties to the State^ in the preparation of opinions
upon the various points about which the Government
consulted him — on benefices ; on Church property ; on
the Inquisition ; on the prohibition of books ; on tithes.
The epithets applied by distinguished authorities bear
witness to their value. Gibbon talks of 'golden
volumes/ Grotius calls them 'great.^

The fame of the great Servite grew world-wide. But
at Venice his years were closing in some loneliness and
depression. To his eyes it seemed that his policy had
not achieved all the success he desired. The murder
of Henry IV in 1610 was a cruel blow; and he saw
France faUing once more under the Jesuit sway.
Venice too appeared to be lost in a lethargy which
offered no resistance. Again and again in his corre-
spondence he complains of Venetian supineness^ apd
declares that the Republic is no freer after^ than it was
before^ the fight. Moreover, his intimate friends and
supporters were djring : Alessandro Malipiero in 1609,
Leonardo Donato, the Doge, in 16 12, Andrea Morosini,
the historian, in 161 8. The younger generation held
different views ; were disposed to leave matters alone.
Sarpi felt the gradual abandonment. It is said he even
thought of going to England or again to the East.

250 PAOLO SARPI

The extent of that abandonment was shown immediately
after his death. The senate decreed a monument in
his honour. The Nuncio declared that the Pope could
not submit to such an affront^ and if it was erected^
the Holy Office would be obliged to declare Sarpi an
impenitent heretic. The Venetian Ambassador coun-
selled compliance, comforting himself with the reflection
that he who may not live in stone will live in our
annals with less risk from all-corroding time.

But the end of this active life was drawing near.
Sarpi had never feared death. When his friend the
Doge expired^ he wrote ^ that nothing more desirable
could happen to an honest man than to say adieu to the
earth after a lifetime spent in preparation for departure
by the integrity of thought and the dischai^ of duty.
That indeed was Sarpi's own case. He died in
harness.

On Easter Eve, i6aa, while working in the
archives, he was seized with a violent shivering fit. It
was the beginning of the end, though he rallied and
resisted for another year. Early in 1623 he obeyed
a summons to the Palace. He was very ill at the time,
and on his return he knew himself stricken for death.
On January 14 he took to his bed. Fra Fulgenzio
was summoned to the senate to give a report. ^ How
is he?^ they said. 'At the last,' replied Fulgenzio.
* And his intellect ? ' ' Quite clear.' The Government
then proposed three questions on which they desired
the dying man's advice. Sarpi dictated his replies,
which were read and acted upon.

^ Lett,, ii, 334 : * Nulla d piti desiderabile ad un onesto uomo, che
dire addio alia terra doppo nn appareochio di tutta la vita nell'
interezza del sentimenti e nell' adempimento stesso dei propri
officj.'

BROWN 251

He grew rapidly worse ; still he was able to say mth
a smile^ Praise be to God: what is His pleasure
pleases me^ and vnth His help we wiU through with this
last act becomingly. Then falling into a delirium^ they
heard him murmur : / must go to St. Marias, It is
late. There is much to do. About one in the morning
he turned to his friend Fra Fulgenzio^ embraced him,
and said. Do not stay here to see me in this state : it
is not fitting. Go you to bed, and I will return to Crod
whence I came. Esto perpetua, — *May she endure/
—were the last words on his lips, a prayer which his
audience took as on behalf of his country, for whose
just rights and liberties he had fought so well.

November 20, 1895.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

JE ne me doutais guere, la premiere fois que je vins
a Oxford^ voici quatorze ans^ qu'un jour je me
trouvends associ^, m^me pour la plus humble part, a la
grande oeuvre. d'enseignement qui s'accomplit ici depuis
des siecles.

Laissez-moi tout d'abord vous en dire ma reconnais-
sance; V0U8 avez trouv^ le secret d'allier dans votre
University le respect de ce qu'il y eut d'excellent dans
le pass£ au goiit et a ^intelligence de ce qu^il y a de
plus nouveau dans le present, comme vous faites monter
sur les v^n^rables murs de vos colleges de jeunes ver-
dures et de jeunes fieurs. C'est ainsi que votre large
hospitalite n^a pas craint de convier aujourd'hui parmi
vous un romancier fran9ais a s'asseoir dans cette place
ou il a eu comme pr^^cesseurs tant de litterateurs
distingu^s, et parmi eux un de vos ^crivwis qu'il a le
plus admires et aim^, le regrett^ Walter Pater. Vous
me permettrez, Messieurs, d^apporter ici mon tribut
d'hommage a cette pr^cieuse m^moire et de mettre
sous les auspices de ce parfait prosateur dont je
m'honore d^avoir eu la sympathie, le court et un peu

254 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

technique essai que je vais vous lire. Si ce scnipuleux
ouvrier de style ^tait encore des vdtres, le savant
fellow de Brasenose, Fartiste accompli de Marnu
Pj^picurien et de la Renaissance, m^approuverait d'avoir
choisi pour I'evoquer deyant vous la figure du prosa-
teur fran9ais le plus scnipuleux aussi et le plus
accompli qui ait paru chez nous dans cette seconde
moiti^ du siecle, Fauteur de Madame Bavary, de
SalammbS, de VEIducation sentimentale, de la Teniation
de saint Antoine, de Bouvard et Picuchet et des TVois
ConteSy Gustave Flaubert. Vous connaissez tons les
livres que je viens de vous nommer^ et qui sont
classiques d^ja par leur forme, malgr^ les hardiesses de
certaines de leurs pages. Us sont en effet d^un art tr^
severe^ mais tres libre^ ou se trouve pratiqu^ cette
esth^tique du vrai total qui se retrouve dans Aristo-
phane, dans Plaute^ dans Lucrece, dans les dramatistes
de la periode Elisabetheenne, dans le Goethe de Faust,
des Affinity, des EUgies romaines et de Wilhelm
Meister. Ce n'est pas ici le lieu de discuter les perils
de cette esth^tique, si tant est que le souci pieux de
Fart puisse aller sans une profonde morality. Et^ pour
Flaubert^ je me chargerais de d^montrer que si ses
livres sont audacieux^ Fesprit qui s^en degage n'est pas
corrupteur. Mais ce n^est pas une these que je viens
soutenir devant vous^ c'est un homme que j'ai Finten-
tion de vous montrer. Ses idees ont pu etre plus ou
moins exactes^ plus ou moins completes. Ce qu'il y a
de certain, c^est qu^il les a con9ues dans toute la
sincerite de sa conscience, qu^il y a conforme son effort
avec la plus courageuse ardeur et la plus desinteressee,
qu'a Fambition de realiser ce rSve d^art il a tout sacrifie,
plaisir^ argent, succes, sant^, enfin que ce Maitre du

BOURGET 255

r&disme a donne le plus noble, le plus continu spectacle
d^idealisme pratique. Dans sa correspondance, et a
propos d' Alfred de Musset, on rencontre cette phrase
significative: ^C'est un malheureux, on ne vit pas
sans religion et il n^en a aucune. • . / Flaubert, lui, a
eu la reli^on des Letties, pouss^e jusqu^a la devotion,
jusqu^au fanatisme. Aucun homme n^a repr^sente a
un degre superieur les hautes vertus du grand artiste
litt^raire. Toute son existence ne fut qu^une longue
lutte avec les circonstances et avec lui-mSme pour
egaler le type d^ecrivain qu^il s'^tait form^ des sa
premiere jeunesse, et, vraiment, a lire sa correspon-
dance, a le suivre parmi ses quotidiens, ses acbam^s
efforts vers la perfection du style, a le regarder qui
pense et qui travaille depuis ses annees d^adolescence
jusqu^a la veille de sa mort, on comprend la tragique
justesse du mot que Balzac prete a un de ses h^ros
dans son roman sur la vie litt^raire, les Illusions
per dues I 'Un grand ecrivain est un martyre qui ne
mourra pas, voila tout ! . . .'

Depuis ses annees d^adolescence ? . . . C'est depuis
ses annees d^enfance que j'aurais du dire. Le premier
volume des lettres de Flaubert s'ouvre par un billet,
date de d^cembre 1830, — il avait neuf ans, — ou il
s'adresse en ces termes a Pun de ses camarades: 'Si
tu veux nous associer pour ^crire, moi j^^crirai des
comedies et toi tu ecriras tes reves,' et le dernier
volume de ces mSmes lettres s^acheve en 1880, sur ces
lignes griffonnees quelques jours, quelques heures
presque avant sa mort : ' Je me flattais d'avoir termini
le premier volume de Bouvard et Picuchet ce mois-ci.
II ne le sera pas avant le mois d'octobre. J'en ai

256 QUSTAVE FLAUBERT

probablement pour toute Fann^. . . / Et ces deux
phrases encadrent cinquante annfes d'une correspon-
dance qui n'est qu'une longue confession du mSme
labeur toujours recommence. Aucune vocation d'ecri*
vain ne fut plus continAment prolong^^ aucune ne fut
plus precocement caracteris^e. Pour comprendre dans
quel sens cette vocation se d^veloppa, il faut se
representer tout d'abord avec exactitude le milieu social
ou Fecrivain se trouva plac^ par le hasard de la
naissance^ et le milieu intellectuel oii il se trouva place
par le hasard de ^education.

Le pere de Gustave Flaubert etait chirurgien en chef
a I'Hdtel-Dieu de Rouen. Tons les t^moignages s'ac-
cordent a c^lebrer sa g^niaUt^ professionnelle, la
droiture de son caract^re^ la siiret^ de sa science, la
g^n^reuse ampleur de sa nature. Mais quel t^moi*
gnage vaut le portrait fameux que son fils en a trace
sous le nom du docteur La Riviere et cette page ou il
le montre, arrivant dans la chambre de Mme Bovary
mourante: ^Les mains nues, de fort belles mains et
qui n'avaient jamais de gants, comme pour Stre plus
promptes a plonger dans les miseres.' Quelle touche
de maitre et qui fait penser a ces tableaux de Van
Dick ou toute une race tient dans la minceur ou la
vigueur des doigts! Et il ajoute: ^Son regard, plus
tranchant que ses bistouris, vous descendait dans I'&me
et d^sarticulait tout mensonge a travers les allegations
et les pudeurs. Et il allait ainsi, plein de cette majeste
debonnaire que donnent la conscience d'un grand
talent, de la fortune, et quarante ans d'une existence
laborieuse et irr^prochable. • • •' De ce p^re qu'il admi-
rait si profondement, Gustave Flaubert avait herite
cette precision dure et comme chirurgicale de son

BOURGET 257

analyse. Mais cette ressemblance intellectuelle ne
devait apparaitre que plus tard, et dans Pexecution,
dans le tour de main de son ceuvre^ au lieu que durant
les ann^es d'apprentissage^ un irreparable divorce
d'id^es s'etablit entre le pere et le fils dont eelui-ci
souffrit cruellement. Voici pourquoi. Pareil a tant
de specialistes dont les facultes se condensent toutes
sur un point unique, le pere Flaubert ^tait d'une
indifference absolue a Pendroit de la litterature et de
Fart. Maxime Du Camp, qui fut Pintime ami de
Gustave a cette ^poque, rapporte dans ses Souvenirs
quelques-uns des propos que tenait le vieux chirurgien
lorsque son fils lui parlait de ses ambitions d'ecrivain :
' Le beau metier de se tremper les doigts dans Pencre.
Si je n^avais mani^ qu^une plume, mes enfants
n^auraient pas de quoi vivre aujourd^hui. . • .' Et encore :
^Ecrire est une distraction qui n^est pas mauvaise en
soi. Cela vaut mieux que d^aUer au cafe ou de perdre
son argent au jeu. . • • Mais a quoi cela sert-il ? Per-
Sonne ne Pa jamais su. . . .^ De telles boutades, si elles
n^entamaient pas la teiidresse et Fadmiration du jeune
homme, paralysaient en lui tout abandon, toute
confiance. II s'habituait a consid^rer le monde pro-
fond de ses Amotions esthetiques comme un domaine
reserve qu^il fallait constamment defendre contre
Pinintelligence de toute sa famille, contre celle de ce
pere d'abord, contre celle de son fr^re, heritier du
bistouri et des prejug^s du chirurgien, contre celle de
sa mere qui lui disait: ^Les livres t'ont d^vore le
coeur. • . .^ Ce pere, ce frere, cette mere, — cette mere
surtout, — il les cherit d^une grosse et large affection
d'homme robuste qui contraste d'autant plus ^trange-
ment avec Fevidente reserve de son Stre intime chaque

8

358 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

fois qu^il s'agit dea choses de la litt^rature ou de I'art.
Rien de plus significatif sous ce point de vue^ que les
lettres Writes a son plus cher confident, Alfred Le
Poittevin, durant un voyage en Italie entrepris avec
toute cette famille durant sa vingtieme ann^: ^Mon
pere, dit-il, a h6sit4 a aller jusqu'a Naples. Com-
prenda-tu quelle a 6ti ma peur? En voU-tu le sena?
Le voyage que j^ai fait jusqu'ici, excellent sous le
rapport materiel, a it6 trop brute sous le report
poetique, pour desirer le prolonger plus loin.... Si
tu savais ce quHnvolantairemefU an /aii avorter
en moi, taut ce gu'on m^arrache et tout ce que je
perds . . .'

Remarquez bien. Messieurs, la nuance du sentiment
exprim^ dans ces quelques mots. II y a la tout autre
chose que la mauvaise humeur du jeune homme dont
les vingt-deux ans, fougueux parfois jusqu^au d^rdre^
se rebellent contre les cinquante ans d'un pere ou
d^une m^re, assagis jusqu^i la froideur. J^ reconnais
la protestation douloureuse d'un talent qui veut durer,
grandir, s^epanouir, qui veut vivre enfin, contre un
milieu qui Popprime en le prot^geant, comme un
vase trop ^troit pour Parbuste en train d'y pouaser.
J'y reconnais aussi Torigine d^une des id^ maitresses
de Gustave Flaubert: la persuasion, pour prendre
une de ses formules, que le monde a la * haine de la
litt^rature.^ II devait, sur le tard de sa vie, exag^rer
encore cette th6one sur la solitude de Pecrivain et
sur Phostilit^ que lui portent les autres hommea.
Le m6me Maxime Du Camp raconte qu'apres la guerre
de 1870, et a propos de chaque ev^nement politique
capable de nuire a un roman ou a une piece de tbdtoe,

BOURGET 259

Flaubert s'&riait : ' Us ne savent qu'imaginer pour noun
tourmenter. lis ne seront heureux que lorsqu^il n'y aura
plus ni ^rivains, ni dramaturges^ ni livres^ ni th^tres. • . /
C^est la une explosion qui fait sourire. Rapprochez*
la de ses m^contentements de jeune homme contre
les inintelligences de sa famille^ de se9 fureurs d'homme
la&T contre sa ville natale, ce Rouen^ ou^ disait-il^
'j^ai b&ill^ de tristesse a tous les coins de rue,^ et
vous comprendrez comment il est arrive a ce qui fait
le fond mSme de son esth^tique: la contradiction de
PArt et de la Vie.

Vous le comprendrez davantage^ si vous consid^rez
qu'a cette premiere influence d^exil hors de la vie^
une autre vient s'ajouter qu'il est n&essaire de carac-
t^riser avec quelque d^tail^ car elle circule d'un bout
a Pautre de Fceuvre de Flaubert, et en un certain
sens elle en fait la mati^ constante: cette influence
est celle du romantisme fran9ais de 1830, per9u sur
le tard, a travers les livres des Hugo, des Musset,
des Balzac, des Dumas, des Sainte-Beuve, des Oautier,
par un jeune provincial enthousiaste. Tout a 6t£
dit sur les dangers et les contradictions de cet Id^
romantique, con9U au lendemain de la prestigieuse
aventure napol^nienne par les enfants oisifs et nost-
algiques des h^ros de la Grande-Arm^ Aucune
analyse n'en saundt mieux montrer la d^raison que
la confidence faite par Flaubert lui-mdme dans sa
biogn^hie de Louis Bouilhet: ^J^ignore, dit-il, quels
sont les rdves des colleens, mais les ndtres ^taient
superbes d'extravagance, expansions demi^res du ro*
mantisme arrivant jusqu'a nous, et qui, comprim^
par le milieu bourgeois, faisaient dans nos cervelles
d'^tranges bouillonnements. Tandis que les coeurs

s 2

26o GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

enthousiastes auraient voulu des amours dramatiques
avec gondoleS; masques noirs et grandes dames eva-
nouies dans des chaises de poste au milieu des Calabres,
quelques caract^res plus sombres ambitionnaient le

glaive des conspirateurs Je me souviens d'un

brave garyon toujours affubl^ d'un bonnet rouge.
Un autre se proposait de vivre plus tard en Mohican,
un de mes intimes voulait se faire renegat pour aller
servir Abd el-Kaden On n'etait pas seulement trou-
badour^ insurrectionnel et oriental, on etait avant
tout artiste. Les pensums finis, la litterature com-
men9ait. On se crevait les yeux a lire au dortoir
des romans; on portait un poignard dans sa poche,
comme Antony. On faisait plus. Par degoM de
I'existence Bar . . • se cassa la t£te d'un coup de pistolet.
And... se pendit avec sa cravate. Nous mentions
peu d'Soges, certainement ! Mais quelle haine de
toute platitude ! Quels elans vers la grandeur ! • • .^
Figurez-vous maintenant la rencontre de pareilles
sensibilit^s avec les moeurs paisibles de la France
au temps de Louis-Philippe et la necessite pour tons
ces petits Lords Bjrron en disponibilit^ de prendre
un metier, celui-ci d'avocat, cet autre de professeur,
un troisi^me de n^gociant, un quatrieme de magistrate
Quelle chute du haut de leur chimere I Quelle impos-
sibility d^accepter sans revolte Fhumble labeur, Fetroi-
tesse du sort, le quotidien des jours! Et voil^pour
Flaubert un second principe de desequilibre intime.
II ^tait, par naissance, un homme de lettres parmi
des savants et des praticiens. U fut, par education,
un romantique au milieu des bourgeois et des pro-
vinciaux.

II fut aussi, et c'est la troisieme influence qui

BOURGET 261

acheve d'expliquer sa conception de Part, un malade
au milieU de Phumanit^ saine et simple^ la victime
courageuse et desesperee d'une des plus cruelles affec-
tions qui puissent atteindre un ouvrier de pens^e^ car
il souffrait d'une de ces infirmit^s qui touchent aii
plus vif de PStre conscient^ toutes melees qu^elles sont
de troubles physiques et de troubles moraux. On
pent regretter que Maxime Du Camp se soit reconnu,
dans ses Souvenirs^ le droit de reveler les attaques
d'epilepsie qui, d^lavingt-deuxigmeann^, terrasserent
Flaubert. La r^v^lation est faite, et il y aurait une
puerility & paraitre ignorer ce qui f ut le drame physique,
si Ton peut dire, de Fexistence de ce malheureux
homme. Quand les premiers acces se furent produits,
il eut le courage de prendre dans la bibliotheque
de son pere les livres qui traitaient du terrible mah
II y reconnut la description exacte des symptdmes
dont il avait ^te victime et il dit & Maxime Du Camp :
^ Je suis perdu. • . J Des lors, il vecut dans une pre-
occupation constante de I'attaque toujours possible,
et ses habitudes furent toutes subordonnees a cette
angoisse, depuis la plus legere jusqu'aux plus essen-
tielles. II prit en horreur la marche, parce qu'elle
Fexposait a £tre saisi en pleine rue de la crise redoutee.
II ne sortait qu^en voiture, lorsqu'il sortait, et il lui
arrivait de rester des mois enferm^, comme s'il n'eiit
eprouve de security qu'entre les murs protecteurs
de sa chambre. Desireux de cacher une misere dont
il avait la pudeur, il se concentra de plus en plus
dans le cercle ^troit de Fintimite domestique. II se
refusa toute esp^rance d^etablissement personnel, esti*
mant sans doute qu^il n'avait pas le droit de se marier,
de fonder une famiUe, d^avoir des enfants auxquels

a6a GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

il edt mqui de transmettre un mal aussi certainement
h^r&litaire. Tous les liens qui rattachent rhomme
a la vie sociale achev^rent de se rompre pour lui
sous Passaut de cette derni^re ^reuve, et, comme il
I'a dit lui-mfime dans une formule ginguli^re, mais
bien profonde: ^tous les accidents du monde lui
apparurent comme transposes pour Pemploi d'une
illusion i d^ciire^ tellement que toutes les choses, y
compris sa propre existence, ne lui semblerent plus
avoir d'autre utilite. • • / Traduisez cette phrase dans
sa signification pticwe, et vous y trouverez la definition
m£me de Fartiste litteraire, pour qui la vie n^est qu'une
occasion de degager I'oeuvre d'art, devenue ainsi,
non plus un moyen, mais une fin, non plus une
image de la realite, mais la r^alite m£me et la
seule qui vaille la peine de supporter la douleur d'Stre
homme.

L'art litteraire a ^te souvent d^fini de la sorte, comme
constituant un but par lui-mSme et aussi comme
repr^sentant la consolation et la revanche de la vie.
Pour ne citer que deux noms, tr^ disparates, mais
moins eloign^s Fun de Fautre qu'il ne semble, par
leur haine du monde moderne, c'est la these que
proclamaient Theophile Gautier et ses disciples, et
c'est aussi la these a laquelle aboutissait le pessimisme
de Schopenhauer. L'originalit^ de Flaubert reside
en ceci, qu'il etait, comme je Fai marqu^ d€ja,
dou^ de cette ferveur intime qui fait les convaincus,
les fanatiques mSme, et cette ardeur de sa convic-
tion Pa fait aller jusqu'au bout des consequences
logiques de son principe d'art avec une nettete qu'aucun
autre ^crivain n'a peut-£tre egal^e. On pourrait extraire

BOURGET 263

de sa correspondance iin code complet des i^les que
doit Biiivre P&rivain qui s'eat vovl6 au eulte de ee que
Ton a quelquefoiiB appele VAit pour FArt, s'il se voue
au travail du roroan. La premi^ de ces r^les,
celle qui revient conBtamment dans cette correspon-
dance^ c'est Fimpersonnalit^, ou^ pour prendre le
langage des esth^ticiens, I'objectivit^ absolue de
Toeuvre. Cela se comprend ais^ment: le fond de
cette thforie de Part pour Part^ c'est la crainte et
le m^pris de la vie. La fuite de cette vie redout^
et mepris^e doit done £tre aussi complete qu'il est
possible. L'artiste essayera avant tout de se fuir
soi-mSme et, pour cela, il s'interdira de m^ler jamais
sa personne a son oeuvre. Flaubert est, sur ce point,
d'une intransigeance farouche: ^N'importe qui,' ^cri-
vait-il k George Sand qui Pengageait i se confesser,
k se raconter, ^n'importe qui est plus int^ressant
que le sieur Flaubert parce qu'il est plus g^n^ral/
Et ailleurs: ^Dans Pid^al que j'ai de Part, je crois
qu'on ne doit rien montrer de ses coleres et de ses
indignations. L'artiste ne doit pas plus apparaitre
dans son ceuvre que Dieu dans la nature.' Et dans
son roman de VMducation sentimentale, parlant d'un
travail d'histoire que fait un de ses h^ros: 'II se
plongea dans la personnalit^ des autres, ce qui est la
seule fa9on de ne pas soufibir de la sienne. • . • ' Poussant
cette r^le d'impersonnalit^ jnsqu'a ses demi^res limites,
il interdit a Partiste de conclure, car conclure, c'est
montrer une opinion, c'est se montrer. ' Aucun grand
poete, dit-il quelque part, n'a jamais conclu. Que pen-
sait Hom^ ? Que pensait Shakespeare ? On ne le sait
pas. • . •' II interdit de mSme au romancier Pemploi
du persontiage sympathique, parce que pr^ferer un de ses

a64 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

personnages k un autre^ c'est encore se montrer. Sur ce
chapitre de Pimpassibilit^ que F^crivain doit observer,
d'apres lui, avec une rigueur entiere, il a prononce des
paroles d'une saisissante eloquence, Reprenant sa com-
paraison de Dieu et de la nature, il disait : ^ L'auteur dans
son oeuvre doit £tre comme Dieu dans Funivers, present
partout et visible nulle part. L'art ^tant une seconde
nature, le cr&iteur de cette nature-la doit agir par des
procedes analogues. Que Fon sente dans tons les atomes,
a tons les aspects, une impassibilite cachee, infinie.
L'effet pour le spectateur doit Stre une espece d'eba-
hissement. Comment tout cela s'est-il fait? doit-on
dire, et que Ton se sente ^cras^ sans savoir pourquoi. • • J
II disait encore: — je cite au hasard, — *Nul lyrisme,
pas de reflexions, la personnalite de Fauteur absente ! • . .
La personnalite sentimentale sera ce qui, plus tard,
fera passer pour puerile et un peu niaise une bonne
partie de la litterature contemporaine. • • . Moins on
sent une chose, plus on est apte & Pexprimer comme
elle est, comme elle est toujours en elle-mdme dans sa
g^neralite et d^gag^ de tons les contingents ^ph^meres
• . . •' Et, dominant tons ces pr^ceptes, il reclame une
continuelle surveillance de son propre elan, de la
defiance de cette espece d'echaufEement que les niais
appellent Pinspiration. ... ^11 faut ecrire froidement,
dit-il. • . . Tout doit se f aire a froid, posement. Cluand
Louvel a voulu tuer le due de Berri, il a pris une
carafe d^orgeat, et n'a pas manqu€ son coup. C'etait une
comparaison de ce pauvre Pradier qui m^a toujours
frappe. Elle est d^un haut enseignement pour qui
sait la comprendre. . • •'

Si maintenant. Messieurs, vous passez de la corre-
spondance de Flaubert, ou ces idees sont exprimees de

BOURGET 265

cette £09011 abstraite et doctrinale quasi a chaque page,
aux oeuvres sur lesquelles s'est consume son patient,
son acharn^ labeur, fous constaterez aussitdt que ses
Uvres n^ont 6t6 que ces idees mises en pratique. Et
d^abord tous les sujets en ont ^te choisis par Fauteur
syst^matiquement en dehors de son existence et dans
une tonalite en pleine antithese avec ses preferences,
jBes go&ts, son caractere, toute son atmosphere d^esprit.
Rien de plus significatif sous ce rapport, que cette
Madame Bovary qui marqua ime date dans Phistoire du
roman fran9ais, et servit de point de depart a toute
revolution naturaliste. Quel contraste entre ce roman
anatomique et les circonstances de magnanime exalta-
tion ou il fut compost! Flaubert etait retir^ a la
campagne pres de Rouen, chez sa mere, dans cette
maison blanche de Croiset, ancienne habitation de
plaisance d'une confr^rie religieuse. U y vivait de
maniere a justifier une de ses plaisanteries habituelles :
' Je suis le dernier des peres de FEglise • • • / II ^tait
jeune, il etait riche, il etait libre, et son imique souci
etait de peiner parmi ses livres et sur sa page blanche,
passionn^ment, infatigablement ! Toute la semaine
s'^coulait a travailler seize heures sur vingt-quatre,
et la recompense du bon prosateur etait de recevoir, le
dimanche, la visite du poete Louis Bouilhet avec lequel
il lisait tout haut Ronsard et Rabelais. D'ordinaire de
pareils labeurs sont, chez un homme de cet ftge, le
signe d'une ambition d^autant plus violente qu'elle
a recuie plus loin son terme et ajoume son assouvisse-
ment. Dans une page d'autobiographie tres frappante,
Balzac, parlant de sa jeunesse et du travail auquel il se
condamna lui-mSme, a fait la confession de tous les
ambitieux pauvres qui voient dans le triomphe litt^ire

266 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

un mojen de rentrer dans le monde, illustres, riches et
aim^ : ^ J'allais, dit-il, vivre de pain et de lait, comme
un solitaire de la Th^ba'ide, au milieu de ce Paris si
tumultueux, sphere de travail et de silence, oii, comme
les chrysalides, je me b&tissais une tombe pour renaitre
brillant et glorieux. J'allais risquer de mourir pour
vivre • • • / Gustave Flaubert, lui, ne poursuit a tra-
vers son patient effort aucune chim^re de luxe, d'amour
ou de gloire* C'est un Id^l tout intellectuel qu^il
s'est propose de r^aliser, avec le plus complet dedain
du succes exterieur : ^ Je vise a mieux qu'au succ^,'
d^clarait-il a un ami, ' je vise a me plaire. J'ai en t£te
une mani^re d'^rire et une gentiUesse de langage
auxquelles je veux atteindre, voila tout • • • / Et avec
une bonhomie qui est la marque propre du gars nor-
mand qu'il €tait reste : ^ Quand je croirai avoir cueilli
Pabricot, je ne refuse pas de le vendre, ni qu'on batte
les mains s'il est bon. Mais si, dans ces temps-la, il
n^est plus temps et que la soif en soit passle a tout le
monde, tant pis • • • .^ Peu lui importe que les com-
pagnons de sa jeunesse arrivent tout autour de lui a
la notori^t^, tandis quMl demeure inconnu ; ' Si mon
oeuvre est bonne, si elle est vraie, elle aura son &;ho, sa
place, dans six mois, dans six ans, apres la mort, qu'im-
porte • . • / Et quelle modestie dans cet orgueil : ^ Je
n'irai jamais bien loin,' g^mit-il, 'mais la t&che que
j'entreprends sera ex^cutee par un autre. J'aurai mis
sur la voie quelqu'un de mieux dou^ et de plus n^ • • • .
Et qui sait ? Le hasard a des bonnes fortunes. Avec
un sens droit du metier que Pon fait et de la perseve-
rance, on arrive i Festimable • . • /

Ouvrez maintenant Madame Bovary, qu'y rencon-
trez-vous ? Le tableau, scrupuleux jusqu'a la minutie.

BOURGET 267

des moeuni les plus violemment contnures a cette pure
et fidre existence d^un jeune Faust emprisonne dans sa
cellule. Ce ne sont dans les scenes d^crites par cet
implacable roman qu^espoirs mediocres, passions mes-
quines^ intelligences avort^es, sensibilitSs basses, une
deplorable legion d^ftmes grotesques au^dessus desquelles
plane le sourire imbecile du pbarmacien Homais, de ce
bourgeois grandiose a force de sottise! Cet effet
d^^bahissement r&v6 par Flaubert est obtenu. Cette
prose impeccable, tour ^ tour coloree comme une
peinture flamande, taill^e en plein marbre comme une
statue grecque, rythm^ et souple comme une phrase
de musique, s'emploie a representer des Stres si
difformes et si diminu^s que Fapplication de cet outil
de g^nie a cette besogne vous etonne, vous d^concerte,
vous fait presque mal. Que pense Fauteur.des mis^res
qu'il examine d'un si lucide r^^rd, qu'il raconte dans
cet incomparable langage ? Vous ne le saurez jamais,
et pas davantage son jugement sur les vilenies de ses
personnages, sur F^tat social dont ils sont le produit,
sur les maladies morales dont ils sont les victimes.
Le livre est devant fous, reellement, comme une chose
de la nature. II se tient de lui-m£me, ainsi que le
voulait Flaubert 'par la force interne du style, comme
la terre, sans £tre soutenue, se tient dans Pair. • . .'
C'est en ces termes qu^il annon9ait son projet. Ils
pourraient servir d'^pigraphes a ce roman de mceurs
provinciales, comme i ce roman de moeurs cartha-
ginoises qui s'appelle SalammbS, comme a ce roman
d'histoire contemporaine qui s^appelle VMducation,
comme a cette Epopee mystique qui s'appelle Saint
Antoiney comme i ce pamphlet contre la bdtise modeme
qui s'appelle Bauvard et Picuchet, comme iL ce tri-

268 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

ptyque prestigieux des Trais Conies, qui ramasse sous
une mSme couverture de volume lea infortunes d'une
servante normande^ la l^gende pieuse de saint Julien
PHospitalier et la Decollation du Baptiste. II semble
que Fartiste litt^raire ait vraiment execute tout le pro-
gramme qu^il formulait dans ses lettres de jeunesse:
^ Ecrire^ c'est ne plus £tre soi. • . /

J'ai dit : ^ il semble/ car si Gustave Flaubert avait
vraiment conform^ son activity d'artiste a toute la
rigueur de ses theories, et completement, absolument
d^personnalise son oeuvre, ses livres ne nous arriveraient
pas impr^gn^s de cette saveur de mSiancolie, penetr^
de ce path^tique qui nous les rend si chers* C'est id.
Messieurs, Poccasion de constater une fois de plus cette
grande loi de toutes les creations d'art* Ce qu'il y a
de meilleur, d'essentiel, de plus vivant en elle, ce n'est
pas ce que I'artiste a m^ite et voulu, c'est FS^ment
inconscient qu'il y a d^pos^, le plus souvent a son insu,
et, quelquefois, malgr6 lui. J^ajoute qu'il faut saluer
dans cette inconscience non pas une humiliation pour
I'artiste, mais un ennoblissement de sa tfiche et une
recompense d'un autre travail : celui qu^il a fait non
pas siir son ceuvre elle-m£me, mais sur son propre
esprit. Ce don de mettre dans un livre plus de choses
qu'on ne le soup9onue Boi-m£me, et de depasser sa
propre ambition par le r^sultat, n'est accord^ qu'aux
genies de souffrance et de sincerite qui portent dans le
fond de leur etre le riche tresor d'une courageuse et
haute experience desint^ressee. Cest ainsi que Cer*
vantes a fait Don Quichotte et Daniel de Foe RobinsoHy
sans se douter qu'ils y insinuaient. Fun, toute Pheroique
ardeur de FEspagne, Fautre toute F^neigie solitaire de

BOURGET 269

I'Anglo-Saxon. S^ils n'euBsent pratique, de longues
ann^es durant, ces vertus, le premier de chevaleresque
entreprise, le second d'invincible endurance, leurs
romans f ussent rest^ ce quails voulaient que ces livres
restassent, de simples recits d'aventures. Mais leur
&me Talait mieux encore que leur art, et die a passe
dans cet art pour lui donner cette puissance de symbole
qui est la vitalite agissante des livres. Eh bien ! Pftme
de Flaubert aussi, valait mieux que son esth^tique, et
c'est cette &me qu^il a insufSee, contre sa propre
volont^, dans ses pages, qui leur assure cette place a
part dans Phistoire du roman fran9ais contemporain.

Reprenez en effet cette Madame Bovary qu'il a
pretendu executer de cette maniere impeccablement
objective, et cherchez a d^ager la quality qui en fait,
de Faveu des juges les plus hostiles, un livre tout a fait
superieur. Ce n'est pas Inexactitude du document.
Vous trouveriez dans tel ou tel proc^ rapport^ par la
Gazette des Tribunaux des renseignements aussi precis
sur les nioeurs de province. Ce n'est pas la difficulte
que Tauteur a dii vaincre pour rediger dans un style
aussi magistral une anecdote aussi platement vulgaire.
La saillie toute hoUandaise des figures, le relief d'une
phrase a vives arStes qui montre les objets comme a la
loupe, la correction d^une syntaxe qui ne se permet
jamais une repetition de mots, une assonance, un
hiatus, — toutes ces habiletes de metier risqueraient
plutdt, a ce degre, de donner une impression de factice,
presque de tour de. force, et Sainte-Beuve avait, des le
d^but, mis le trop adroit ecrivain en garde contre ce
peril de ^excessive tension. Non. Ce qui souleve
cette mediocre aventure jusqu'a une hauteur de sym-
bole, ce qui transforme ce r^cit des erreurs d^une petite

V

270 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

bouigeoiae mal mari^ en une poignante A6gie humaine,
c'est que Pauteur n'a pas pu, malgr^ les gageures de aa
doctrine, se renoncer lui-m6me. II a eu beau choiair
un Bujet ntu^ aux antipodes de son monde moral, le
raoonter tout uniment et sans une seufe r^exion,
maintenir chacun de ses personnages & un m£me plan
d'indiff^rente impartiality, ne pas juger, ne pas con*
dure, sa vision de la vie le r^vele tout entier. Le mal
dont il a souffert toute sa vie, cet abus de lapens^ qui
Pa mis en disproportion avec son milieu, avec son
temps, avec toute action, involontairement, instinctive-
ment, il le donne i ses m&liocres h^ros. C'est la
pens^, mal comprise, ^gar€e par un faux Id&l, par
une litt^rature inf ^rieure, mais la pens^ tout de m6me
qui pr^cipite Emma Bovarjr dans ses coupables exp^-
ences, et tout le livre apparait comme une violente et
furieuse protestation contre les ravages que la dispro*
portion des rfives imaginatifs et du sort produit dans
une creature assur^ment m&liocre, mais encore trop
dflicate pour scm milieu. Et ce mfime
r£ve et de la pens^ court d'un
hcation sentimentale dont
Flaubert aunuE^I^^H^^^^fetan^t encore que de
Bouvard et P6cuchet que^^HHBjjg^de ses ven-
geances/ Ce mdme th^me soutient mthmim^ oik
Pempoisonnement de la pensee et du rSve enHbnti^,
agissant smr des Ames barbares avec la m£me force
destructive que sur des &mes civilis^. Ce m£me
th^me circule dans la Teniatum de saint Antoine ou la
pens^ et le r£ve sont de nouveau aux prises, cette
fois, avec une &me croyante qui en agonise de douleur,
en sorte que cet homme, de raisonnement et de doc*
trine, qui s'est voulu impassible, impersonnd et glac£.

BOURGET 271

Be trouve avoir donn£ comme motif profond a tous see
livres le mal dont il a souffert : Fimpuissance d'^galer
ta vie & sa pens^ et a son r£ve. Seulement au lieu
que^ chez lui, cette pens^ et ce r£ve ^taient a leur
maximum, ses doctrines d'art Font amen^ & cboisir
pour ses romans des existences dans lesquelles cette
pens^ et ce rfive sont a leur minimum, et cela mSme
ajoute a Faccent de ses livres. Nous sentons, par dela
ses ironies continues, sa reserve volontaire, sa surveil-
lance de lui-m£me, tout un monde d^^motions qu'il ne
nous dit pas. C'est Diderot, je crois, qui a jet^ au
cours d'une de ses divagations esth^tiques cette phrase
admirable : * Un artiste est toujours plus grand par ce
qu^il laisse que par ce qu^il exprime/ Flaubert se f&t
revolt^ Ik contre, lui, Fexpressif par excellence, et
pourtant aucune oeuvre plus que la sienne ne justifie
cette parole de Festh^ticien, tant il est vrai que nous
sommes tous, suivant une vieille oomparaison, les
ouvriers d'une tapisserie dont nous ne voyons que
Penvers et dont le dessin nous 6chappe.

Quand on aper9oit Gustave Flaubert sous cet angle,
comme un romantique comprim^ par son milieu, rejete
par les ciroonstances aux plus intransigeantes theories
de Part pour Part^ et cependant conduit par I'instinc-
tive n^essit^ de son g^nie int^rieur a impr^gner ses
livres de sa tragique melancolie intellectuelle, on se
rend mieux compte des raisons qui ont fait de lui un
chef d'dcole, a son insu encore et contre sa volont^.
Car il ^tait de bien bonne foi, lorsqu'en 1875, et au
moment o^ triomphaient ses disciples Zola et Daudet,
il ^crivait i Geoige Sand: 'A propos de mes amis,
vous ajoutez mon &ole. Mais je m'ablme le tempera-

273 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

ment a tacher de n'avoir pas d'^cole. A priori, je les
repousse toutes. Ceux que je vols souvent et que
vouB d^signez, recherchent tout ce que je meprise et
s'inquietent m^liocrement de ce qui me tourmente. . . .'
Ici encore^ Flaubert ne mesurait pas la portee complete
de son oeuvre. Eleve attarde des maitres de 1830^ ii
etait arriv^ dans la litterature fran9aise au moment
pr^is ou cette litterature etait partagee entre les deux
tendances qui r^Bument les deux plus grands noms du
milieu du siecle : Victor Hugo et Balzac. Avec Hugo,
une rh^torique nouvelle ^tait n^e, tout en couleurs et
en formes, et qui avait pousse jusqu'a la virtuosite le
talent de peindre par les mots. Avec Balzac, Pesprit
d^enquete scientifique avait fait irruption dans le
roman, et presque aussitdt Pune et Pautre ecole avait
manifeste le vice qui £tait son danger possible: la
premiere, Finsuffisance de la pensee, la seconde,
I'insujSsance du style. Ce qui fit de la publication
de Madame Bavary un evenement d^une importance
capitate, une date, pour tout dire, dans Phistoire du
roman f ran9ais, ce f ut Paccord de ces deux &x>les dans
un mSme livre, egal en force plastique aux plus belles
pages de Hugo et de Gautier, comparable en lucidite
analytique aux maitres chapitres de Balzac et de
Stendhal. Cette rencontre en lui des deux tendances
du siecle, du romantisme et de la science, Flaubert ne
Pavait pas cherchee. Sa theorie de Part pour Part Py
avait conduit par un jeu de logiqUe dont lui-m£me
s'etonna toute sa vie. On sait qu'il a constamment
souffert des ^oges donnes au realisme de Madame
Bovary. C^tait sa recherche sjrst^matique de Pimper-
sonnalite qui, en le faisant s'effacer devant Pobjet,
Pavait amene a cette rigueur d^analyse exacte. Ayant^

BOURGET 273

de parti pris^ choisi comme objet de son premier roman
une aventure commune et terre a terre^ il s'^tait trouve
composer mie etude de moeurs, et la composer dans
une prose sup^rieurement ouvr^, sa prose. Ce fut
pour ses contempondns une revelation. L'article de
Sainte-Beuve dans ses LundU, celui de Baudelaire dans
son Art romantiquey sont des monuments d'une sur-
prise qui tout de suite devint f^conde et susdta tour a
tour les livres des fr^res de Goncourt, ceux de M.
£mile Zola^ ceux de M. Alphonse Daudet^ ceux de Guy
de Maupassant^ pour ne citer dans le roman fran9ais
contemporain que des artistes incontestes. Un roman
dont la matiere soit la verity quotidienne^ Thumble
v^rite/ comme disait Maupassant en t^te d^Vhe vie,-^
un roman capable de servir a Fhistoire des moeurs,
comme un document de police, — et ce roman, 6cnt
dans une prose coloree et plastique, serr^e et savante,
avec ce que les Goncourt appelaient, barbarement
d'ailleurs, une ecriture artiste, tel est le programme issu
de Madame Bovary, qu'ont essay^ d^appliquer tour a
tour, suivant leur temperament, les miniaturistes enerv^s
de Renie Mauperin, le puissant visionnaire de V Assam-
moir, le chroniqueur sensitif du Nabab et le large
conteur de Pierre et Jean. Flaubert, ce poete lyrique,
ni d'un m^decin et grandi dans un hdpital, Pavait
trouvee toute faite en lui, cette synthese du romantisme
et de la science. II s'etait trouve aussi tout pr£t pour
ressentir et pour traduire, lui, Pardent idealiste empri-
sonn^ dans toutes les ^iseres d'une ville de province, la
haine des lettres contre la m^diocrit^ ambiante, qui est
une des formes de la rlvolte contre la democratic
Enfin, et c'est par Ml qu'il demeure si vivant parmi nous,
et si present, malgr^ les tendances nouvelles des lettres

T

274 FLAUBERT

fran9ai8e8, il a donne aux ^rivains le plus magnifique |

exemple d'amour passionn^^ exclusif pour la litt^rature. ^

Avec ses longues annees de patient scrupule et de con-
sciencieuse attente^ son admirable d^dain de I'argent, des
honneurs, des suec^ faciles, avec son courage & pour-
suivre jusqu'a leur extremity son rSve et son oeuvre^ il
nous apparait conime un h^ros intellectuel. Je serais
bien fier. Messieurs^ si le t^moignage d'un ordre un peu
trop technique, que je lui ai apporte aujourd'hui, pouvait
contribuer a r^pandre et a augmenter dans ce liberal
Oxford, nialgr^ les inevitables malentendus que la tres
libre conception du roman fran9ais risque toujours de
soulever en terre anglo-saxonne, le respect auquel a
droit, parmi tons les lettr^s, le plus grand, le plus pur,
le plus complet de nos artistes litt^raires.

1897.

GOETHE'S
ITALIAN JOURNEY

I de9ire to asaoeiate this Lecture mth the memory of two friends
whose labours in the promotion of English Croethe studies mil not
easily he forgotten : Hebman Hageb {d. Feb. 1895) and Heinbich
Pbeisivgeb (d, Feb. 1896). Their work {especially as successive
secretaries of the Manchester Goethe Society) owed its fruitfulness
not less to the btiUiant scholarship ofths one and the wide literary
culture of the other than to rare qualities of heart and character
which make the loss of both still poignant to their many friends.
Like few others, they stood in close touch with the two elements,
English and German {so kindred yet so alien), of ihe community
in which they lived, and drew them together largely by virtue of
their own rich endowment in some of the finest characteristics
of both.

THE ideal traveller is a man in whom the single-
minded fervour of the pilgrim is mingled with the
intellectual ardour of the discoverer and the alert
sensibUityof the cultivated tourist. There is something
in him of Saint Louis, something of Dante's Ulysses,
and something of Lawrence Sterne. Such a combina-
tion is most naturally attained among those whose goal
of travel is Italy. For Italy is a shrine which few
approach for the first time without a nascent thrill of
the pilgrim's awe ; yet the shrine is also a microcosm,
a little universe full of problems for the intellect and

T 2

276 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

of various delight and picturesque charm for the sense.
It is probable that no book in the world presents all
these aspects of Italian travel so vividly as the Italienische
Reise of Goethe. In an age when Europe was full of
sentimental travellers bent only upon pretexts for
smiling the inimitable smile of Sterne^ or for dropping
a caricature of his exquisite tears, Goethe, with a
sensibility far richer and more versatile than Sterne's
own, set forth across the Alps resolute to see and to
know, to work and to live. His journey was perhaps
the most deliberate act of a life controlled throughout
by conscious design, like a work of art, — an act in
which the whole man moved together, into which he
cast his whole capital of hope and faith — nay, hazarded,
like that Dantesque Ulysses, the one possession of
a love * to qual dovea Penelope far lieta.^ The record
of a journey so planned, at the crowning moment of
his maturity, by a man of Goethe's genius, necessarily
interests us even more as biography than as travel;
and it is as biography, not as travel, that I propose
to deal with it to-day. And not even, chiefly, as
a narrative of his outward experiences in Italy; but
rather as a document, almost unique in its kind, of the
psychical history of a great poet during the central
crisis of his life. Let me only add, that the materials
available for that* purpose have been within the last years
notably increased. The work called the Itatieniscke
Reise was worked up by Goethe, thirty years after the
journey itself, from the journals and letters written
at the time A large number of the originals he then
destroyed. But the valuable Joimud sent to Frau
von Stein and a number of the letters to Herder
were happily preserved^ and have now been issued

HERFORD 277

by the Goetlie-GeselLschaft^ admirably edited by Erich
Schmidt.

Italy bunt upon Groethe like a revelation. To
describe his transport during the first weeks, nay,
months, of his sojourn, this disciple of Spinoza in-
stinctively borrows the theological phrases of the
converted sinner.

^ The scales fall from my eyes. He who is plunged
in night takes twilight for dawn, and a grey day for
a bright one ; but what is that when the sun rises ' ?
Certainly, out of Rome one has no conception how one
is here put to school. One must, as it were, be born
?igain, and one looks back on one's former ideal as at
shoes one wore as a child K I may be the same man
still, but I believe I am changed to my inmost marrow K'

Still more explicitly a week later : ^ The new birth
which is transforming me from the core outwards,
still proceeds. I expected to learn something here;
but that I should so go back to school, that I should
have to unlearn, nay, to learn anew, so much I did not
expect. Now I am convinced of it, and have com-
pletely surrendered, and the more I have to repudiate
myself, the more I rejoice.^

And a year later, in language less flushed with the
ardour of first impressions : ' Ail that I learned, con-
ceived or thought in Germany, is to what I am learning
now^ as the rind of the tree to the kernel of its fruit.
I have no words to express the quiet alert joyousness
with which I now begin to contemplate works of art ^.^

^ ItaUBeiae,JtaL 4, 1787 ; Tagebueh, Sept 30, 1786 (ed. E. Schmidt,
p. 198).

• Ibid., Dec X3, 1786. " Dec a, 1786.

* From the tetcihing of Heinrioh Meyer. ' Dec as, 1787.

r

r

278 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

Expressions such as these make it excusable to regard
the Italian journey as a still more significant turning-
point in Goethe's life than it really was. L^end loves
the sudden conversion, pedantry the well-defined epoch,
and the large sinuosities of Goethe's career have been
apt to acquire a certain angularity under their manipula-
tion. In England, at least, it is not uncommon to hear
language which suggests that the Italian journey was
the terminus ad quern of his relations with naturalistic
or realistic art, the terminus a quo of his strivings after
the antique and the ideal. It would be truer to say
that Italy, by bringing the antique in its living reality
before his eyes, not only fulfilled the cherished dream
of years, but finally delivered him from a haunting
phantom of the antique, more antique than antiquity
itself, and thus restored him to the company of the
great poetic realists, his true kindred, from which that
phantom had beckoned him away. Both these distinct
if not antagonistic effects, the fulfilment of the dream
and the laying of the phantom, are clearly to be read
in Groethe's narrative, and have to be borne in mind in
studying his mental deportment as this new world
sweeps in upon him.

It was the /ulfilment of a dream^ Sixteen years
before he saw the ApoQo or the Paestum temple,
Goethe had been led by Herder at Strassburg into the
glorious thraldom of Greek poetry. At Wetdar, in
1772, he found a refuge in Homer from hopeless love,
installed himself in the palaces of Pindar and Plato, and
wrote letters to Herder about them which throb and
tingle with an ecstasy poured forth with the unreserve
of twenty-three^ — an ecstasy not yet in the least

> To Herder (July, ^n^\ Hirzel-Bemays, Dtrjunge Chethtj i. 307.

J

HERFORD 279

incompatible with an equal fervour for the Gothic
glories of Strassburg^ which his little pamphlet ^Von
deutscher Baukunst^ glowingly interpreted to the world
in the following year : ^ O to be Alcibiades for a day
and a night and then die ^ ! ^ he cries^ yearning to have
met Socrates face to face. Even now, however, he is
full of zest to turn his Greek knowledge into action,
to master art as well as facts, and weld matter into new
shape as well as luxuriate in sensation. ' An artist is
nothing so long as his hands do not work and shape ^Z
At Weimar this bent found expression, not only in
the repeated workings and shapings of his own poetry,
but in a peculiar attraction to Greek plastic art.
Winckelmann had traced the evolution of Greek
sculpture, so far as this was possible without visiting
Greece, and given a penetrating analysis of its aesthetic
qualities. Goethe was, on the observant and intellectual
side of his nature, deeply akin to Winckelmann, a kin-
ship which gives a fraternal intimacy of appreciation
to the life he subsequently wrote of him^; and the
ideas of Winckelmann determined, during the whole
of his first eleven years at Weimar, his relation to the
antique. Phidias and Scopas and the unknown hewer
of the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere appealed to
his delight in plastic expression, but they appealed
as through a glass, darkly, in woodcut and plaster-cast.
Face to face their creations could be studied, out of
their native land, only in Rome. The deepnseated
veracity of Goethe's nature chafed at this blurred half-
knowledge of the beauty he divined, and towards Rome,

IkTJfwnQt QoeShe (end of 177 x), L 303. ' Ibid^ i. 308.

' Cf. e.g. his naive reproof of Winckelmann's hatred of philo-
sophers. WinMmann : PhUouphie (Hempel ed., xxviii. 9x9).

28o GOETHE'S ITAUAN JOURNEY

for the greater part of these eleven years, with growing
tenacity and maturing resolve, his heart and his eyes
were set. Desire is an inadequate word for the gravita-
tion which impels a man of tiiis stamp to get out of the
region of notions into the region of direct experience, —
of intuition, — of Anschauung. To gratify that impulse
is not, for such a man, to indulge in a luxury, but to
overcome a disease ; and Groethe^s state during the last
years before his journey was full of morbid symptoms.
He could not endure to open a Latin author or to look
on an Italian landscape ; Herder rallied him with get*
ting all his Latin from Spinoza, because he shrank from
the sight of any other. ^ Had I not carried out the
resolve to make this journey,^ he wrote to Frau von
Stein from Venice, * I should have gone mad.' * In every
great parting there lies a germ of madness,' he wrote
later, on the eve of his return home; and the words
were true now, for his love to the unknown land had
the poignancy of remembered loss. And Italy brought
him instant relief. It brought him the full sensible
experience of what he had imperfectly divined ; and in
those rapturous descriptions of his new birth we have
a measure of the gulf which, for him, separated the
imagination fed upon things taught and the imagination
fed upon things seen. ^I have had no wholly new
thought, found nothing wholly strange, but the old
has become so definite, so living, so consecutive, that
it has the effect of novelty. It was as when Pygma*
lion's statue, already endowed with all the being art can
give, at length came to him and said, ^'It is I^.'"
And he goes on to breathe the profound content which
fills him, — the content of one who suddenly finds him-

* Nov. X, X786.

HERFORD 281

self in the world for which he was made, and with
which all his instincts and activities harmonize. Here
at length that fidelity to sense-impressions which dis-
qualified him for all that is fantastic or speculative in
art, found its reward, ^I live here now/ he writes,
' with a clearness and calm which I had for long not
known. My habit of seeing and interpreting all things
as they are, my trust in the light of the eye, my entire
exemption from prejudice, serve me once again right
well, and make me at least supremely happy. Every
day a new and notable object, daily fresh, grandiose
wonderful images, and an entirety long conceived and
dreamed but never grasped with the imagination ^J

But a phantom was laid as well as a dream fulfilled.
In other words, Italy not merely defined and vitalized
his conceptions of the antique but modified and trans-
formed them. Winckelmann had taught Goethe and
his contemporaries to regard the beauty of sculpture as
resting upon the repose and generalization of the forms,
and thus as in its nature opposed to movement and to
character. Expression he explicitly represents as hos-
tile to beauty ; and the highest beauty was to be won
by promiscuously assembling the loveliest lines of a
host of faces, a process which necessarily disintegrates
and shatters expression. Winckelmann, no doubt,
implicitly qualified this position in his dealing with
concrete examples'; but, as usually happens, his
scholars ignored the involuntary inconsistencies of the
master's finer insight, and gave a more unlimited scope
to his dominant teaching. No one can read Goethe^s

* Nov. 10, 1786.

* Cf. the admirable treatment of Winokelmann in Mr, Boean-
qnet'i Hitiory tfJSsOuttef p. 039 1

282 GOETHE^S ITALIAN JOURNEY

Iphigenie without feeling that the ideals of sculpture
have there obtruded themselves, in spite of Lessing,
upon those of drama. The grace of Sophocles is upon
the supple yet finely chiselled verse; but in the con-
ception and shaping of the dramatic matter the repose
and ideal abstraction of form which we still call statu-
esque seems to have been a more controlling inspiration
than the life-like pity and terror of Sophoclean tragedy.
Iphigenie is a noble and pathetic figure, but the pathos
is expressed with a reserve borrowed rather from the
methods of the Greek chisel, as Goethe understood
them, than from those of the Greek pen. She has
been aptly called a Greek Madonna, and Goethe him-
self, standing before the picture of St. Agatha at
Bologna, recognized his heroine in that ideal form,
and resolved to permit her no language which he could
not attribute to the Saint. As is well known, another
saint, but a breathing and human one, was already
faintly recognizable, to Weimar society, in Iphigenie ;
and we can hardly doubt that the sway exercised over
him by a woman of high-bred distinction and intellectu-
ality, calm without coldness, tender without passion,
increased the hold upon him of all in the Greek genius
that was self-controlled, ideal and reposeful, and with-
drew him from the spell of the lyric cry which Antigone
can utter no less than the heroes of Homer. Thus the
passion for the antique which drove him across the
Alps contained an element of illusion, and the joy of
satisfied desire was far transcended, in his immensely
strenuous intellect, by the loftier joy of discovery.

Let us now proceed to watch the steps in this process.
The Italian journey may be regarded as a drama in three
acts, with a prelude. On September 3, 1786, Goethe

HERFORD 283

stole away in the dead of night from Carlsbad^ hurried
over the Brenner, by Verona, Vieenza, Padua, to
Venice ; thence after three weeks' stay, without a pause
by Bologna, Florence, Perugia, to Rome (October 29).
There he spent the following four months, from
October to February — the first act. Towards the
end of February he went south to Naples and Sicily,
thence back to Naples, and again to Rome in June,
1787. The records of the second Roman sojourn, from
June, 1787, to April, 1788, are of the utmost interest
in Goethe's development, though wanting in the
picturesquenes^ and charm which place the descrip-
tions of Naples and Sicily among the most delightful
literature of travel in the world. Throughout these
various phases of his journey Goethe is before all
things an observer. He had come to Italy to get his
eyes upon the things he had dreamed of ; and it was by
getting his eyes upon them that he discovered all the
other things he did not dream of. Imagination was,
in Goethe, we may almost say, a function of the eye ;
and almost all his poetic history is implicitly written in
his ways of using the eye. It is therefore of primary im-
portance to notice what he sees and what he does not see.
Certainly the limitations of Goethe's observing power and
its comprehensiveness are equally striking. Its limita-
tions : for Goethe serenely ignores entire provinces of the
world of Italy which the hardiest modern philistine would
not dare be known to have passed by. Republican and
Christian Rome, mediaeval and Christian Italy, he heeds
not : at Assisi he turns with loathing from the colossal
memorials of St. Francis to feast his eyes on the temple
of Minerva. Byzantine and Gothic architecture are
anathema to him; the man whose wonderful prose

284 GOETHE^S ITALIAN JOURNEY

hymn, thirteen yea,n before, to Strasabw^ Minster had
anticipated Ruskin's equally wonderful chapter on the
Nature of Gothic Architecture, now compares the
dreamlike wonder of SU Mark's to a crab on its back,
and dismisses Gothic at large from his attention. ^ The
rows of miserable statues of saints on stone brackets,'
he says in a passage added in 1816, but doubtless true
enough to his mind in 1786, 'the pillars like bundles of
tobacco-pipes, the pointed pinnacles and petal-points ; —
with these, thank heaven, I have done for ever^ ! ' His
interest in painting begins with the Renascence.
Giotto's frescoes in the Arena at Padua concern him
as little as Fra Angelico's in St. Marco at Florence.
Of Mr. Ruskin's ' three most precious buildings in the
world,' two, St. Mark's at Venice and the Arena, he
thus ignores, or worse. To the third alone, the Sistine
Chapel, he does full justice. History, again, added
attraction for him to no monument or site ; at most,
the spectacle of the Via Sacra, where the roads from the
uttermost points of the world had their meeting-point,
beguiles him for a moment to fancy himself following
the legions to the Weser or the Euphrates, or standing
in the crowd which thronged the Forum on their return.
A generation after Goethe's visit, these defects were
visited on him by the reproaches of two very different
classes of his countrymen at Rome — the Romantics,
who were the first to vindicate the early art of Italy,
and the historical students of the early Republic, who
gathered round Niebuhr.

All these notable things which Goethe passed by
failed, in one way or other, to appeal to his sense of
form* Gothic offended his Hellenist's eye by the

^ ItaL Beige, Nov. 9, 1786.

HERFORD 285

want of repose inherent in its soaring lines ; the pre-
Raphaelite painting by its stiffness and crudity: and
history lay out of the region of Ansckauung altogether.
On the other hand^ the great painters of the Renas-
cence, as well as the sculptors of Greece, and the
architects of Rome, discovered to him for the first
time the possibilities and significance of form in art.
He had long known tiie Belvedere Apollo in plaster-
casts, but when he stands before the marble contours
of the original he passes into one of those accesses of
rapt intuition in which, as Wordsworth says, of another
kind of rapture, ^ the sense goes out/ ' The Apollo,'
he cries, ^ has plucked me out of the actual ^.' Even
the dull imitative symmetries of PaUadio become to
him a revelation of ^ all art and all lifeV He had
hitherto regarded art as ' a faint reflexion of Nature ' ;
now, he writes to Karl August shortly before his
return, it has become a new language to him'. No
wonder that he looks back on the transalpine Egypt
as the formless North. Nothing contributed so power-
fully to develop this sense of form as his persistent
use of the pencil. Goethe's talent for art lay entirely
in his eye, not in his hand, but so powerful was the
impulse derived from the eye to recreate form that the
hand was forced into an activity uncongenial to it.
During the whole of his journey, but especially in the
two Roman sojourns, Goethe drew. In the first,
under the guidance, first of Tischbein, then of Meyer
and Hackert, he sketched from Nature; during the
second winter he spent the best part of his time in

^ Taqtlbfuch^ Cot. 4 (e<L E. Schmidt, p. 139).

' lua, lUiae, Cot. 8, X786W

' Jan. 35, 1788 ; ed. DQntzer ^Hempel, zziy. 915).

r

r

286 GOETHFS ITALIAN JOURNEY

drawing, and later in modelling, the human figure.
His sketches, a selection of which has been published
by the German Goethe-Gesellschaft, have at first sight
a purely pathological interest. In reality, however,
they were simply the rude auxiliary scaffolding to an
educative process which was going on unseen behind.
The painter and the modeller failed to model or to
paint, but combined to train the poet. As M. Cart
expresses it, ' he learnt to draw, not with the pencil^
but, thanks to the pencil, with the pen ^.^ In a formula
of Goethe^s own, he learnt to see with a feeling eye^
and feel with a seeing hand ^.

Plasticity was no doubt the first and greatest gift of
Italy to Gk>ethe. Yet the plastic quality of his later
work is not adequately expressed by the analogies of
sculpture or painting. The figures in Hermann und
Dorothea are at least as delicately chiselled as those
of the Iphiffenie; but the chisel is felt to be a less
appropriate image in their case, and we seek involun-
tarily for analogies to their breathing and supple
delicacy in a totally different region — that in which
the rosebud unfolds into the rose, and the child^s face
is silently moulded into the woman's. I do not mean
merely, what is obvious, that these figures are nearer to
ordinary life than the others, but that the analogies of
organic nature have in the meanwhile taken hold of the
poet's imagination, and shared with those of art in
controlling his eye and determining the quality of his
touch. And this process, like the former, though
it had begun long before, was consummated in Italy.

Very early in his Weimar time Goethe had become

' Theophile Cart, Chethe en Italie, p. 179.
' R^imUche EUgien, v.

HERFORD 287

a keen student of natural history* The paternal
administration of a little German State^ watchfully
bent on exploiting the economic resources of the land,
provided many openings for the study. His official
supervision of the forests led him to botany, of the
mines to mineralogy^. Werther's somewhat abstract
worship of Nature became defined and articulated
into a passionate effort to understand in detail how
the flower grows, and how this goodly frame, the
earth, fitted itself to be the cradle and the home of
man. Weimar smiled at these eccentric pursuits of
its poet, and Schiller, not yet quite ripe for his
friendship, wrote with serious indignation to Komer
of his ' zur Affectation getriebene Attachement an die
Natur,^ — the infantine simplicity of understanding which
permitted him to abandon himself to his five senses
and dabble in herbs and mineralogy^. To such
dabbling Italy offered a host of new seductions ; and
the eagerness of the pilgrim to gaze on the shrine of
ancient art did not in the smallest degree check his
alert observation wherever he went of plants and soils.
Lists of minerals diversify the praises of Palladio and
the passionate words of love in the vivacious Journal
which the ^ Great Child ' sent home to Charlotte von
Stein. At Palermo he goes out for a quiet morning's
work at his Odyssean tragedy of Natmkaaj but the
marvels of strange plant life in the public garden put
to flight his vision of the garden of Alcinous. And
on his return to Rome even the tapestries from

^ This and much more ib set forth in a lominoua page of Scherer,
Oeach, cL d. LiL, p. 546.

* Aug. 13, Z787 (cit. Koberstein, Qnmdiin d. Qnch, d, deutschen
NaL-Litttrahur, iy. 974 n.^

a88 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

Raphael's cartoons hardly persuade him to forget the
lava-streams of Naples from which he had with
difficulty torn himself away.

To the purely literary student of Groethe these
activities are apt to appear more or less idle divagations
from his proper work^ just as scientific specialists have
often disdained them as incompetent intrusions upon
their own. Tet it may be questioned whether the
profoundest instincts of Goethe's mind are not more
transparently legible in his study of nature than in
his study of art. In that study the bias of prejudice,
the bias of system, which disturb his serene apprecia-
tion when confronted with Gbthic or pre-Raphaelite
beauty, had far less place; there, above all, he
exercised that gift which the maturer Schiller beauti-
fully described in the analysis of Goethe's mind which
opened their correspondence and sealed their friend-
ship : ^ Your observant gaze, der so siiU und rein auf
den Dingen ruhty never exposes you to the danger of
those vagaries in which both speculation and the
imagination which follows its own lead alone so easily
go astray. In your veracious intuition all that analysis
toils to discover, lies entire ^.' To Goethe himself his
acquisitions in natural science seemed to fall into
their places in his mind, like new individual utterances
of an intellect whose scope and cast he thoroughly
understood. ^However much I find that is new,' he
had written to Frau von Stein ^, ^I yet find nothing
unexpected; everything fits in and joins itself on,
because I have no system.' We know from countless

* Bri^fiMchsel, i. 6, Aug. 93, 1794.

* An Frau y. Stein, ii. 331. Qf. the same phrase used of his art
studies, Ital. B$i8e (Hempel ed., zxiv. 393).

HERFORD 289

utterances what system meant to Goethe — the ^ theory '
which is always * grey ' while * life ^ is always ^ green ' ;
or as one of his bitterest epigrams has it^ the wooden
cross whose only function is to crucify a linng things
Goetiie had no system, no rigid classification agamst
the barriers of which new experiences might jostle, to
the system^s detriment or, too probably, their own;
but he had what Bacon called an anticipation of
Nature, a way of thinking about Nature which over
a wide field of phenomena corresponded with the way
in which Nature herself thinks. Throughout Nature
he anticipates organic unity; complete isolation,
ultimate discrepancy, exist only as figments for his
mind. No doubt Goethe at times pursued this antici-
pation where it did not hold, as in his vain onslaught
on Newton^s P/affischer Ein/all of dividing the prim-
eval unity of light into seven ^; no doubt it led him
at other times only to such a half-truth as the theory
of the metamorphosis of plants. Yet his half-truths
were but rash formulations of conceptions which the
whole course of nineteenth-century discovery has
elaborated and defined, and his recognition of the
skull as an expanded vertebra was itself a discovery
of the first rank. He delights to trace organic
affinities in the inorganic world. The weather polar-
izes itself into recurring antithesis of wet days and
fine, his own poetic faculty has five or sevep day
cycles of alternate production and reposed ^I must

' Eptgrammej So. ' ^enien (Hempel, iii. 952^.

' ' Sonst hatte ich einen gewissen Cyklus Ton fOnf oder sieben
Tagen, worin ioh die BesehAftigungen vertbeilte ; da konnie ich
unglaublich viel leisten/ 1827. Gespr. vi. 164 (quoted hj R. M.
Meyer in a fine and suggestive article, ' Ooethe's Art zu arbeiten/
Q. J.jXiy. 179),

U

290 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

watch more closely/ he writes in the Diary of 1780,
*the circle which revolves in me of good and bad
days. Invention^ execution, arrangement, all revolve
in a r^ular cycle — ^gaiety, gloom, strength, elasticity,
weakness, desire, likewise. As I live very r^ularly
the course is not interrupted, and I must get dear in
what periods and order I revolve round myself^/ And
as he interprets the material and the intellectual worlds
on the same analogies, so he recognizes no final
division between them; with his master Herder he
begins the history of man with that of the planet '. Few
travellers, and fewer poets, in his day apprehended with
so keen a zest the influences of physical environment ;
of soil upon plant life, of site upon the conformation
of towns. It must be allowed that he betrayed the
weak side of this particular zest in the famous letter in
which he gravely took Charlotte von Stein to task,
in the depths of her anger and grief at his union with
Christiane Vulpius, for over-exciting her passions with
coffee*.

The central conception upon which all Goethe's
interrogations of organic nature converge is what he
calls the type. Penetrated with the instinct of evolu*
tion, he feels out in each individual specimen the
elements which attach it to the life of all other living
things ^. The crowning moment of his botanic studies
is not the discovery of some rare species, but the day
when he can report to Frau von Stein that he is on

^ Tag^hwhy L iia ; quoted by Keyer, tcs.

* Herder's Idem gur PhUoaophie der G€9chieMe der Menschheit (1787),
which Goethe read in Italy.

' Letters to Frau t. Stein, ed. SchOU, ii. 364.

* Jiai, Reiae, May 17, 1787.

HERFORD 291

the point of finding the grand type of all plants — the
Urpjlanze, * a marvel which Nature herself might envy
me/ But the type is not^ in Goethe^s hands^ isolated
from the multiplicity of single plants. It is rather
a sort of intellectual nucleus^ about which the impres-
sions of the individual plant-world in all their concrete
richness spontaneously arrange themselves in his mind,
so that his intuition of the concrete individual has no
sooner liberated the typical elements than these are
caught and converted back into intuition, the concrete
living thing appearing to him clothed as it were in its
affinities, closely inwoven with the images of its kindred
forms, and of the gradual phases of its growth. It was
the intensity of this process in Goethe which made
it impossible for him to believe that anything was
ultimately isolated. This is what a scientific critic, in,
Goethe's last years (1822), celebrated as his Gegen^
standliches Denken, a phrase which the old poet seized
upon with undisguised pleasure, explaining it to mean
that his thought did not detach itself from the con-
crete objects, their impressions being absorbed into
and penetrated by it, so that his intuition was itself
thought, his thinking intuition ^. It went along vrith
this 'objectivity of mind,' that his way of getting to
the typical elements was not a despotic construction of
them out of the data at hand, but a watching for the
fruitful instances, for what, in an admirable phrase,
he called the pregnant points of experience ^.

^ Hence his characteristie difference with Schiller, who took the
Urjiflanee to he an * Idee,* while Goethe insisted that it was an
* Er/ahrung.'

' Beaondre FSrderung durch ein eiwdgee ffeittreiekes Wort, z8aa. Hempel
ed.y zzYii. 351 f.

U 2

292 GOETHE^S ITALIAN JOURNEY

^I never rest until I find den prdgnanten Punkt,
from which many conclusions can be derived, or rather,
which spontaneously begets and lays before me conclu-
sions which I with careful fidelity gather up/ So, with
benign Olympian egoism, Gk>ethe expounds himself.
This process of gathering up the typical elements at
the point where they are most richly stored is not to
be confounded with that which simply abstracts from
a number of individuals what they have in common,
arriving at a series of generic qualities. That is
a process valuable in logic, but not very instructive in
the study of living oi^nisms* A man who tried to
arrive at the typical Englishman by eliminating, one by
one, all the qualities in which Englishmen differ, would
find in the crucible at the end of the process no John
Bull, but an impalpable phantom of a man without
probably so much as a taste for roast-beef to define
him. Probably enough, too, it would turn out that no
complete light would be thrown on the English type by
the most exhaustive analysis of the commonplace English-
man ; that originality, far from being an out-of-the-way
nook occupied by mere vagaries and eccentricities, was
often the haunt in which the inmost secrets of national
life were written large, and could be read plain ; the
pregnant place, in Goethe^s phrase, which spontaneously
begets and brings forth large conclusions ; so that we
should understand the common Englishman himadf
better by fathoming Shakespeare than by fathoming
John Smith. To reach the tj^ in this way demands
not merely an analytic comparison of specimens, but,
above all, the brooding penetrative interpretation of,
it may be, just those specimens which seem to have
individual stuff in them, and are apt to be cast aside as

HERFORD 293

anomalies. And this was Goethe's procedure; this
was the inveterate habit of his mind. The famous
instance of the intermaxillary bone need only be men-
tioned : he himself compares with this Gegenstdndliches
Denken his equally Gegenstdndliche Dichtung. His
finest lyrics were occasional poems, not merely sug-
gested by a particular occurrence, but retaining the very
individual stuff, so to speak, of the occurrence intact,
merely lifted to the highest level of expressive speech,
and thereby necessarily brought into relation with
universal experience, since this is what supreme ex-
pression means. He himself notices how it was said of
his lyrics that each contained something individual —
etwa9 Eigenea. An old traditional story took pos-
session of him ; he bore it about with him at times for
forty or fifty years, not as an inert mental deposit, but
alive and quick in the imagination, continuously trans-
formed, but without suffering change, ripening towards
a purer form and more decisive expression ^. So it was
with the great ballads of '97 — Die Braut van Korintk
and Der Gatt und die Bajadere. This imaginative
interpretation of particulars differs from a mere gene-
ralization of them, as the flower in the crannied wall
seen in the light of what it is, ^ root and all, and all in
aU,' differs from an abstract exposition of pantheism ;
or, as Millet's wonderful creation The Sower—' gaunt,
cadaverous, and thin under his livery of misery, yet
holding life in his large hand, — he who has nothing
scattering broadcast on the earth the bread of the
future'— differs from the blurred abstraction which
Mr. Oalton might obtain from the combined photo-
graphs of all the sowers that ever lived.

' Btmmdire FSrderung, 9te., u. s^ p. 353.

294 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

•

It was probably in his dealings with natural science
that Goethe first became vividly conscious of his own
method. But it reacted in Rome upon his interpre-
tation of art, and thence upon his ideals of style. The
Italian journals show us the former process as it goes on^
the Roman Elegies exhibit the latter complete. He had
arrived in Rome^ as we saw, imbued with the conception
which Winckelmann had made general, that the essence
of antique art was a calm and abstract beauty, to which
expression and movement were, as such, hostile. So pre-
pared, it was not unnatural that his wholly untrained
eye, ardent to discover that harmonious calm, had at
first gazed with ecstasy on the insipid, and held him
spellbound for a week in the Palladian desert of V icenza.
At Rome, too, he found Winckelmann's teaching still
dominant among his scholars, with its least profitable
elements exaggerated and its undeveloped germs of
truth suppressed. During his first sojourn he was
entirely a pupil in the hands of these accomplished
artists, and too much their inferior in artistic sensibility
to criticize their artistic methods. But he was already
unconsciously gathering, by long days of delighted
study in the Sistine Chapel, material for a different
judgement; and when in the summer of 1787 he
returned to Rome, and plunged with boundless zest into
his art studies, his attitude was far more critical.
Bungler as he remained in all the executive processes
of art, he was now something more than an amateur
in the training of the eye, and his close and familiar
intercourse with the organic life of nature, his sym-
pathetic understanding of leaf and flower, and of the
structure of the human body, opened to him a way of
approaching art to which none of his artist friends had

HERFORD 295

in any degree access. Goethe^s complete absence of
pretension gave these merits their full weight in the
society of Rome^ from which he now affected a less
severe seclusion than at first. Younger men gathered
about him^ fell under his spell, underwent his benign
moulding and formative power, became incipient dis-
ciples. Already in August we find him hitting out
what he calls a new principle of art interpretation, and
contrasting it with that of ^the artists.^ He has
begun to model the human figure; or, as his ardour
phrases it : ^ Now, at last the A and X2 of all known
things, the human figure, has got hold of me, and I of
it, and I say : ^^ Lord, I will not leave go of thee, except
thou bless me, though I should wrestle myself lame.''
I have come upon a thought which simplifies many
things for me. It comes to this, that my indomitable
study of Nature, my anxious toil in comparative ana-
tomy, enable me now to see much as a whole in Nature
and in the antique, which the artists with difficulty dis-
cover piecemeal, and what they do discover, they cannot
communicate to others \' On September 3 he wrote:
^ My art studies make great progress, my principle fits
everywhere and interprets everything.' Finally, on Sep-
tember 6, more explicitly : ' So much is certain : the old
artists had as complete a knowledge of Nature, and as
definite an idea of what can be represented and how it
must be represented, as Homer had. These great works
of art were at the same time supreme works of Nature,
produced by men according to just and natural laws.
All that is arbitrary or fantastic falls away ; here is neces-
sity, here is God.' The ideas which he here conveys in
allusion and epitome are probably those which he after-

^ /tal. 126t0e, AugUBt 93, 1787.

296 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

wards unfolded in the introduction to the Propylaen, the
short-lived effort of the prophets of art in Weimar to
preach their gospel to a deaf nation ^. There he contrasts
two methods of artistic production. ^ An artist may^ by
instinct and taste^ practice and experiment^ succeed in
eliciting the beautiful aspect of things, select what is
best from the good he finds, and produce at least
a pleasing effect; or he may (which is far rarer in
modem times) penetrate into the depth of Nature and
into the depths of his own heart, so as not only to
produce what is superficially effective, but, vying with
Nature, to create an intellectual organism, and give the
work of art a content and a form by which it seems
natural and supernatural at once^.' Clearly, the former
procedure of arbitrarily selecting and contriving beauti-
ful forms is that piecemeal study which he branded
in the Journal, and which we know to have been taught
by Raphael Mengs. It was the procedure inevitably
suggested by a theory which would throw over the
higher as well as the lower truthfulness of art in a blind
pursuit of beautiful form* For a mere compilation of
beautiful forms cannot, save by accident, have expres-
sion, any more than a voliune of elegant extracts^
however ingeniously pieced together, can make a poem.
Goethe never to the end completely overcame Winckel-
mann's antitbesb between beauty and expression ; but
a man who had for yea» been »adingin the dngle
organism the signs of the type, and had lately achieved
as he thought a momentous discovery in the process,

^ This suggestion is made by O. Hamack: *Goethe*a Kunst-
aDscbauung in ihrer Bedentung fQr die Gegenwart,' Gf. J., zv. 194.

' Einleitung in die i^qpyMen, Hempel ed., xxviii. 13. Cf, Har-
nack, U.5., p. 187 f.

HERFORD 297

was not likdy to wholly ignore the aesthetic value of
expression. And now came his eager studies of the
human figure. From two totally different directions,
through osteology and antique sculpture, he had con-
verged upon this study; now it became the meeting-
point at which his presuppositions in classic art and in
organic science met and flashed through both regions
of his thought with an electric illumination. The
creation of a statue became for him now akin to that
searching interpretation of the particular organism by
the aid of the fullest knowledge and the subtlest insight,
which makes every fibre in it significant and expressive*
The statue was for him analogous to those pregnant
paints of organic nature in which the type reveals itself
without being extorted — an organism expressive in
every contour of the permanent and persistent qualities
and relationships of man.

It was inevitable that when his new principle had
thus unlocked for him, as he thought, the secrets of
sculpture, he should look with other eyes upon his own
art of poetry. The poet, like the sculptor, had not to
pursue an abstract ideal of beauty, and assemble beauti-
ful forms from all sources, but to reveal the typical in
Nature. In this revelatbn Goethe now found the
essence of style. In the profound and luminous little
essay, written soon after his return, Ein/ache Nach-
ahmung der Natur, Manier, StiP, he distinguished under
these names three phases in the artistic rendering of
form. By the ^ simple imitation of Nature ' he under-
stood the accurate copying of forms by one without
insight into their origin and structure. As soon, how-
ever, as the detail becomes complex and minute, as In

^ Hempel ed., xziv. 595 t

298 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

drawing a tree or a pebbly brook, accurate imitation
tends to give way to some kind of convention^ in the
choice of which the artist betrays his own idiosyncrasy ;
in Goethe's words, he ' devises a language of his own
to render what he has seen, a language in which the
mind of the speaker is directly expressed and defined.
And just as the opinions entertained on moral questions
group and shape themselves differently in every thinking
spirit, so every artist of this class will see, apprehend
and imitate the world in a different way.' Thus arises
what Goethe calls Mannerism. ^But if the artist, by
imitating Nature, by striving to find a universal ex-
pression for it, by exact and profound study of the
objects themselves, finally attains to an exact and ever
exacter knowledge of the qualities of things and the
mode of their existence, so that he surveys the whole
series of forms, and can range together and imitate the
various characteristic shapes, then what he achieves, if
he achieves his utmost, and what, if achieved, sets his
work on a level with the highest efforts of man, is Style,'
In this interesting passage Goethe distinguishes what
we might otherwise call a conventional treatment of
things (Mannerism) from two modes, a lower and
a higher, of realism. Simple imitation, he says,
works, as it were, in the vestibule of Style. The
more faithfully it goes to work, the more calmly it
perceives, the more quietly it imitates, the more it
accustoms itself to think about what it sees — viz. to
compare what is similar to separate and what is unlike,
and range single objects under universal points of view
— the more worthy it will become to cross the threshold
of the sanctuary of style.

It is easy from this passage to understand why

HERFORD 299

Goethe in Italy wrestled so passionately with the fate
which^ otherwise so bountiful^ had denied him the
artist's forming hand. To shape the marble or the clay
would alone have completely solved the problem of the
artist as he now, under the spell of plastic art, under-
stood it. Again and again, in the Journal and Letters,
he scornfully turns aside from the futility of words,
abstract sounds which only by an indirect and uncer-
tain process bring the thing to the eye.

' But of a single oraft Master I am, or wellnigh :

Writing German. And thus I, hapless poet, for ever
Shaping unshapeable stuff, squander my life and my a^t^'

In words, however, and German words, fate com-
pelled him to work. Words were a pis-aller, and he
strove to make them do, as far as they might, the work
of plastic form. The Roman Elegies are reliefs carved
in ivory and glowing in mellow sunlight. With the
dull skies of the North he has left behind its featureless
forms ; we are in a world teeming with light and colour,
and where the light is caught and flashed back from the
clear-cut profiles of gods and men. The Rome in which
we find ourselves is not the Rome of the antiquarian or
the tourist ; not a church, not a picture meets the eye,
not one familiar outline of the historic monuments
shapes itself under the poet's pen ; the stones of Rome
are silent in spite of his appeal ; but from the ruined or
vanished temples the gods of the ancient world have
come forth, their immortal youth fresh upon them as
in the days of Phidias and Praxiteles, unconscious of
the eighteen centuries of Christendom, unconscious of

^ Epigramme 99 ; qf. 77. The reasons adduced for understanding
' den schlechtesten Stoff ' merely of the subject of his epigrams are
not to me convincing.

I

300 GOETHE^S ITALIAN JOURNEY

the faded figments which pseudo-classicism had put in
their place^ receive the poet^s homage, mingle in his
story and serve as symbols for his thought. Goethe's
neo-paganism is equally distinct from that of Shelley
and of Pope. The deities of Twickenham are the ex-
piring pulsations of Greek myth, under the stress of
the extruding pressure which all ethereal things under-
went in the grip of the Liatin tongue, where Ceres
meant com and Bacchus wine. The gods of Shelley,
on the other hand, still glow and tremble with the vital
energies of which myth is born ; they are of the kindred
of the sun and dawn, divine presences detected through
the shimmering woof of Nature, but not yet completely
defined with human form. Goethe's deep-seated in-
stinct for harmonious completeness and sensuous definite-
ness, drew him to the intervening epoch in which the
mythic tradition, detached from ail mystic suggestion
but not yet dissipated into phrase and fable, found ex-
pression under the chisel of the great sculptors in ideal
human forms. For him, as for them, the human body
is (in the words of Oitilie) the nearest likeness of the
divine ; and of the antique representations of it he had
written from Rome in words already quoted, ^ there is
necessity, there is God.' Human enough these gods of
Goethe certainly are ; but their humanity clothes itself
in unfailing grace. Olympus is not far above the earth,
and it does not surprise us to find the gods the poet's
guests in his Roman studio. He looks round the room
with its treasured trophies of Roman art-shops, and it
becomes a Pantheon before his eyes: —

'Jupiter's godlike brow is bent, and Juno's is lifted,

Phoebus ApoUo steps forth, shaking his crownet of curls ;
Downward cast and austere is the gaze of Pallas, and sprightly
Mercury shoots side-looks sparkling with malice and charm.

HERFORD 301

But Cytherea uplifts to Bacclms the dreamingi the tender,
Eyes that with blissful desire still in the marble are moist ^'

Or^ instead of their being his guest^ he inToluntarily
finds himself theirs. Surely neo-pagan rapture never
found more intense expression than in the close of the
seventh El^y^ vrhere he dreams himself strayed into
Olylnpus ; —

' May a mortal partake such bliss ? Am I dreaming ? or is it

Thine Olympus indeed, O father Zeus, that I tread?
Ah me I hero I lie, in supplication uplifting

Unto thy knees my hands ; Jupiter Xenius, hear I
How I entered I know not ; but Hebe my steps as I wander'd

Tum'd aside, and led, clasping my hand, to thy halls.
Hadst thou sent her to bring some hero, haply, before thee ?

Was the fair one at fault ? Pardon I Her fault be my gain !

Art thou the god of the guest and of them that welcome him ?

then

Thrust not thine own guest-friend back from Olympus to earth I

Bear with me, Zeus I And at last may Hermes, tranquilly

leading,

Guide me, by Gestius* tomb, down to the homes of the dead I '

Byron's ^ O Rome^ my country ! city of my soul ! '
expresses a passion as ardent as Goethe's ; but in him
the passion breaks forth as a thrilling l}rrical cry;
Goethe's masterful art constrains it into living human
or godlike shapes. The human form has become for
him, we may almost say^ not only the supreme but
wellnigh the only adequate language of art; whatever
he has to say he strives to render in the idioms of this
tongue. Not only the Roman Elegies^ but the few
poems actually composed in Italy, illustrate this. That
love opens the eyes to the splendour and beauty and
colour of the natural world is a common enough poetic
idea: notice how Goethe expresses it in the brilliant

^ BSm, Eltgim^ zi.

302 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

little apologue^mor als Landschaftsmaler. The poet was
sitting at dawn upon a crag, gazing fixedly on the morn-
ing mist, which spread like a grey canvas over the land-
scape. A boy came and stood at his side. ^ '^ Why do
you gaze thus idly on the empty canvas ? '^ I will show
you how to paint. And he stretched out his finger,
that was ruddy as a rose, and began to draw on the
broad sheet. Aloft he drew a beautiful sun, which
glittered dazzling in my eyes ; then he made the clouds
a golden edge, and sunbeams breaking through the
clouds ; then the delicate crests of luxuriant trees, the
hills rising boldly one behind another; then, below,
water that seemed to glitter in the sun, seemed to babble
under the steep brink. Ah, and there stood flowers by
the brook, and there were hues on the meadow, gold
and pearl and purple and green, all like emerald and
carbuncle ! Overhead in clear and pure enamel the sky,
and the blue hills far and further; so that utterly
ravished and new-bom I gazed, now at the painter, now
at his work. But the hardest remains. Then he drew
again with pointed finger a little wood, and right at the
end, where the sunlight blazed on the ground, a bewitch-
ing maiden, f eatly formed and daintily clad, fresh cheeks
under brown locks, and the cheeks were of like colour
with the finger that drew them. ^' O you boy ! *' I cried,
^* what master has taken you to school ? '^ While I j^t
spoke, lo, a breath of wind wakes and stirs the tree-tops,
ruflSes all the wavelets of the brook, fills the perfect
maiden^s veil, and what made me more marvel as I
marvelled, the maiden begins to move her foot, steps
forth, and approaches the spot where I am sitting with
my wilful master. And when all was moving, trees and
brook and flowers and veil, and the dainty foot of the

HERFORD 303

fairest one^ do you imagine that I upon my rock^ like
a rock, sat still ? '

Some three years before the date of this poem, and
two before he went to Italy, Goethe had written the
yet more famous Zueignungy now prefixed to the entire
series of his poems. It is interesting to contrast them.
Here too an abstract thought about art is conveyed
through an aUegory. The German language contains
no verses of more finished loveliness than these, but
how different is the method ! Instead of the brief
statement of the situation at the outset — the poet at
dawn on his rock, the mist, the boy — we have three
stanzas of description : — ^the poet wakened from sleep,
climbing the hillside to his upland hut, his joy in the
flowers by the way, then the river and the mists and
the sun breaking through; then at length amid the
dazzling vapours, the godlike form of poetic Truth.
A dialogue ensues; — confession, worship on the one
side, counsel, playful irony on the other : finally, near
the close she lays in his hands a veil and tells him in
two stanzas more how to use it. Evidently here Goethe
has not yet learnt to suspect the futility of words which
he was to declare so peremptorily in Italy. Had this
been written shortly after his journey instead of shortly
before it, how differently that throwing of the veil — the
one fragment of action which the poem contains —
would have been related to the scale of the whole!
We should not have been told how the veil would turn
the world into poetry for the poet; we should have
seen it flung and watched that transformation going
on before our eyes, as we watch the landscape growing
under the hand of Amor.

But this is not the only interesting point of com-

304 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

pariflon. Italy has given Ooetbe a totally new apprehen-
sion of colour, of definiteness in form* The Amcr ah
Landschaftsmaler was written in the intervals of a
sketching tour amid the autumnal splendour of the woods
of Frascati. A letter of nearly the same date as the
poem (November 24, 1787) brings this vividly home to us.
* There is a brilliance and at the same time a harmony,
a graduation in the colouring of the whole, of which in
the North we have no conception. With you everjrthing
is either hard or dull, gay or monotonous.' Brilliant
and harmonious too is his own landscape in the Amor ;
it has the clear bright colouring of RaphaeFs frescoes
in the Farnesina, with their deep blue background, like
blue hills and pellucid enamelled sky. The Zueignung
landscape has the quite different charm of the North ;
the clear outlines grow delicately uncertain ; mists lie
low along the river and wander in fantastic drifts and
eddies along the mountain side, or make a dazzling vdl
of sheen for the sun : it is not the brilliance of the
blofwotnB which BtrikeB him, but their dewy freshness.
And most significantly of all, the delight in a nebulous
and tremulous beauty thus communicated to the land*
scape is embodied also in the image which figures the
relation of poetry to truth ; it is not the wonder-working
rosy finger of Amor, glorifying the blank canvas with
colour, but a veil, — ^not a veil like the maiden's to float
gracefully in the breeze, but one 'of morning vapour
woven and radiant sunlight,' that softens and modulates
the harshness of actuality, allays the throb of passion,
and makes day lovely and night fair.

It is not, however, in the Amor or the Roman Elegies,
brilliantly plastic as they are, that we find the most
enduring artistic fruit of his Italian journey. The

HERFORD 305

sensuous splendour of the Italian world, culminating in
the glory of the human form revealed in antique sculp-
ture, for a time hurried him along paths which were not
absolutely his own. He returned home after twenty
months' absence, full of the deep content of one who has
stilled the intellectual hunger of years, to find a chilly
welcome, in the little German court from which he had
fled. Weimar had not quite forgiven his disappearance :
it retailed scandalous stories of his habits, and grudged
him his well-salaried leisure ; he on his part chafed at
the constraints of German Sitte, and remembered the
free Bohemian camaraderie of the studios of Rome.
His literary prestige itself was threatened. When the
MSS. of Iphigenie and of EgtnofUj laboriously rewritten,
reached Weimar from Rome, his friends admitted their
merit but regretted the author of Werther ; and now all
the youthful impetuosity of genius which the author of
^ Werther had flung from him in its pages was renewed

\ in the young poet of the RobberSy who had come to
Weimar in Goethe's absence, and had moreover empha-
\ tically disapproved of the Egmont. Not without pique

at this Mrant of response, Goethe gave his Roman humour
full bent ; sacrificed with hardly a pang the friendship
of Charlotte von Stein by an informal union with a
burgher's daughter, and wrote of his love as Propertius
and TibuUus had written of theirs, in the aggressively
pagan Roman Elegies. Aggressively pagan Goethe
clearly was in these first years after his return. The
German north was slow to emerge for him from its
mantle of Cimmerian darkness, slow to recover its power
\ of appeal to an eye steeped in the glow of Raphael

^ and of Sicily. And Christianity was not lightly or

soon forgiven its ascetic chastisement of the senses, its

X

\

3o6 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

flagellations of the form that Phidias had caired^ its
monastic sequestrations of beauty^ its tramplings upon
passion. Thirty years later Goethe, though still com-
pletely untouched by Christian theology, was to find a
noble expression for Christian religion as that which
teaches the reverence for what is below us \ But in
1 797 it was rather his humour to tell with incomparable
Man the legend of the betrothed maiden of Corinth who
dies under the ascetic constraints of her Christian
parents, but wins back through the unconquerable
power of love from the grave itself to the embraces of
her unseen and unknown lover ^ !

But Goethe was too great and too deeply rooted in
the mind of his time to be absolutely and completely
the ' old pagan ' he pleasantly called himself. Antiquity
was once for all gone, and to be literally andent was to
fail to be truly antique. The moral consciousness of
the world had been definitely enriched, its horizon

•

enlarged. To feel and think like Propertius — or even
like Plato — in the nineteenth century, is to be something
less than Propertius and something less than Plato;
for 'the ancient civilization,' as the Master of Balliol
has said in an admirable essay^ 'was not impover-
ished, as such a revival of it must be, by ignoring
problems which had not yet been opened up.' Goethe
of all men could not ignore the problems of the modem
world; he was penetrated by them. His deep-rooted
instinct for the organic, which had thrown a new
light for him upon the expressiveness of antique art,
tended yet more inevitably to dissolve the barriers which,
for him, severed the antique, like a sacred precinct, from

> Wilhelm Meister^a Wanderjahrt, Book ii.
* Die BrmU von Korinih.

HERFORD 307

the profane modem world. The pasBionate student of
natural history could not persist in disdaining all flowers
but the rose. And the student of the natural history of
man could not persistently refrain from applying the
new-won wealth of his art to the living organism which
alone he intimately and profoundly knew, the German
burgherdom about him. Many other influences, with
which we are not here concerned, contributed to the
production of Hermann und Dorothea ; the stimulus of
Schiller's friendship, the habituation to epic narrative
gained (under whatever different conditions) in Reineke
Fuchs and WUhelm Meister ; the example of Voss ; and
the exorcism by which F. A. Wolf had banished (1795),
as he and Goethe thought, the great constraining shade
of Homer, and made it possible to step out and walk in
the large Homeric way without adventuring to do battle
with a god. We are rather concerned to see how those
two lines of Goethe's development which we have been
foUowing out — his discipline in Greek Art and in
organic nature, after meeting in his theory of criticism
and in his theory of style— now, at length, came together
harmoniously blended in his poetry. Goethe himself,
recognizing perhaps most clearly what he had reached
with most toil, declared that all the merits of his epic
were those of sculpture. How much it owes to sculp-
ture is obvious : — the plastic beauty of the forms, the
absence of those critical or reflective divagations which
escape the pen so much more easily than the scalpel,
the subordination of effects of colour to those of contour
and mass. And the entire drawing is guided by an
exquisite instinct for the typical, in that kind which
we have seen to characterize Goethe. Hermann and
Dorothea are perfectly individual, yet they are at the

X %

3o8 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

same time prefftiant points in which the life-history of
an endless vista of German manhood and womanhood
may be read. A typical German community, with its
habitual activities and routine, yet everywhere disclosing
the secret of its own persistence, the stuff of heart
and character in which, generation after generation, it
stands rooted, is unfolded before us with the simplest
yet profoundest art, steeped in that implicit poetry which
for Goethe habitually invested the enduring relations of
things. And thesubtlest feeling for environment inspires
the drawing of the human figures of this community,
' Wo $ich nail der Nalar metuMiiA iln- iTnucA nodt erwiM.'

In the simple story of the innkeeper's son, we read
the whole economy of a community firmly planted in
the soil ; we see its orchards and gardens and vine-
yards, we see the burgher's thrift and the watchful eye
of the housewife. And across this thriving community
is thrown, with the finest effect, the wreckage of one
abruptly uprooted and dispersed, while again out of
that wreckage detaches itself the noble figure of
Dorothea, homeless and exiled, but a perpetual well-
spring of all the qualities which give cohesion to society
and build up the home. In drawing of detail too, the
sculpturesque intuition is perBistently blended with
organic feeling : there is a suppleness in the clear forms,
a tenderness in the unhesitating profiles. This la^e
flexible speech impresses on all that enters its embrace
a delicate precision of form, but also elicits everywhere
lubtle suggestions of growth. When Hermann and
Dorothea walk homeward through the cornfields to-
wards the stormy sunset, they are gladdened by the
tall waving com, which almost reaches their tall figures ;

HERFORD 309

the gladness of harvest, and the comeliness of goodly
stature, stealuig upon our imagination from the same
two lines. The stamping horses whose thunder we
hear under the gateway, or which we watch speeding
homeward eager for the stall, while the dust-cloud
springs up under their mighty hoofs, are drawn by
a man who has looked on the glorious fraternal four
of bronze that champ and curvet over the portal of
S. Mark's. Yet, on the other hand, what depths
of patriarchal sentiment, of the feeling that gathers
about the home lands where for unremembered genera-
tions men have sown and reaped and garnered, taking
their life from the earth, and at last laid to rest in it,
— lies in a single utterly simple line : These fields are
ours ; they grow ripe for the morrow^s harvest. Here
those two springs of poetry well up apart ; more often
they blend too intimately for the finest analysis. At
other times their currents meet and mingle without
indistinguishably blending, like the grey Danube and
the green Inn at Passau. Hermann and Dorothea
descend in the gloaming through the vineyard to his
father's house. On the rough unhewn steps her foot
slips and twists; she is near falling. * Swiftly he
spread his arms and supported her; gendy she sank on
his shoulder, breast drooped upon breast, and cheek
upon cheek. So he stood, rigid as a marble image, con-
trolled by resolute will, did not clasp her closer, but
stayed himself against her weight. And so his senses
were filled with his glorious burden, the warmth at her
heart and the balm of her breath exhaled upon his lips,
and he felt the man in him as he bore her womanhood's
heroic stature.' One easily feels the hand of the sculp-
tor in that fine description ; in the precision vrith which

3IO GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

not only profile, but pose, the strain or relaxation of
muscle, are realized, the fearless insistence on weight
and stature, heedless of the Romantic canon which
forbids a heroine to be heavy. Yet, on the other hand,
what breathing vitality, what warmth and fragrance, in
every line !

Let me, finally, in a few sentences, give a somewhat
wider horizon to this study of Goethe's style at the
moment of its maturest perfection. In his later poetry
the exquisite balance between plastic and organic feeling
is somewhat disturbed; under the influence of Schel-
ling, the mysterious and impalpable aspects of oiganic
nature grow more and more dominant in his mind, and
it becomes the office of poetic expression not to strive
to body forth the impalpable, but to suggest it by like-
ness and symbol. Alles Vergdngliche ist nur ein Gleich-
niss — all the vesture of man's thought and speech
becomes but a parable of the eternal infinity of Nature.
Goethe lived in a time when, alike through poetry and
science, the universe of sense and thought was at count-
less points acquiring a new potency of appeal to man.
All things, as Wordsworth said, were speaking ; and the
multitudinous chorus found nowhere so complete an
interpretation as on Goethe's clear harp of divers tones.
Wordsworth and Shelley render certain aspects of
external Nature, the loneliness of the mountains, the
tameless energy of wind, with an intensity which makes
all other Nature poetry pale. But they looked with
cold or uninspired eyes on the whole world of art, on
the mystery of the Gothic vault, the glory of Attic
marble. Except under certain broad and simple
aspects — the patriot, the peasant, the child — ^they were
strange to the world of man. Their ' Nature ' was not

HERFORD 31 r

yet the unendliche Natur, at whose breasts all things in
heaven and earth drink of the springs of life. Words-
worth^s aspiration to tell of man barricaded evermore
within the walls of cities remained an unfulfilled item
in the programme of a recluse ; and Shellejr^s champion
of oppressed humanity hung far aloof from men among
the caverns and precipices of Caucasus* Physical
Nature they spiritualize rather than interpret. Words-
worth has^ like Goethe, the ' quiet eye^^ and sees and
renders with a precision as delicate as his the forms of
things — the daisy's star-shaped shadow on the stone ;
he feels with equal or perhaps greater intensity the
being of the flower^ but he does not, like Goethe, feel
its becoming. Nature for him has something of the
rigidity of his own character. With Shelley, on the con-
trary, the vitality of Nature streams and pulses through
its whole fabric with an intensity which dissolves all
form and structure into light and air, and anticipates
the sk>w aeons of organic change with momentous
, crises of convulsion. Goethe alone is the poet of the

^ Nature that evolves. In this direction, no doubt, we

must also recognize the sources of his limitations. He
was so penetrated with the instinct of harmonious
evolution that he pursued it by too short and simple
paths, arrived too easily at the goal. The mathema-
tician, who lays the concrete totality on the rack of
a disintegratbg analyBW, was as abhorrent to him as
the caricaturist who mutilates the beauty of truth with
burlesque. From the tragic side of life he turned with
an aversion not wholly bom of pity. And tragedy
itself insensibly missed^ in his hands^ the supremest
heights of pity and terror. Faust is not wrung with
the remorse of Othello, and his reconciliation attains

312 GOETHE'S ITALIAN JOURNEY

a harmony more complete^ perhaps, but of a lower kind
than that which we enter through the purifying pity
which the merciless poignancy of Othello's tragedy
inspires. Tet harmony is the last word of art as of
lif e^ the final postulate of religion and philosophy ; and
if Goethe rarely, like Shakespeare, evoked poetry from
the supreme agonies and anarchies of men and states,
if he knew neither the divine anger of Dante nor his
diviner love, and had seen neither the depths of hell nor
the heights of heaven, he yet toiled for two generations
towards the mastery of a world, of which their horizon
encircled but narrow portions, the image of the in-
dwelling reason of the universe slowly growing arti-
culate through the ages in the intellect and imagination,
the ordered knowledge and ideal art of Man.

November i8, 1897.

THE SPANISH ROGUE-STORY

(NOVELA DE Pf CAROS)

THE interest shown in rogues and their ways needs
no expknation ; it is part of the curiosity of one
half of the world to know how the other half lives. The
Oods and Heroes of the Epic, and the Arcadian Shep-
herds of the Idyll, are so far removed from the ordinary
experience of mankind that their magnificent artifi-
ciality palls at last, and the imagination cries out for
some simpler and more natural food. There is a part
of our nature that loves to see and hear men like our-
selves, it may be a little better or a little worse, acting
and speaking as we might act and speak amid in-
finitely varied surroundings. The crafty fox, or jackal,
is the most interesting character in the beast fable;
we cannot respect him, but his versatility excites our
admiration more than the boldness of the lion, the man i
of one virtue. Rejmard is perhaps the oldest and most j
universal n^e or picaro. When he appears upon the
scene our interest revives ; we are not sorry, indeed,
that his mischief sometimes brings him into awkward
positions, but we take comfort the while in the thought
that he is immortal, for we hold him dearer than the

314 THE SPANISH ROGUE-STORY

more virtuous beasts who are by turns his victims
and his tools. But for this he must not be too
wicked, his tricks must be humorous as well as
profitable, for wickedness unadorned is repulsive and
inartistic.

When literature has taken for its province Quicquid
agunt homines^ it finds itself face to face with a
problem ; for there are many things that all men do,
and these are generally uninteresting. It is only
a later age that takes delight in reading about itself
in its more commonplace moods, and studies mankind
through books. We, perhaps, can dispense with plot,
incident, and adventure, and, like Dutch painters,
revel in the exact portraiture of the things of everyday
life, but our remote ancestors had not yet reached this
period of development. An ancient Assyrian KaiU
yard Book or a Byzantine Pride and Prefudice
would probably have excited but little interest
among contemporaries. The tale of the clever thief,
a shadowy rogue-character struggling to emerge from
, his neolithic state, hovers in the dawn of literature.
! In Petronius he appears fully developed for the first
; time; we find him again naked and unashamed in
/ Apuleius ; in the middle ages he becomes supernatural
and figures largely in demonologies, and so he comes
through Rabelais and Dickens right down to our own
time. The very profession of a rogue brings him into
contact with all classes of society, he is always running
away from somebody or after somebody; his dis-
content with the humdrum existence aroimd him
shows a certain originality of mind. Most lives con-
tain some incidents worth telling, but the picaro^s life
is interesting — ^nay, thrilling — throughout. Not only

BUTLER CLARKE

315

is he ever active and busy^ but he sets other characters
in motion and gives rise to new if unpleasant experiences
and situations. With the tremulous delight of con-
scious naughtiness we follow him through scenes which
our respectability would never allow us to visit alone,
and only half-ashamed find ourselves deeply engaged
in some plot against our neighbour's donkey or his
purse. Experience is widened without after-taste of
guilt, the imagination is stimulated and the purpose
of art, not indeed in its highest form, but in a form
which all alike can share, is fulfilled.

Though the rogue is found in every age and climate,
some situations are more favourable to his growth than
others, and he is not everywhere made the subject of
books. Moral standards change so much that he now
figures chiefly in criminal statistics, for the distinction
between picaro and criminal, though very real, is dis-
regarded by the law. The picaro is guilty of almost
every crime, yet he is not black-hearted ; above all, he
is no^ hypocrite. He is the irresponsible product of
a state of society, he is primitive man in an artificial
environment.

'. . . the good old rule
SafBoeth him, the simple plan
That they should take who have the power
And they should keep who can/

In order to enjoy his story he must be looked upon
as extra-moral, just as ambassadors and their belong-
ings are by a fiction extra-territorial. This was
understood by the earlier Spanish recorders of his
exploits. The later ones ceased to understand him
aright, they were afraid of their own creation, and are
never tired of repeating that their object is a moral

\

316 THE SPANISH ROGUEJSTORY

one and their hero the incarnation of all that should be
shunned. The plcaro reformed and grown old — a con-
tradiction in terms, for the j^fcoro^ jsever youngs and
is devoid of conscience — is introduced bewailing the
misdeeds of his youth. The happy sense of irre-
sponsibility is gone ; instead of the rogue we have the
vulgar criminal, and excuses are lavished on the in-
excusable. The picarOj then, is a by-product of society,
and his story is a peculiar form of the novel of manners
and adventures. It is generally autobiographical, and
its chief merit, over and above its literary and artistic
worth, lies in the inimitable picture it presents of the
inner life of an age — of a tenth that is submerged but
finds no discomfort in submersion.

In Spain down to the middle of the fifteenth century
literature was an exotic cultivated only at court, in the
cloister, and in the schools. Artificial, mythological,
and obscure, it was addressed to a small class taking
no heed of the people, who sang their ballads of the
Cid and the Moorish vrars despised of literary folk.
The reaction towards nature and reality is marked by
the appearance of the Celestina or TVaffi-comedy of
Calivto and Melibea about the year 1480/ This /o»o
strange book is neither a novel nor yet a play. Though
written from end to end in dialogue, and divided into
twenty-one parts called ^ acts,^ its length and diffuseness
quite unfit it for acting. But it is hardly too much to
say that it contains the germ of all that is original in
the Spanish drama and the Spanish novels of manners
and adventures. The first act — ^by far the largest — is
said to be the work of Rodrigo Cot^of Toledo. The rvc
plot involves a host of minor characters, but the aigu-
ment is simple. Calixto in pursuit of a truant hawk

BUTLER CLARKE 317

comes suddenly on Melibea in her garden. He at once
falls in love, and, with the outspokenness of a Spanish
gallant, declares his passion. Harshly rejected, he re-
turns home and falls into a state bordering upon
despair. He takes into his confidence his servant,
Sempronio, and is persuaded to entrust his case to
Celestina, matchmaker, go-between, quack doctor, and
witch. Sempronio goes to summon her, and we are
introduced to her home and associates, a graphic and
unedifying scene in low life. To Calixto Celestina
stakes her reputation on securing his success in his
suit. Here the original author is said to have left his
work; but so well had he indicated his plot, and so
good a model had he furnished of brisk and natural
dialogue, never till that time attempted in Spanish,
that Fernando de Rojas, who completed the book, was
able to make the remaining twenty acts undistinguish-
able in style from the first. Through these twenty acts
we will not foUow him, partly because of the indelicate
nature of the story, and partly because of its length and
complication due to the vivacious tangle of underplot.
Celestina, disguised as a pedlar, makes her way into
Melibea^s house, wins her confidence, hoodwinks her,
and fulfils her pledge to Calixto. But the witch falls
a victim to poetic justice, murdered in a quarrel among
her gang over their ill-gotten gains. Calixto, surprised
in Melibea's garden, perishes by a fall from the wall,
whereupon the disconsolate lady mounts a tower, and
after bewailing her frailty from its top, dashes herself
to pieces at her father's feet. A long soliloquy by
Pleberio, the father, on the danger of evil associations,
forms the last act.

The success of the Celestina was rapid and great.

3i8 THE SPANISH ROGUE^TORY

It was translated into every literary language — includ-
ing Latin — and has left its mark everywhere. Its hero
and heroine are the very types which we afterwards
meet in the Spanish sword and cloak plays^ and in the
novels of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Romeo and
Juliet are their direct descendants. It is at the same
time one of the first books, after the middle ages, to
take low life as its main theme. Sempronio, Parmeno,
Carlo, Felicia, and the rest, are picaros. Celestina
herself we shall meet over and over again in the rogue-
stories. The material for the long series we are about
to examine was dug by its author or authors, the form
was fixed by Lazarillo de Tormes.

About the middle of the sixteenth century there
appeared in Spain a little black-letter volume of about
a hundred widely printed pages, entitled The Life of
Lazarillo de Tormes and of his Misfortunes and
Adversities. So eagerly was it sought after, first by
the public and afterwards by the Inquisition, that of
the earliest known edition — that of Burgos, 1554 —
only one copy has survived, and the rough little chap-
book, with its coarse woodcuts and many misprints,
is one of the treasures of the Chatsworth Library.
Within the next two years it was thrice reprinted, once
at Alcala, and twice at Antwerp for the benefit of
the Spaniards in the Low Countries. But these editions
are only less rare than the earlier one, for everybody
read it, and the copies were worn away in the pockets
of Spanish soldiers abroad, or thumbed out of existence
as they passed from hand to hand in Spain. Its
success, indeed, equalled that of the Celestina, and
sprang from the same cause. The learned and polite
literature of the period had abandoned the earth and

BUTLER CLARKE 319

moved in an imaginary world. Latin, French, Italian
and even Arabic models had been studied and imitated*
If anywhere an original path had been struck out it
was in the Romances of Chivalry which began to
be fashionable during the first half of the sixteenth
century. But, after Tirant lo Blanch and Amadis of
Gauly these knightly stories became ever more vapid
and wordy, their heroes ceased to be human, and each
new writer outdid his predecessors only in the size of
the giants and the wild incredibility of the enchant-
ments which Florisel or Primaleon so easily overcome.
The age of chivalry was passing away, the ponderous
folios were costly and cumbersome, and the story of
Palmerin was almost as much out of place in a cottage
as the hero himself would have been. The drama was
in its infancy; the vittancicoSy or carols sung with rough
impersonation by shepherds at Christmas, a few
mysteries acted in churches, and certain stiff dialogues
intended for court revels, and rough farces for country
fairs, formed its whole stock as late as the middle of
the sixteenth century. A vast amount of verse was
written, but any of the early cancianeros, or song-
books, into which it was collected will serve to show
how metaphysical and mythological, stilted and formal
it had become. With the exception of ballads of
uncertain date, and the rollicking satire of the Arch-
priest of Hita, it is hard to find, between the Poema
del Cid (twelfth century) and the famous Coplas de
Manriquey which belong to the later sixteenth century, "^ /M 'j vr - H
a Spanish poem of more than merely historical and
linguistic interest. The citizen, the farmer, the soldier,
and the muleteer had their old-world legends and
ballads orally handed down, and cared nothing for the

)

F

320 THE SPANISH ROGUE^TORY

fine poetry that found favour at court. People who
lived in the workday world refused utterly to believe
in the lovesick^ lackadaisical and euphemistic shep-
herds of the pastoral romance lately introduced through
Portugal from Italy. A generation that had heard its
fathers tell of the conquest of Granada^ a generation to
which the marvels of the New World were daily being
revealed, and which had itself witnessed the heroic
deeds of arms that spread the Spanish power in Italy,
the Netherlands, and Africa, had no need to seek the
stirring and wonderful amid the enchanted castles
of an imaginary chivalry. It was anew pleasure for
the people to find themselves the subject of a book,
and to recognize in story the familiar types of everyday
life. The portrait they found in Lazarillo was not
perhaps a flattering one, but they acknowledged its
truth and delighted in it as their own.

The structure of the story — if story it can be called —
is so simple as to be almost childish. Tet it is uneven
and defective. The book hardly admits of analysis,
for its merit Ues in its terse abruptness, its marvellously
true touch of nature, its good-natured but biting satire,
its unstudied vigorous language, and its sublime dis-
regard of proprieties, literary and other. In jotting
down a few keen observations on men as he found
them, its author has left a picture of the society of his
day, such as volumes of history as then written could
not supply. A rough outiine, however, will give some
idea of the Joose c onstruction and vast capabilities of
the Spanish rogue-story, of which Lazarillo is the first
and best example.

Lazarillo — ^littie Lazarus — takes his high-sounding
territprial name from the river that runs by Salamanca.

BUTLER CLARKE 321

In hifl childhood his father, a miller on the stream, was
publicly flogged and exiled for ^ certain unskilful blood-
lettings/ practised on the sacks entrusted to him.
'Suffering/ as his son writes, 'for justice sake;' he
died in an expedition against the Barbary coast. Left
to her own resources his wife took in washing, kept
open house for students of the university, and replaced
her husband by a thieving mulatto groom. But again
the police broke up the household, and Lazarillo became
guide to a blind beggar. He has left his name in the
profession, for wherever Spanish is spoken a blind man's
guide is still called a Lazaritto. ' Since Ood made the
world,^ he writes of his master, ' never did he fashion
so cunning and astute a rogue. At his business he
was past-master. He had by heart more than a hun-
dred prayers. His voice was deep, resonant, and very
musical, and echoed through the church where he
prayed. His look was humble and devout, and he was
at his best when praying, for he never waved his arms,
nor made grimaces with his mouth and eyes, as others
do. Besides this he had a thousand ways of getting
money • . . but never did I see so greedy and niggardly
a man.' One of the longest chapters in the book tells
of Lazarillo's wanderings with his blind master, the
tricks he played on him in order to get his share of the
doles of the charitable, and the beggar's cunning in
outwitting, detecting, and punishing him. But in the
end Lazarillo outdid him. One rainy night they were
making their way through a village, down the street of
which poured a dirty torrent. The blind man, anxious
to avoid wetting his feet, bade his guide lead him to
a place where he could jump across. ' '' Put me with
my face towards the water,'' he said ; '' you jump first

Y

V

322 THE SPANISH ROGUE-STORY

and I will follow/' I led him to a stone pillar and set
him straight in front of it ; then I gave a spring and
crouched behind the pillar as though a wild bull were
upon me. ^^Now/' said I, ^^jump your hardest so as
to land on this side of the water/' Scarcely were the
words uttered when he gave a bound like a wild goat,
stepping backwards to gain speed, and springing for-
ward with all his might. His head dashed against the
pillar and echoed like a great pumpkin. • • • I never
heard what became of him, nor did I seek to learn.'

The next day the boy was found wandering, and
taken into service by a parish priest. His change of
masters brought no improvement in his fortunes. ^All_
yriefs with bread are less/ says the Spanish prov erb, and
TA^Aj'jlln hRi\ pYphftngi*d Ul treatmen t for starvation.

owadays we see nothing laughable about hunger,
but its pangs and the ingenious means of remedying
them are a favourite theme of the rogue-story. To
such straits is Lazarillo reduced on a crust a day
and two onions a week, that when parishioners fall
ill he prays for their death in order that he may eat
his fill at the burial-feasts. Many are the tricks he
plays in order to elude the vigilance with which the
niggardly priest guards his slender stock of coarse, food,
and great is its owner's perplexity over its disappearance ;
but the secret is out at last, and Lazarillo is again
a wanderer. In his next master, whom he meets at
Toledo, we are introduced to the most carefully drawn
and interesting figure in the book, the proud but
be^arly escudero, or serving-gentleman, a hidalgo of
long pedigree, who has quitted his phantom estate in the
noble north because of a quarrel with a richer neighbour
to whom he refused to take off his hat first. Full of

BUTLER CLARKE

323

\

\

braggart point of honour, he holds work of any kind
degrading, yet would be content to accept the meanest
post as hanger-on to the great, and to flatter and lie
for a_ living. But for the present nobody requires his
services, so he dwells alone in an unfurnished house
until the landlord claims rent and he is forced to
hurry elsewhere. All day, gnawed by hunger, he
parades the streets in his shabby but well-brushed
cloak, ' now throwing its fold over his shoulder and now
beneath his arm, his back straight, but with graceful
inclinations and movements of his arm, his hand from
time to time resting upon his thigh.^ He wears sword
by side as a gentleman should, and carries a huge
rosary. In his mouth is a toothpick to make believe
he has dined, yet the only food he gets are the
crusts that Lazarillo, his servant, collects by his old
profession of begging. ^Merciful heavens,' exclaims
Lazarillo, ^ how many such have you scattered up and
down the earth, who for the beggarly thing they call I I
honour suffer more than would win them Paradise.' My]
Honour, it is to be noted, in this peculiar sense is quite
external. ^ An ounce of public affront,' says Cervantes,
^is heavier than a ton of secret shame.' It is this
sentiment that compels Calder6n's hero to murder the
wife of whose innocence he is certain, merely because
she is compromised in the sight of the world. El
M6dico de su Honra is applauded still in Spain. .With all

his faults the escudfrn \fk no t a liml Mlnm^ nn Avampln

Sold* "^^ 9

and victim merely of a general prejudice, and Lazarillo

IS becoming really fond of him when their gloomy

partnership is broken up by a visit of the rent-collector.

The next chapter reads like an argument or summary

merely, ^I had to seek a fourth master, and he was

Y %

/

324 THE SPANISH ROGUE^TORY

a Mercenarian friar, to whom I was sent by the semp-
stresses I have mentioned, and whom they called their
kinsman. A notable hater of the choir and of convent
fare, much given to roaming, secular business, and
visits, so that I fancy he wore out more shoes than the
rest of the convent together. He gave me the first
pair I wore in my life, but they did not last me a week,
nor could I put up any longer with his perpetual trot.
For this, and for certain other little matters that I do
not mention, I quitted him.'

It was the fifth chapter, or ' treatise,' as the author
prefers to call it, that brought the book into the Index
Expurgatorius, for it contains the famous story of the
buUkrOj or pardoner, who now became Lazarillo's
master. During their Moorish wars the Spanish kings
received from the popes a bull of crusade allowing them
in aid of their struggle against the infidel to profit by
the sale of certain indulgences. After the fall of
Granada the bull was extended to provide money for
the religious needs of the New World* This source of
income was farmed out, and the proceedings of the
pardoners were so oppressive that among the petitions
of Parliament are repeated protests against their
violence. They would collect the whole population of
a viUage in the church on a week-day, and keep them
locked up under pretence of hearing sermons imtil
a certain number of the indulgences were sold. Or
they would stop passers-by in the streets and suddenly
call upon them to recite the creed, pater-noster, or other
prayers. The slightest hesitation or mistake obliged
the victim to buy the bull under threat of delation to
the religious courts. When these means failed they
sometimes, we must suppose, practised tricks such as

BUTLER CLARKE 325

the one so brilliantly described in our story. It is too
long to be told here in full^ and too good to Buffer
curtailment. Those who do not read Spanish may find
it in the good old English version by Thomas Rowland
of Anglesea^ entitled The Spanish Rogue.

After four months' service Lazarillo tired of the
pardoner, but again took service with a clergyman,
this time a chaplain who gave him a donkey, four
pitchers, and a whip, and sent him off to gain his
living as a water-carrier, charging him thirty maravedis
a day as hire for the tools of his trade. Even so he
managed to put by a little money. ^ As soon as I found
myself decently clad,' he says, ' I told my master to
take his donkey, for I Would no longer follow that
business.' His next venture was not more successful ;
a shower of stones and a heavy drubbing at the hands
of some malefactors who had sought asylum in a
church, cured him of his fancy for bailiff's work. At
last he found a post to suit him and gratify his am-
bition. As town-crier of Toledo his duties were to
announce public wine-sales, to act as auctioneer, cry
lost property, and accompany such as were publicly
flogged or hanged, ^ proclaiming aloud their misdeeds
in good romance.' His luck does not end with his
' crown appointment,' as he proudly calls it. He marries
a lady of doubtful antecedents and hasty temper, the
ex-housekeeper of the Archpriest of San Salvador, and
is delighted to find that her former master takes
a kindly interest in his affairs. ^ At this time,' he
writes, ^ I was in my prosperity and at the pitch of all
good fortune.' Here the book breaks suddenly off, as
though in the middle of a chapter. The author cast
it down when he got tired of it, without troubling even

326 THE SPANISH KOGUE-STORY

to add his name, but Lazarillo became father of a fiimily
hardly less famous and numerous than that of Amadis
himaelf*

In 1555 appeared at Antwerp a Second Part, anony-
mous like the First, but the work of another and far
inferior hand. So little did its author understand the
book, that he turned it into a kind of fairy-story.
Lazarillo suffers shipwreck on the way to Algiers, is
changed into a tunny-fish, and becomes a great person
among the dwellers of the sea. The silly fragment is
not worth attention. Sixty years later, when the rogue-
stories were very popular, Juan de Luna, a teacher of
Spanish, published in Paris a further continuation.
He succeeded somewhat better than his predecessor,
but he was so thorough a pedant that he actually under-
took to weed the original Lazarillo of 'ill-chosen words,
false concords and faulty constructions.' His book
is by no means dull, but its author's notions of decency
are even more slack than those of most writers in the
style. His pages are full of fierce and vindictive satire
against the clergy, and though they contain amusing
passages, we are scarcely sorry that Jean de la Lune,
as he calls himself, never fulfilled his promise of writing
the Third Part which was to be the best of all.

Five years after its appearance Lazarillo was placed
upon the Index, but copies continued to pour into
Spain from abroad, and seeing that it was impossible
to suppress, it was thought well to emend it. The
expurgated edition appeared in 15712, and Lazarillo
was not again printed in full in Spain till well on in
the present century.

For fifty years nobody thought of asking who was
the author of this famous book, and nobody ventured to

BUTLER CLARKE 327 ^.

claim it. Then on insufficient evidence it was attributed
first to Juan de Ortega^ General of the Jeronymite
Order, and, later, to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, author
of a famous book on the Wars of Granada, and
soldier, statesman, and ambassador under Charles V.

Dr. Lockyer, Dean of Peterborough, told Joseph
Spence that Lazarilh was written by a company
of Spanish bishops on the way to the Council of
Trent. He cites no evidence, however, and Mendoza's
name was placed upon the title-page, where it continued
until Mr. Morel-Fatio showed how faulty was the
evidence in support of his claim. The same critic
would seek the real author among the band of liberal
scholars grouped round Juan de Valdes the reformer,
But LazariUo shows no trace of being the work of an\
educated hand. It may have been written in a camp,
a pot-house, a lax student's garret, or even a prison.
It was meant for the people, and probably sprang from
them. Its author s name was perhaps an obscure one,
and he did not look to a stroke of genius that cost him
scarce an effort to give it fame. Its reckless fun and
disregard for propriety point rather to one who had
little to lose and hoped no gain when he drew with
bold unerring hand the three great types of Spanish
society in the sixteenth century, the priest, the hidalgo,
and the beggar.

A successful book generally produced in Spain a host
of imitators who did not stick at forgery. It is therefore
surprising that, with the exception of the author of the
spurious Antwerp Second Part of LazariUo, nobody
turned his attention to the picaro for forty-five years.
The next to carry on the tradition was Mateo Aleman
of Seville. The First Part of his Life and Acta of the

328 THE SPANISH ROGUE-STORY

Ptcaro Guzmdn de Al/arache, watchman of human Ltfe,
was published in 1599. Of the author his friend Luis
de Vald^ wrote : ^ There never was a poorer soldier^
or a more overflowing hearty nor a more restless and
eventful life than his/ But this is practically all we
j know of him. Guzmdn de Al/arache is not his only
book^ but it is the only one deserving attention. LazariUo
represents the transition of Spanish society from the
frugal severity of Ferdinand and Isabel's old-fashioned
reign to the freer and looser manners of the stirring
times of Charles V. Under Philip II a kind of arti-
ficial reaction set in. The king's gloomy austerity
spread to the rest of the nation^ and made hypocrites
where it failed to make converts. Philip died in 1598^
so Guzmdn appeared amid the wild outbreak of almost
hysterical frivolity that followed years of repression.
The reading public had vastly increased, and the welcome
given to the p(caro \b proved by the fact that six years
saw twenty-six editions of the book, and more than fifty
thousand copies were sold. It was early translated
into French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch and
Latin. The English version by Diego Puede-Ser, alias
James Mabbe, Fellow of Magdalen, contains laudatory
verses from the pen of Ben Jonson :

'The Spanish Proteus, which though writ
In but one tongue, was formed with the world's wit.
And hath the noblest mark of a good booke
That an iU man doth not securely looke
Upon it ; but wiU loathe or let it pass
As a deformed face doth a true glass.*

Guzman de Al/arache in its general plan closely
follows LazariUo de Tarmes, but is distinguished from
its model by its vastly greater length, the more studied

BUTLER CLARKE 329

development of its principal character, its more finished
style, the introduction of episodical stories like the
pretty Moorish romance of Osmin and Daraxa, and by
the long and wearisome moral commentary that follows /
each new escapade and misfortune of its hero. The
writer professes a lofty object, to chastise vice and
combine pleasure with profit. It is to be noticed also I
that he entirely drops the fierce satire against the clergy .y
But a great and lamentable change has come over the]
picaro ; he has seen the error of his ways, and is on)^
the high-road to respectability. At times he even goes\
the length of painting himself as an honest man driven
by misfortune to evil courses. This spoils the book
from an artistic point of view, and Guzmdn is at times
littie better than a weakling and a sneak. Only here
and there does the author slacken his moral rein and ;
give himself up to the genuine fun of his subject. As]
usual, the book is in the form of an autobiography. «
The ruin of his father, a Genoese usurer, drives the
hero from his home when only twelve years old. He
picks up his knowledge of the world in inns along the
road, and arrives at Madrid a fledged picaro. A time
of service with a cook teaches him still further villanies.
He is dismissed, and makes up his mind to enlist and
go abroad. Refused on account of his tender age, he
becomes servant to an officer, and steals and cheats for
his master's benefit until they reach Italy. But the
captain has grown afraid of him, and ungratefully
dismisses him as soon as he can do without him. After
visiting at Genoa his father's relatives, who play a very
dirty trick upon their shabby kinsman, he drifts to
Rome, becomes a beggar, and gives an elaborate account
of the craft as there organized. Rescued from his

330 THE SPANISH ROGUE^TORY

supposed piteous plight by a cardinal, he exhausts the
patience of his good master by his incorrigible thieving,
but finds another in the French Ambassador at Rome.

Here ends the First Part, breaking off suddenly like
LazariUo, and, like it, offering a bait readily taken by
the forger. The title-page of the spurious Second Part
bears the name of Mateo Lujan de Sayavedra, con-
cealing the personality of Juan Marti, a Valendan
lawyer. Parts of it are by no means worse than the
original ; in fact Aleman hints that it is partly his own
and stolen from his notes. But, on the whole, it is
wearisome reading, and at times the story, which
supports the long moral and mythological discourses,
shrinks to a mere thread. The picaro goes the usual
round, major-domo and scullion in Italy, student at
"^Alcali, lackey, actor and galley-slave. It is the most
^digressive of picaresque books. ^ It will not do for me,'
says the author, ^ to jump from the coals of my kitchen
to the education of kings.^ Yet this he is always doing,
and often, as he admits, ^ like the mare of Xerxes ' he
oversteps the limits of nature and probability. A legal
discussion on the nobility of the Basques is dragged in
and occupies several chapters.

When Aleman shortly afterwards brought out his
own Second Part, he was not content, like Cervantes,
with overwhelming the forger with mockery. He in-
troduced into his book, by name, a brother of Marti,
and after holding him up to contempt as a sorry villain
even among picaroSy slew him by making him jump
overboard in a fit of frenzy, imagining himself to be
really Guzm&n de Alfarache. We pick up the true
Guzman again at the point where we left him devoting
his talent for intrigue to the love affairs of the French

BUTLER CLARKE 331

Ambassador. With an inconsistency which is found)
again in the character of Sancho Panza^ and which, I
perhaps, is not unnatural, the rogue is at times cun- l
ning in the extreme, and at others an utter booby I
and simpleton. Thus it is that he falls victim to
a trick played upon him by a lady whom his master
persecutes with unwelcome attentions, and so wide is
the fame of his discomfiture that he is forced to quit
Rome. On leaving for Florence he is cheated and
robbed by his associates, but he speedily remedies his
fortunes by his unholy skill at cards, a never-failing
resource of his tribe. He now enters upon a more
ambitious course of roguery, and sets up as a gentle-
man. The Spaniards in Italy were hated and feared
for their pride and unscrupulousness. Guzman himself
tells us that when they travel they leave their consciences
at home as articles too delicate to stand a sea voyage.
Even the meanest of them gave himself such airs that
the Italians often slily inquired, ' If you are all gentle-
men, who tends the pigs in Spain ? ' Still he managed
to bluster along comfortably enough, and by a series
of clever tricks ruthlessly plundered the relatives of his
father who had treated him so ill when, on his first
arrival at Genoa, he presented himself before them poor
and friendless. On his way back to Spain his jackal
Sayavedra, or Marti, is drowned. But it is wearisome
to follow his fortunes further, and we are tempted to
rejoice when his career of rascality is cut short, and
he is condemned to the galleys. His description of the ]
convicts' life is one of the most interesting parts of |
the book. He is too clever to ^ flog sardines,' as they
called it, for long. As officers' servant he seizes a chance
of betraying a plot of mutiny among his former com-

332 THE SPANISH ROGUE^TORY

panions of the oar-bench. It is while still on board
awaiting his pardon and^ as he assures us, fully re*
pentant, that he finds time to write his exhaustive and
exhausting story. Its digressions are numerous and
incongruous. Among them is found a tirade against
the meanness and jealousy of the lower orders, a de-
scription of Florence, the Arancel de los Nedos, or
Tariff of Foob, a laboured piece of witticism in the
style perfected later by Quevedo, and more than one
excursus upon political economy.
The next writer in the style attempted the risky
I subject of the lady Picaroon, and without profit to
his own reputation or his readers. Nothing can
show the character of his book better than its title-
page : ' The roguish Highland^ffirl called Justina ; in
which, under vntty discourses, are hidden profitable
morals. At the end of each chapter you will find an
explanation shewing how you may profit by the book to
fieejrom the deceits which are common in our days. It
is also an Art of Poetry containing fifty-one kinds of
verse never till now set forth ; their names and numbers
are on the following page. Dedicated to Don Rodrigo
Calderdn Sandelin of the bedchambre of his Mtyesty,
lord of the toums of Oliva and Placenzuela. Composed
by the Licenciate Francisco Lopez de Ubeda, native of
Toledo.^ The prologue declares ^that there is no
entanglement in Celestina, no joke in Momus, roguery
in Lazarillo, elegance in Guevara, wit in Eufrosina,
cross-purposes in el Patrahuelo, or story in the Golden
Ass, and speaking broadly, there is no good thing in
ballad, play, or Spanish poet, but that its cream and
! quintessence is herein contained.' Those who venture
^beyond this pedantic and pretentious preamble will find

BUTLER CLARKE 333

the book very hard reading. The scene is laid in the
town and neighbourhood of Leon. So many are the
local details that the author must have been familiar
with the district; his real name^ Perez de Le6n,
perhaps denotes a native. The incident is confined to
a few unsavoury tricks played by Justina at local
merry-makings. For digression^ laboured wit^ and'
indecency the Picara Justina may be compared with
Tristram Shandy, but it is Tristram Shandy without
trace of the charming scenes and characters that
illuminate and redeem that monument of perversity.
It has moreover the unenviable distinction of being
cited by the learned Oregorio Mayans y Siscar
as the first example of the corrupt Spanish prose I ^^.t
of the seventeenth century. Its pages are crowded ! ^ ^
with strained conceits and witless plays upon
words^ making it quite untranslateable^ were any-
body found rash enough to undertake the thankless
task. The ' Moral ' or Aprovechamiento appended to
each chapter is invariably a platitude of the most
impertinent kind. After a revolting disquisition on
the knaveries of innkeepers^ we read : ' There are inn-
keepers so corrupt and dissolute that you will find their
houses to harbour more vices than persons. Here
covetousness, sensuality^ idleness, scandal, and deceit
find lodging, and, above all, evil communications and
over-freedom, which is a cause of great perdition in
the Christian state.^ This author would have made
a famous preacher in the style of Fray Oerundio, and
a worthy associate of the scholar in Gil Bias who wrote
the learned note, ^In Athens children cried when
beaten.' Oddly enough the book was often reprinted,
though its success was not great enough to induce the

334 THE SPANISH ROGUE^TORY

author to carry out his intention of writing a Second
Part, in which Justina marries Guzman de Alfarache.

The next author of rogue-story in chronological order
is Cervantes. In 1 6 13 he published his Novelas Ejem^
plaresy romantic stories for the most part, of a kind that
had been made popular by Italian writers. After Dan
Quiopote nothing could add to Cervantes' fame as a writer,
) but we see him here in his best light as a man. It is won-
derful how, after so much buffeting about the world,
he preserved freshness of mind to create the famous
character of the gipsy girl who keeps her native purity
unstained amid the foulest surroundings, and to evolve the
grave and kindly philosophy of the Dialogue of the Dog9^
But while Cervantes was able at will to withdraw into
I the charmed world of his imagination, his eyes took in
: keenly the scenes around him, and looked not unkindly
' upon the sordid but picturesque figures which he
^ met in his wanderings. Thus among his stories we find
/ Binconete and CortadiUOy a chapter from the lowest
) life in Seville. An inn in Sierra Morena is the chance
meeting-place of two ragamuffins bound southward to
better their fortunes. ^ The younger was about four-*
teen or fifteen, and the elder not more than seventeen,
both sprightly youths, but very ragged, shabby, and
out-at-the-elbows. As for cloaks they had none, their
breeches were of coarse linen, and their stockings bare
flesh. For this, it is true, they made up by their shoes ;
for one was wearing a pair of trodden-down and cast-
off sandals, while his companion's boots were in ribbons,
had lost their soles, and looked more like hobbles than
shoes. One wore a green hunting-bonnet, the other
a low-crowned broad-brimmed hat without a band.
On his back and slung about his chest one carried

N

BUTLER CLARKE 335

a shirt of dingy hue rolled up and thrust into one of its
sleeves. The other had no bundle or saddle-bags to
trouble him, but the front of his dress showed a great
swelling caused, as afterwards appeared, by a ruff or
Walloon collar stiffened with grease instead of starch,
and so worn and frayed that it looked like a bundle of
lint. Wrapped up and treasured away along with it was
a pack of cards, of oval form, for by constant use their
corners had been worn away and they had been cut
down to that shape. Both were sunburnt, their nails
untrimmed, and their hands not over-clean. One
carried a half-sword and the other a yellow-handled
huntsman's knife.' No better portrait of the picaro \
can be found. The greetings of these two worthies '
are exchanged with stately courtesy, but they speedily
make friends, and throwing off the mask confess to
one another the peccadillos which obliged them to quit
their homes. They get money for their journey by
combining to cheat a muleteer with the oddly shaped ^
cards. At Seville they set up as muchachos de \
esportillay or basket-boys, hiring themselves, like their \
fellows in the Arabian NighUj to accompany house-
holders to market and carry home their purchases.
This, of course, is only a cloak for picking pockets.
But they soon find out that the tricks they have learned
in the country are as nothing to those practised in the
metropolis of picaros, where the whole body of male-
factors, from petty thieves who steal linen hung out
to dry, to first-class cut-throats, are organized into
a regular guild. An acquaintance picked up in the !
street, a full-blown picaro who, when asked, ' Is your
worship perchance a thief?' answers, ^Yes, for the
service of God and of all good folk/ introduces the I

336 THE SPANISH ROGUEJSTORY

uew-comera to Monipodio, the head of the association —

prototype of Fagin and many others. The motley

throng of bullies and low women over whom he holds

sway is sketched with matchless skill. The organiza*

tion of the gang is revealed, the book of engagements

read out, and its various items of wounds, beatingB^

insults, and frights, retailed by the company at fixed

prices, are assigned for execution to suitable members.

The description of the lovers' quarrel in low life is

unsurpassed in vigour even by the most brilliant

passages of Don Quixote. Its realism is startling, but

it is saved from being merely repulsive by its author's

inimitable gift of humour. Cervantes saw these people

I leading the lowest and most criminal lives, but he

I recognized that they were not utterly bad. No shadow

j of hypocrisy lies about their carefully tended common

altar, or even about the piety of the old woman, who,

having vowed to bum a candle before a shrine as

a thank-offering for the successful theft of a bundle

of washing, borrows the necessary sum, without any

/ intention of repaying it, under pretence of having left

j her purse at home. The absurd good faith of the

; whole proceedings is what strikes us most. The patter

of the germania or thievesMatin is gay and artless,

comic touches everywhere relieve the savagery of the

, background, and over the whole the author has shed

: that indefinable quality of distinction that marks all

his work. Even those who do not care to read about

people whom they would not wish to know will not

utterly reject the two ragamuffins. We take leave of

; them amidst the most unpromising surroundings, but

we do not despair of their future. Cervantes has been

called a one-book author, but we have here a proof

\

BUTLER CLARKE 337

that he could have written another as good as the
special form will admit of. He never falls into the
besetting sins of the kind, its low buffoonery, its over-
prying into the dark and loathsome comers of society,
and its tedious moralizing over actions too obviously
bad to need comment.

Five years after the Navela^ BfempUtres the same
printer, the famous Juan de la Cuesta, brought out at
Madrid the Life of the Squire Marcos of Obregdn, by
Master Vicente EspineL Its author was already an
old man. Espinel came of a family of conguistadores,
or original Christian settlers, at Ronda, and there he
studied 'Latin, music, and the art of holding his
tongue' till the age of twenty, when his father sent
him off to Salamanca with a hi^e, old-fashioned
sword, a good frieze cloak, a little valise, and a bless-
ing, to make his way in the world. Hindered in his
studies by his natural restlessness and his poverty, he
for two years made a miserable living by giving lessons
in music. In 1572 the university was dispersed on
account of riots that had broken out owing to the
prosecution of the saiatly Fray Luis de Le6n by the
Inquisition, and Espinel set out for home 'in apostolic
guise.' It was thought no shame for the poor student
on the road to ask an alms, and, when nothing better
could be had, the pittance of the poor could be shared
at the convent gate. So Espinel, though penniless, pro-
longed his journey, visiting famous places by the way.
A few months later he was again in Salamanca and had
found a rich patron. His talent for music and poetry had
gained him friends, but his books were still neglected|>^.
and his name is not to be found upon the matricula- ^
tion roll of the university. Tet he was supposed to be -^

z

338 THE SPANISH ROGUE-STORY

studying for the Church with a view to being pie-
aented to a chaplaincy founded by his relatives for his
benefit. In 1574 he suddenly quitted Salamanca, and
obtained the post of alferez or standard-bearer to the
vice-admiral of the fleet of 300 sail that was fitting out
at Santander for the invasion of England. But plague
fell upon the camp, and those who escaped dispersed.
Among them Espinel, who wandered westward along
the coast, through the leafy Basque provinces and
Navarre to Saragossa, making himself welcome every-
where by his music. For some years he served the
Count of Lemos as escudero or gentleman-attendant
at Valladolid, and afterwards accompanied his patron
to Seville, intending to join the body of Spanish troops
sent by Philip II to take part in Don Sebastian's
disastrous expedition to Africa. They arrived too late
to share in the campaign, and Espinel stayed on in
the charming city leading the loose and disorderiy life
reflected in the portion of his verses written at this
time. His quarrels and duels at last forced him to
seek asylum in a church, but even the influence of his
powerful patrons could no longer protect him, so he
was shipped off to Italy in the retinue of the Duke of
Medina Sidonia, Governor of Milan.

With regard to this journey a question has arisen
which will probably never be satisfactorily answered.
Alluding to it in his Marcos de Obreg(fn, Espinel
says that he was carried off by African pirates and
lived for a time as a slave at Algiers. The incident
of a time of captivity in Africa is so often found
in Spanish novels that we are inclined at first to
suppose that Espinel introduced it haphazard into
the story of Marcos' life. The adventures that befeU

BUTLER CLARKE 339

Marcos at Algiers are indeed wildly romantic and
improbable, but his release is told with such detail
of names of well-known witnesses that we can hardly
refuse to believe that some such misfortune really
befell the author, who, as we shall see, is Marcos him*
self. At any rate his captivity was not a long one ;
he landed at Genoa and passed on to join the Spanish
army besie^ging Maestricht. Again he found patrons,
and one of these he followed back to Milan, where he
was chosen to write the Latin and Spanish verses to
adorn the catafalque of Anne of Austria at the requiem
held in the cathedral. Three years he lingered in
Italy, and all this time his health was bad, owing, as
he says, to the heaviness of the water of Italy as com-
pared with that of Spain. In spite of this he wrote
some of his prettiest verse, and associating with the
best musicians of the time» greatly improved in the
art.

At thirty-four Espinel grew weary of the life he had
been leading as poet, soldier, musician, and adven-
turer, and his thoughts turned to the modest chap-
laincy at Ronda. An old friend of his had become
Bishop of Malaga, and through him he obtained ordina-
tion. His sonnets at this time are full of promise of
amendment, but his disorderly life was too recent to
be forgotten, and his fellow townsmen refused to
believe in his reformation. Persecution drew from him
a fine eptstola, in which he admits the truth of all and
more than all that had been raked up against him, and
then turns on his detractors and crushingly exposes
their base motives. He was admitted to his benefice,
and four years later obtained promotion. But the
scandals continued ; life in a country town, too, was

z 2

340 THE SPANISH ROGUE^TORY

irkflome to his restlefls spirit ; he felt that his talents
were buried; and he compared himself in verse to
a lizard^ numbed by cold under its stone on the bleak
heights of Ronda. He appointed a deputy to do the
work of his benefice^ and remained in Madrid among
his friends until a royal order compelled him to return.
It seems that the evil reports about him did not lack
foundation^ for he was deprived of one of his benefices,
and two years later the magistrates of Ronda addressed
to the king a memorial declaring ' that this chaplain is a
man of such habits, conversation, and manner of life as
is set forth in the annexed report upon his vices, crimes,
excesses, negligence, and avarice. The service of God
and your Majesty demands that another be appointed
in his place, for we cannot believe that rebuke or
punishment can work a change in evils rooted in the
nature of the man and confirmed by habit/ Had
Philip II lived, this report would have ruined Espinel^
but he died the same year, and the poet gleefully re-
turned to Madrid, where he joined in the gay reaction
against the gloomy asceticism of the old king. His
inventions in music and poetry, a new lyric metre that
still bears his name, and the addition of a fifth string
to the guitar, had made him famous. He was
welcomed in the literary world, took his degree at
Alcaic, and received an appointment as master of tlie
school of music attached to the chapel of the Bishop
of Plasencia. He enjoyed the friendship of Cervantes
and Lope de Vega ; a Latin epigram from his pen is
prefixed to Gazmdn de Alfarache, and he was chosen
to examine for the imprimatur books as famous as
Lope's comedies. The scandals against him were foi^
gotten, or remembered only at Ronda, whither he never

[III ■"■■ 1

BUTLER CLARKE 341

retnraed^ and he died in peace during the hard winter
of 16^3-4.

If I have detained you so long over these biographi-
cal notes^ it has been with the object of showing
the close connexion that often exists between the
writers and the heroes of the rogue-stories. Imagina-
tion played but a small part in their composition^
memory supplied incident and character in abundance, ;
while rough experience, often untouched with sym- j
pathy, gave the coarse and realistic setting. This is
specially the case in the book before us, for Marcos de
Obregdn and Vicente Espinel are practically one and
the same person. The criminous clerk merely set
down his own life previous to his ordination, added
a few incidents which, if they had not happened to
himself, had come within his experience, and mixed
in an mordinate amount of commonplace moralizing. ,
In his preface he declares that he believes this story I
of his life to be an improving one. ^ There is not
a page in my Escudero but contains some special moral
over and above the obvious one.' He still dwells with \
pleasure on the follies of his youth. Sometimes, how- '
ever, he feels he has gone too far; he then hastily
divests himself of the swashbuckler's buffcoat, resumes
his sober gown, and betakes himself again to his
moralizing. Or, again, he is cynical, and tells against
himself horrible stories. I do not remember in the
whole series of these books a more heartless story
than the one contained in Part II, chapters i and a. \
Marcos has cajoled his gaoler into the belief that he
can make gold, and ruthlessly blinded him by casting
corrosive acid into his eyes. ' He fell back fainting
and speechless, while I rejoiced heartily to find myself

342

THE SPANISH ROGUE-STORY

r

; free, even at the cost of the poor turnkey, for the

j desire for liberty justifies everything. The wretched

\ gaoler, thinking to get a house full of gold, was left

I without even eyes to see it. May God look upon the

I covetous, and bring to their souls such salutary chastise-

\ ment as preserves life and soothes the conscience/

Although its hero nowhere wins our sjrmpathy, Marcos

de Obreg6n has always been considered one of the best

books of its class. Ticknor sums up his opinion by

'declaring that while inferior to Guzman de Alfarache

and Lazarillo in diction and style, it is superior to them

in action and movement; events follow one another with

[greater rapidity, and the conclusion iB more logical and

complete. With part of this criticism it is impossible

to agree. Lazarillo in a tenth of the bulk contains

a greater number of finished pictures that cling to the

{ mind, and is surpassed only by Celestina in vivacity.

' But Marcos de Obregdn is much more carefully and

I elegantly written. Occupying a halfway position be>

I tween the rogue-story, pure and simple, and the ordi-

' nary novel of adventures, it contains some admirably

drawn characters, such as Dr. Sagredo and his haughty

\ wife, and the moustached bully of the gaol. If the

; book is read with any real pleasure, however, it is not

(

j because of any literary or artistic excellence, but because
it takes us back to a great epoch of one of the most
pi cturesque socie ties that have ever existed. Rags and
neryj off^^ ^n** f|ti^f>i*>i'^ll»ny and hero ism go_h and
' ih^fe and* We pass fromtEe dim garret of the starving
student at Salamanca to an assembly of virtuosos in
an Italian saloon, from a thieves' kitchen in Seville to
a palace in Algiers. And the whole story is told by a
\ shabby old serving-gentleman to his friend the hermit

BUTLER CLARKE 343

while sheltering from a downpour of rain on the out-
skirts of Madrid.

A sentence of Voltaire's has made Marcos more
famous than any of his fellows. In his Steele de Louis
XIV J speaking of Gil BUUy he says, ' It is entirely taken
from the Spanish novel entitled La Vidad del Escudeiro
Dom Marcos d^Obrego^ The fact that the title thus
quoted contains almost as many mistakes as words
goes far to show that Voltaire had no very close ac-
quaintance with the book or the language in which it
was written. But over this sentence a mighty literary
battle was waged at the beginning of this century, in
which many famous men. Sir Walter Scott among them,
took part. Its fury was quite unnecessary ; a cursory
examination of the two books will show that Le Sage
borrowed from Espinel some of his best scenes and
characters. The introductory story of the two students
and the buried pearl, the barber's boy, Diego de la
Fuente, the haughty Dofia Margelina, and many others
are all old friends, but old friends stripped of their
awkward moral appendices and renovated and informed
by Le Sage's brilliant genius. So little did he trouble
to conceal his debt to Spain that he actually introduced
Guzmdn de Alfarache by name into his book. He
gathered materials far and wide throughout the broad >
fields of Spanish novel and comedy, and from Espinel
he took more than from anyone author, but to say that
Gil Bias is ' entirely taken ' from Marcos de Obregdn
is to say that Shakespeare's plays are ^ entirely taken '
from the formless chronicles and tales of which he
made use.

The talkative Lay-brother, or Alonso, Servant qfmany \
Masters, is the work of Dr. Geronimo Yafiez y Ribera,

I

344 THE SPANISH ROGUE-STORY

the author of other graver books such as T^nUhs for a
Christian Life. The First Part was printed at Madrid
in 1624^ the Second two years later at Valladolid.
Though agreeably vnritten and more readable than some^
it is not a good specimen of its class^ departing as it
does in two essential particulars from the primitive
type. The whole of it is in dialogue. Alonso tells his
stories to a vicar of his convent during the hours of
recreation. He is at best, only a half-hearted picaro,
at times he is even a virtuous person brought by mis-
fortunes into evil company. On the whole we dislike
him more than the thorough-going rogue, for besides
being a coward and sneak he is a prig, deservedly hated
everywhere for his intolerable habit of giving good
advice. Many of the miscellaneous stories here loosely
strung together are good, but some are pointless and
a few slightly risky. In the latter case the lay-brother
apologizes for troubling ^his paternity^ with such
profane matters. At the beginning of the Second
Part we find without sorrow or surprise that Alonso's
chatter and meddling have brought about his expulsion
from the convent. He is now a hermit, but has been
through a new set of adventures, and finds a hearer for
them in the curate of his parish. To him he retails
u clever confidence trick with which Guzman had already
made us familiar, the famous story of the Dominican
and Franciscan at the ford, Alonso^s life among the
gipsies and his captivity in Algiers — all this without
showing one spark of originality or producing the
impression that a real person is speaking.

The next of the series, the last with which I need
occupy you, is a book of a very different kind. It
brings us right back to the fountain-head of picaresque

BUTLER CLARKE 345

inspiration^ and putting into shade the more colourless )
pages of intermediate authors ^ outdoes even LazarU lo
itself in boldness. In English it is known as Pablo de ,
Segovia, SLUd has lately been republished with exquisite »
illustrations from the fairy pencil of Daniel Vierge. In j
Spanish it is generally called El gran Tacano (The 1
Great Skinflint), but its full title is History of the Life \
of the Sharper {Bti8c6n) called Don Pablos, Archetype of \
Vagabonds and Mirror of Rascals. Its author was |
the fantastic genius, the Spanish Swift, Francisco de 1
Quevedo, a man who mirrors in his life and writings ^

the whole of the varied and brilliant manners of his
time. At one moment a courtier, at another a recluse,
associating with swashbucklers while keeping up a Latin \
correspondence on learned subjects with Justus Lipsius,
he is all the time pouring from his pen a series of
occasional sketches in verse and prose, unequalled in
Spanish for biting wit, scurrility, fierce satire and
brazen indecency. Later we find him charged with
important secret missions in Italy, or, again, defending
the claims of Santiago, patron of Spain, against those
who wished to substitute for him the lately canonized
Santa Teresa. He became private secretary to
Philip lY, and wrote his Marcus Brutus and God^s
Policy y grave and heavy works on statesmanship. In
his collected works poems on the Resurrection and
treatises on Divine Providence elbow picaresque books
and loose farces. In the end the same bold spirit
which had led him to avenge an insult offered to an
unknown lady in the street by killing her aggressor,
and, though a cripple, to challenge the most famous
fencing-master of the time to a duel to the death,
brought on him the enmity of the all-powerfid favourite,

1

*

/

346 THE SPANISH ROGUE-STORY

the Count-Duke of Olivares, and he was imprisoned
in the stately convent of San Marcos at Le6n. At
Olivares' fall he was set free, but his health was quite
broken, and he died two years later, welcoming death
in touching verses, and edifying the bystanders by his
calmness and piety.

It was in his youth that he wrote in the picaresque
vein^ His first attempt was a satire, not a story. It
bears the whimsical title, Capitulations of Life in the
Capital and diverting Entertainments therein, and
is a descriptive catalogue of the inhabitants of lower
Bohemia. With a pitile88_rea ljsm that causes a thril l

ofjiiggUStandhorror, Hp^ ^ttmga-Ji^fflrtf^ riiir Ayfig^JTi

gssion, first the ragged beg^ tftrib e, the
aimedj th e halt, and the blind, the monst rous defOT m-
ities shown in bootEs^af fa irs, and the J^|ths qm e
garrets where sores are touched up and ^^^utified ^ —
the word is his own — overnight in order to excite pity
; on the morrow. Next the dandies of low life, struggling
to keep up appearances, and bragj^ng amid their
misery of imaginary ladies, horses, and hounds. The
thieving lying pages, and the cowardly bullies with
trailing cloak and hat thrust down over brow, ^who
straddle their legs and stare at you out of the comers
of their eyes,^ are passed in review. These gentlemen
it is who make a profession of coming to the aid of
damsels in distress. A cry is heard in the ill-lit street ;
up rushes our friend to find a lady struggling with
some ill-looking ruffian. A few sword-thrusts are
exchanged and the assailant makes his escape, ap-
parently badly wounded. The gallant rescuer becomes'
uneasy, the man will probably die* Asylum must be
sought in some church. The poor girl hands over her

\

BUTLER CLARKE 347

purse and jewellery, and continues to send supplies to
her rescuer during the time of his supposed ^ retreat,'
little dreaming that he and her aggressor are in league.
Then we have the card-sharpers and the receivers of
stolen goods, and so the ugly list goes on through all
those who make a living out of the follies and vices j
of a yreat city, from the materials thus carefully
collected and studied Quevedo made his Don Pablos.
Though not published till 1626, it probably passed from
hand to hand some years earlier. The date is important
because of the resemblance between some of its passages
and Cervantes' Rinconete and CortadUlo. But a priori
we may conclude that Quevedo was the borrower.
The publication of his story was later by thirteen years.
Had Cervantes laid hand upon Quevedo's work,
Quevedo was not the man to let him pass unchallenged.
The Oreat Skinflint is the most finished and perfect
example of his kind. Alem&n served up the limbs of
a picaro piecemeal between the pages of a sermon.
Espinel did the same, and wandered off into the ordinary
novel of adventure. Rinconete and Cortadilloy like
£a;?an/io itself, is merely a fragment. Quevedo stripped
the rogue of the grave gown that sits so ill upon him, ,
took from his lips his long-winded platitudes, and sent /
him out into the world a shameless but consistent
character. He never falters and never wastes time as
he hurries us through infinitely varied scenes of low
life. He is nowhere confused, and unity is maintained
by the personality of the Imscdn ^alwavB the centre of
the action whenever he ^appears. The book is so well
known that it is useless to iollow its hero from Segovia,
his home, to Alcal&, from Alcala back to the hideous
den of his uncle the hangman, as suitor to a lady.

/

I

348 THE SPANISH ROGUEJSTORY

beggar, actor^ and bravo at Seville. It is full of inc ident ;
its author's violent and ouir4 genius often gives us
a caricature instead of a portrait, but it is marvellously
graphic. It cannot be read with any pleasure ; itjs
oneof the most painful and saddest of^ bgflks. 1^
de scription of squalid and crimmal scenes produces th e
same impression as ^n actual visit to them. Quevedo
never distinjg up^«* tv>f iy<w*n rnf ^^ and folly, but uses the
same me rpil^p la^fVi ^^ mnrlfAiy fnr hntl ^. He revels in
I repulsive detail, and may certainly be excu ^ffl nf a]py
. attem pt to m ftli^ ^^^ nffrftpf^irA K the proper study
, of mankind were man in hi« Inw p^t m\€\ most deprad^

^J^v}, thfi Or/if| farnUn wniilH Ha ai grpjjf. hook. As it

is we turn shuddering away as Quevedo throws the

xold clear light of his genius into the whitewashed

isepulchre of his nation's greatness, and standing at our

side calls our attention to its loathsome details. His

feeling for his fellow men was a mixture of fierce

contempt and hatred.

\ To continue the list would be wearisome and profit-

\ less. The Weasel of Seville and Hook of Purses, the

; Autobiography of EstebaniUo Gonzalez^ the goodn

; humoured Man, the works of Santos and many others

carried on the tradition but added nothing new. The

subject is as wide and varied as one side of human

f nature, and, as such, incapable of exhaustion. The

- picaro had taken root in Spanish literature, and throve

throughout the seventeenth century. Lope de Vega

\ saw his dramatic possibilities, and brought him on the

stage as a stock character of Spanish comedy. For

the ffradosOf the servant and foil of the hero, whose

buffoonery, rascality, and cowardice are obtruded

on us even amid the most grave and stately scenes of

BUTLER CLARKE 349

Calder6n and Tirao de Molina, is nothing but the
picaro slightly changed and under a new name. ^

My subject has been the rogue in Spain during the
period of his most abundant growth, amid a society
peculiarly suited to him. For this purpose I have
passed in rapid review all important books of the class
from the Celestina, 1480, down to Quevedo's story, 1626.
Those who care to examine the- part played by the
rogue in the literature of the world may be referred to
a learned and graceful study by Mr. James Fitzmaurice^
Kelly, published in the New Review^ July, 1895, and \
entitled The Picaresque Novel.

1898.

BOCCACCIO

TO many readers it has appeared as if the friendship
of Petrarch and Boccaccio made the first com-
fortable resting-place in the history of literature^ on
this side of the Dark Ages. On the other side^ further
back^ there are no doubt many marvellous and ad-
mirable things, the enchantments and sublimities of
' Gothic ' art ; but there is little rest there for those who
are unaccustomed to the manners of the earlier literature.
There are interesting things^ there are beautiful things
in the literature of the Middle Ages ; poems and stories
that have character and worth of their own^ and cannot
be displaced or annulled by anything the Renaissance
or the march of intellect may have produced in later
times. But there is one defect in the Middle Ages:
they are not comfortable. There is no leisurely rational
conversation. Many civilized and educated persons feel
on being asked to consider mediaeval literature^ to pay
attention to the poets of Provence or to the Minne-
singers^ the same sort of reluctance^ the same need for
courage^ that Dr. Johnson may have felt in setting out for
the Isle of Skye. Even to speak of Dante is not always

A a

352 BOCCACCIO

safe with the less adventurous sort of pilgrims; it is
like recommending a good mountain to a traveller who
is anxious about his inn. Boccaccio and Petrarch
come much nearer to their readers and take them into
their confidence; they make friends for themselves as
only modem authors can^ or authors who belong to an
age like that of Cicero or Horace, in which there is
conversation and correspondence and a vivid interest'
in the problems of literature. The reader who is ac-
quainted with the Epistles of Horace may be pleased
to think that in the society of Petrarch and Boccaccio
he has escaped from the Ooths ; he has arrived at the
familiar world where there is an intelligent exchange
of literary opinions. Petrarch and Boccaccio have made
this sort of reputation for themselves. It may be falla-
cious in some respects; the explorer who goes to the
Letters of Petrarch will do well for his happiness if be
forgets to compare them with the letters of Cicero or
of Swift. But the impression is not altogether wrong;
Petrarch and Boccaccio, in their conversation, are more
like the age of Lewis XIV or of Queen Anne than any
authors in the thousand years before their day.

Those two Italian poets have the advantage, an unfiiir
advantage possibly, over older writers that they do not
depend for their fame altogether on the present value
of their writings. They have imposed their story on
the world, their hopes, interests, ambitions, and good
intentions. Like Erasmus and Rousseau, they are
known to the world, and esteemed by the world, without
very much direct and immediate knowledge of th^
writings. There is a traditional legend of their quest
for the sources of learning, and for perfection in litera-
ture. Also there is, apart from their individual works.

.-X-_.

KER 353

the historical and dramatic interest of their contrasted
characters. The merest fragments of knowledge about
the two Italian poets, the traditional story of Laura,
the garden of the Decameron^ may set one's fancy to
work on a story of two scholarly friends who were
brought together by their genius and their ambition,
and eternally kept from imderstanding one another
through a difference of humour in their natures. It
is a situation such as is familiar in comedy* There
are two men who are friends and associates ; one of
them, Petrarch, is an enthusiast, full of sensibility, full
of anxiety, troubled about his soul, troubled about his
fame, vexed with distracting interests, and with a mind
never safe from the keenness of its own thoughts —
an unhappy man from the hour of his birth. The other,
Boccaccio, is equable and sanguine, takes the world
lightly, is not inclined to make grievances for himself
nor to remember them; at the same time a hard
worker, yet not distressing himself about his work;
possessed of those happy virtues of which Bacon speaks,
for which it is difficult to find an appropriate name.
'The Spanish name disemboltura partiy expresseth
them, when there be not stonds nor restiveness in a
man's nature, but that the wheels of his mind keep
way with the wheels of his fortune.' He acknowledged
himself the pupil and follower of Petrarch. He was
more even-tempered and happier than his master, but
far inferior to him in scholarship and insight. Boc-
caccio recognized this, and did his best to profit by
Petrarch's example and instruction. His Latin prose
and verse must have seemed doubtful to Petrarch ; one
can only guess what pain the better scholar suffered
and dissembled in reading the essays of Boccaccio*

A a 2

354

BOCCACCIO

That is part of the comedy; the best part of it is that
both the personages retain their separate characters
unspoilt and uncompromised in what might seem to
have been a remarkably hazardous exchange of senti-
ments and opinions. To the end the relations are
maintained between them; Petrarch is always the
master^ and never entirely at liberty^ never contented ;
Boccaccio always acknowledges that he is a pupil^ and
is alwajTB unconstrained.

Two of the differences between them^ which might
seem promising occasions for a downright quarrel^ but
really turn out quite otherwise, are to be found in
Boccaccio's expostulation with Petrarch on his residence
at Milan with the Visconti, which he r^arded very
naturally as a surrender to a tyranny^ and in his letter
accompanying a copy of Dante's poem* To explain
to your friend and master that he is selling his soul^ to
remind Petrarch of the genius of Dante, these ventures
might be thought to be dangerous; it is difficult to
see any good answer to a friend who tells you ever
so considerately that you are turning against your
principles.

As to the shamefulness of Petrarch's yielding to the
attractions of Milan, he had no good answer ready;
what defence he tried to make must be reckoned among
the least admirable things in his history. He had not
to meet Boccaccio only, but a host of other critics.
Boccaccio (in 1353) had put the case as gently as he
could, in the form of an allegory, but his touch was not
light. Italy, neglected and betrayed, is represented as
Amaryllis, and the Archbishop of Milan, Petrarch's
friend, as Aegon priest of Pan, who has abandoned
his rural worship and made himself into a captain

KER 355

of thieves. It is with this renegade that Silvanus
(Petrarch's own name for himself in the eclogue to his
brother) has allowed himself to betray the Muses and
the Peneian Daphne (that is^ Laura), and what is he
doing there ? It is not indeed to be thought that, along
with Aegon, he is glad to hear of murder and rapine,
the shame and desolation of his native land ; yet what
is the friend of solitude, of virtuous freedom, and of
poverty, what is Silvanus doing in that tyrannical house ?

The all^ory does not do much to soften the accusa-
tion. What Petrarch said to Boccaccio in answer is
not known, but the lines of his defence are found in
letters to other correspondents. They are not good.
The power of the great to command obedience, the
vanity of human wishes, these are made his excuse.
There may have been insincerity on both sides ; it is
probable that Boccaccio did not feel the shame of
submission as vehemently as he was able to express it.
Yet, however it is taken, the situation is characteristic
of both parties, and so is the result. Boccaccio is on
the side of the obvious and superficial truth ; the man
who has praised solitude, independence, and poverty,
and who has wished, in immortal verse, that he could
awaken Italy from her lethargy of servitude, is not
the man to accept any patronage from the Yisconti.
Petrarch, on the other hand, finds himself driven from
this plain ground into sophistical apologies. He has
to make himself believe what he wishes, and in the
fluctuations of his life he supports himself on the
commonplaces of the moralists. There is no quarrel,
but the men are different.

The difference comes out much more distinctly, and
we may say the danger of a breach between them is

356 BOCCACCIO

very much greater in the case of the letter about Dante.
A matter of personal conduct was never very serious
to Boccaccio^ where it did not touch his own interests,
and not always then; but on some questions of taste
he would venture a good deal. It is unlikely that he
would have stood a long examination on the rack ; but
one of the last things he would have renounced was his
admiration for the Divine Comedy. The words put in
his mouth by Landor^ in the imaginary conversation
with Petrarch about Dante (Peniamerofiy First Day)^
are perfect as a summary of his ways of thinking.
Petrarch says to him : ' Tou are the only author who
would not rather demolish another's work than his own^
especially if he thought it better — a thought which seldom
goes beyond suspicion.' And Boccaccio answers^ in
terms that really represent his character: ^I am not
jealous of any one ; I think admiration pleasanter.^

He sent a copy of Dante's poem to Petrarch in 1359^
with some Latin verses^ the purport of them being to
inquire why Petrarch was unjust to Dante. He does
not say as much as this explicitly, but the meaning
is plain enough. It is a common incident. Imagine
a zealous admirer of Mr. Browning's poetry sending a
copy of The King and the Book to a severe and critical
friend. ' You must read this : ^' Because, you spend your
life in praising, to praise you search the wide world
over^'; how have you been able to go on for years
without saying a word about this glorious poem ? ' And
the recipient of these benefits, when he has time to
spare, goes calmly and writes a letter more or less like
Petrarch's answer to Boccaccio, and is the cause of
grief and surprise in the mind of the enthusiast. ^ You
are mistaken in supposing that I ever undervalued your

KER 357

poet ; on the contrary, I have always consistently pitied
him, on account of the wrong done to him by his foolish
admirers. It is true that I never read much of him,
for at the usual age for such things I was on other
lines, and had to be careful about desultory reading.
Now, of com^e, I shall take your advice and look into
him again, I hope with good results. I need not say ^
— and so forth.

It is much in that way that Petrarch thanks Boccaccio
for his present; and still they were friends. Some
historians have found that Petrarch is cleared by his
letter from the suspicion of envy, but it is not easy to
find any very sincere good will to Dante or his poem.
It was impossible for Petrarch to share Boccaccio's
honest, unreserved delight; he had prejudices and
preoccupations; he was obliged to criticize. Boccaccio
has no hesitations, doubts, or scruples; his fortunate
disposition makes him a thorough-going partisan of
what he feels to be good. He does not criticize; he
thinks admiration pleasanter.

These two authors, so unlike in most things, were
brought together by friendship and common interests,
*and have their place together in history; they are
among the first of the modems in every account of
the revival of learning, and they are reverenced as among
the first explorers and discoverers by most writers who
have to describe the emancipation of humanity from
the superstitions of the Middle Ages.

It may be suggested that possibly the historians of
the Renaissance have been a little too much inclined
to interpret the fourteenth century by their knowledge
of the sixteenth, to read Petrarch by the light of
Montaigne. Montaigne is what it all ends in, no

358 BOCCACCIO

doubt; in Montaigne^ or in Shakespeare. There at
lastj in the prose author and in the poet^ is the ex-
phnation and solution of those difficulties in iv^hich
the life of Petrarch is involved ; and Petrarch takes the
first stages in a progress that is to lead from superstition
(that is to say, the traditional and conventional moralities
of the Dark Ages) to the free and unembarrassed study
of human nature. It is impossible to understand
Petrarch without the sixteenth century. But Petrarch
did not travel the whole course; though all his life
is an effort to get freedom, he never fully escapes
from the ancient ways. It is a mistake in history to
represent him as conscious of the full meaning and
import of his reforms in learning and in poetry. Many
things he saw clearly, but he was never free from the
mediaeval hindrances, and he feels them more than those
who have no glimmering of any other worid outside
their mediaeval cave. In Boccaccio there are like contra-
dictions, but here the difference of temper in the
two men comes and helps the more sanguine of the two.
Boccaccio does not feel the contradictions in the same
degree as Petrarch, and does not fret about them.

Where the weight of mediaeval convention is most
obvious in the writings of Petrarch and Boccaccio^ is
perhaps in their theories of poetry. The work of
Petrarch in Italian verse is often described, and justly^
as if it were a victory of form and poetic style, of pure
art not distracted from its own proper aims. But there
is no hint of this sort of view in Petrarch's own
descriptions of the poetical office. On this subject he
speaks out quite distinctly ; he has no hesitation at all,
nothing but unqualified and uncompromising adherence
to the doctrine that all poetry is allegory (Fam. x. 41 ;

^m^

KER 359

to his brother) — the doctrine that filled the Middle Ages
with their most tedious fictions and conventionalities^
the doctrine that provokes more scorn and invective
than any other from the leaders of the new schools^
equally in religion and in learning. Tindale the re-
former speaks of it m terms not very different from
those of Rabelais.

Boccaccio holds this mediaeval doctrine also^ but he
holds it in his own characteristic way. He is fond of
it, and especially fond of a quotation from St. Gregory
the Great, the chief authority on the allegoric method.
St. Gregory, in the preface to his MoraRa, explains that
the Holy Scripture is not for one order of mind only,
that it may be read by simple people in the obvious
sense as well as by great clerks in the allegorical.
Boccaccio adopts St. Gr^ory's illustration, and speaks
of poetry, and incidentally of his own Commentary on
Dante, as giving both the easy and the di£Bcult meaning.
* It is like a river in which there are both easy fords
and deep pools, in which both the lamb may wade and
the elephant may swim^ — un fiume piano e prqfondo,
nel quale P agnellopuote andare, e il leaf ante notare.

But while Petrarch holds to this doctrine painfully,
and expounds the Aeneid as an allegory of man^s soul,
and his own eclogue to his brother Gerard the Car-
thusian, minutely, point for point, as an allegory of his
studies, it never is allowed to trouble Boccaccio. His
apology for poetry in the De Genealogia Deorum,
though it keeps to this mediaeval commonplace about
the allegorical mystery of poetry, is full of life and
spirit. One of the best pieces of satire since Lucian
discussed the professional philosophers is Boccaccio's
account of the way the schoolmen on the one hand and

36o BOCCACCIO

the friars on the other go depreciating poetry and crying
up their own wares instead. Who are the men who
revile the Muses ? There is a race^ he says^ who think
themselves philosophers^ or at any rate would be glad
to be thought so^ who say that poetry is all very well
for children in their grammar schools; they are men
grave in language and ponderous in their manners^ who
trade in words that they have gathered from glances at
books^ words that do not touch reality; who trouble
learned men with their problems, and when they are
answered, shake their heads and smile at the rest of
the company, as if it were nothing but respect for the
years of their instructor that prevented them from
crushing him ; then they will go and make use of what
they have heard and give it out as their own, if they
can get any one to listen to them, musing and sighing
as if they were in deep contemplation, or as if they
were drawing true oracles direct from their most divine
and mysterious sources. The allegorical theory of
poetry does not look so formidable when Boccaccio is
explaining it. His defence of poetry is much the same
as Sir Philip Sidney's, and seems to have been called
out by the same kind of puritan depreciation as Sidney
had to refute. Once in his life, it is true, Boccaccio
was seriously frightened and made to doubt whether
a lover of poetry could be saved; through a warning
from the deathbed of a certain religious man, who had
a vision of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and sent them notice
of their probable fate if they persisted in carnal learn-
ing and poetry. Petrarch had to encourage him, and
advised him not to be seriously troubled. Doubtless
in this distress the allegorical theory was a comfort to
Boccaccio. But practically it has very little effect on

KER 361

his work ; and many poets of a much later day^ like
Tasso, allow it a much more important place in their
poetical designs.

It is hardly possible to make too much of the
injQuence of Petrarch and Boccaccio on the literature
of Europe. Both of them depended upon the older
mediaeval poets for much of their own writing ; Petrarch
on the earlier schools of courtly verse^ Proven9al and
Italian^ Boccaccio on French romances^ on the Divine
Comedy, and on the popular narrative poetry of his
own country; but while both were largely in debt, both
made such use of what they borrowed that they gave
their own character to the mediaeval forms ; and so every-
where in later ages the form of courtly lyric is mainly
Petrarchian, not in Italy only, but in all the Latin
nations and in England, with Ronsard, with Camoens,
with the Elizabethans ; while the most successful forms
of narrative poetry are those which Boiardo, Ariosto,
and Tasso derived from the work of Boccaccio, and
handed on to Spenser. Petrarch and Boccaccio deter-
mined the course of the principal streams of poetry in
all the languages of Europe for more than two centuries
after their lifetime, and, in some important respects,
even to the present day.

As a successful inventor of definite literary forms,
as the founder of literary schools, Boccaccio may claim
respect for all his works, and not for his one great
book, the Decameron, only. Even if the Decameron
had never been written, there would still remain a great
variety of things in prose and verse, each with some
original value of its own, and aU, even the least
successful of them, productive and stimulating in the
schools of poetry.

362 BOCCACCIO

The Decameron has perhaps had less mfluence in
this way, as a pattern of literary design and execution^
than some of the other works of Boccaccio— the Teseide
for instance* The Decameron has provided matter for
a great number of authors— Dryden in the Fables,
Keats's Isabella, and later still ; but the form and the
expression of the Decameron, which are its great ex-
cellence, have not been copied to the same extent, or at
any rate in the same obvious and acknowledged manner.
It doubtless made the first great and decisive change
from the naive and unstudied fashions of mediaeval
composition to the elaborate harmonies of prose; and
again, wherever in later comedy the vernacular or vulgar
speech is liberally used, there may be found something
to recall the rich idioms of Bruno and Buffalmacco, and
the other Florentine ruffians of the Decameron, Tet
the Decameron is not followed in the same way as
some of the less famous works of Boccaccio. The
FUocolo, the FHostrato, the Teseidey the fiammetta,
the AmetOy are each a new kind of fiction, showing later
writers some of the promising ways in which their ideas
might be arranged and developed.

The filocolo and the Fiammettay works which have
their faults, are among the most ingenious and dexterous
examples of literary tact. They are types of prose
romance which were wanted in modem Uteratuie.
Boccaccio discovered these new and promising varieties
of story, apparently without any trouble or labour.
The Fiammetta is the first of the prose romances in
which the heroine is made the narrator, and in which
vicissitudes of sentiment are the matter of the story.
He had certain models to work upon ; chiefly, no doubt,
as one of his biographers explains, the Heroides of Ovid;

EER 363

he may also have known the Epistles of Heloisa^ and
sentiment of the kind he deak with is common and
familiar stuff for all the mediaeval varieties of courtly
poetry. But this does not greatly detract from Boc-
caccio's originality as an inventor of one of the principal
types of the modem novel. The Filocolo, his earliest
work^ is even more remarkable. Boccaccio takes an
old French story^ one of the best known and one of
the most attractive^ the story of the true lovers^ Floris
and Blanchefloure. This he writes out in prose, in his
own way, with all the rhetoric, all the classical ornament
he can find room for : the result is exactly like one of
those Greek rhetorical romances which Boccaccio had
never seen, and which were to have such enormous
influence two centuries later. The Greek romance of
Theagenes and Chariclea had, in the sixteenth and the
seventeenth century, a value like that of the Iliad and
the Aeneid : Sir Philip Sidney, Tasso, and Cervantes are
among the followers of Heliodorus, and speak of him
as one of the most honourable names in literature.
Boccaccio knew nothing about Heliodorus; so he in-
vented him. His FUocoh is a literary form in which most
of the things provided by Heliodorus were anticipated,
generations before the Greek romances came to be
a power in the West.

The Ameto is the first pastoral romance in prose,
with poems interspersed; a form not now much in
request, but which was long regarded as an admirable
kind of fiction. The catalogue of these romances is
a long one; and though the readers are not many,
it is no ignoble company that includes the Diana of
Montemayor, the Galatea of Cervantes, the Aatrie.

The Teseide has a higher eminence in the history of

3^4

BOCCACCIO

poetry. It is the first attempt, in a modem languag-e,
to reproduce the classical epic poem. Boccaccio is the
first adventurer in that long line of poets, in all the
nations, who have tried for the prize of the epic, ^ not
without dust and heat,' and with so many failures, with
such vast heaps of wreckage, piles of similes, broken
^ machines,' battered and dingy masks of the gods and
goddesses of Olympus; yet it is not all waste, for
Paradise Lost is one of the successors of Boccaccio's
Teseide. Paradise Lost was written with the same kind
of ambition, to show that the epic forms of the ancients
could be reproduced, and filled afresh, by a modem
imagination using a modem tongue. Renaissance has
some meaning as applied to the works of Boccaccio.
The contents of the ancient poems had of course never
been ignored, and were of as much importance in the
twelfth century as in the fourteenth or the sixteenth.
But Boccaccio is one of the first of modern writers
to try for the form and spirit of classical literature.

He is not absolutely the first, for Dante was before
him. Dante was the first to realize the value and the
possibilities of the ancient devices in modem poetry;
and some part, not a small part, of Boccaccio's work
is to popularize the methods of Dante ; for instance in
that use of the epic simile which was introduced in
English poetry by Chaucer, and which Chaucer learned
from Dante and Boccaccio.

The talent of Boccaccio for finding out new kinds
of literature, and making the most of them, is like the
instinct of a man of business for profitable openings.
The works of Boccaccio, other than the Decameron, are
full of all kinds of faults, from pompous rhetoric to the
opposite extreme of mere flatness and negligence ; but

- -'*

m I

KER 365

nothing impairs his skill in discovering the lines on which
he is going to proceed^ the ease and security with which
he takes up his point of view^ decides on his method,
and sets to work. The execution may be scamped,
may be trivial in one place and emphatic in another,
without good reason, but it seldom does much to spoil
the good efFect of the first design. This intuition of
the right lines of a story was what Chaucer learned
from Boccaccio. There is nothing more exhilarating in
literary history than the way in which Chaucer caught
the secret of Boccaccio's work^ and used it for his own
purposes.

There is more of instinct than of study in Boccaccio's
power of designing. He did not sit down, like some
later poets, to think about the poetical forms of Greek
and Latin poetry, and try to reproduce them. He
copied the epic model, it is true, but it does not need
much reading to find out that an epic should have
a descriptive catalogue of armies, and^ if possible^ one
book of funeral games. The problems of the unities
are different from this, and there does not seem to have
been anything the least like the theory of the unities in
Boccaccio's narrative art^ though the narrative unities
are there in his compositions. He might say like
M. Jourdain : ' Cependant je n'ai point ^tudi^^ et j'ai
fait cela tout du premier coup.' He took no pains about
the study of classical forms; his classical researches
were of another kind. He liked the matter of ancient
learning; his learned works are encyclopaedias; the
Genealoffiea of the Crod8, a kind of dictionary of
mythology intended for the use of poets^ to keep them
right in their noble ornamental passages; De Casibus
Virorum lUustrium (7%« Falh o/Princes^ as it is called

366 BOCCACCIO

in the English veraion, Lydgate's ' Bochas ') ; De Claris
Mulieribus ; and an appendix to the claasical dictionaiy
of the gods providing additional useful infonnation
for the poets 'concerning Mountuns, Woods, Wella,
Lakes, Rivers, Pools and Marshes, and concerning the
Names of the Sea/

He was not troubled about rhetorical principles, and
says nothing much about his art, beyond his explana-
tion of the all^orical theory. His account of Viigil
is characteristic. Boccaccio was a professor in his old
age ; when he came to Virgil in his Dante lectures be
had nothing to tell his audience about Virgil's diction
nor about the idea of an Heroic Poem ; he told them
that Virgil was an astrolc^er who lived at Naples, and
who made a brazen fly and a bronze horse and the two
heads, one weeping and the other laughing, set up at
the two sides of the Porta Nolana. But while he
neglected the theory of poetical composition he was
making discoveries and inventions in Uterary form, and
establishing literary principles in a practical way. He
has no criticism in him, but he does more than the
work of criticism by the examples he sets. Chaucer,
equally without any explicit reflexion on the principles
of construction, shows how he had made out for himself
what Boccaccio was driving at. Chaucer had all the
mediaeval tastes, the taste for exorbitant digressions and
irrelevances, the love of useful information, the want
of proportion and design. But he read Boccaccio and
discovered his secret without any lectures on criticism
and without saying much about his discovery. He
wrote, in imitation of Boccaccio, the stories of the
FUoatrato and the Teseide. He changed them both;
he added substance to Boccaccio's light and graceful

...1

KER 367

form of TVoilus and Cressida; he threw away the
epic decorations of Palamon and Ardta, In both he
retained^ from his original^ the narrative unity and
coherence. How much he learned from Boccaccio, and
how little it was in agreement with his own natural
proclivities, may be seen in his House of Fame. He
has just finished his TVoilus and Cressida, his greatest
work, and one of the greatest imaginative works in
English poetry, a poem which for sheer strength and
firmness of design, not to speak of its other qualities,
may stand comparison with anything in the great
Elizabethan age, even with Milton himself. When he
has finished this piece of work, Chaucer thinks he has
earned a holiday, and writes the House of Fame — a
rambling, unfinished, roundabout paper, with every good
old mediaeval vanity in it — long descriptions, popular
scientific lectures, allegories, moralizings, everything that
he knew to be wrong, everything that was most familiar
and delightful to him from his school-days, and most
repugnant to a correct and educated taste. Wherever
Chaucer sets himself to do strong work, there is the
influence of Boccaccio; he unbends his mind after-
wards, in a plunge among the mediaeval incongruities ;
sometimes with libertine recklessness, as when he im-
posed the tale of Melibeus on the Canterbury pilgrims ;
Melibeus the inefEable, the unlimited, the hopeless
embodiment of everything in the Middle Ages most
alien to life. The reaction shown in Melibeus may
prove how strong the contrary influence was, the lesson
of restraint and coherence which Chaucer acquired
from Boccaccio.

In his relation to English literature, as the master of
Chaucer, Boccaccio may seem to have the character

B b

368 BOCCACCIO

of an academic and scholarly person prescribing rules.
This is illusion. Boccaccio had a natural gift for story-
/ telling, and for coherence in story-telling. His talent
I for composition, design, arrangement, gives him his rank
among literary reformers. But this talent remains
always natural, and half unconscious. There are
pedantries in Boccaccio, but not the academic and
formal pedantry of the sixteenth-century literary men.
He does not lecture on the principles of composition.
He has not Dante's affection for philology; he would
not have had much sympathy for Tasso's painful
defences and explanations about the plan and details
of his epic.

Boccaccio has his strength from the land of Italy,
like Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. He has the old pieties
of the country people. The best things in his great
classical dictionary are the references to the undying
popular beliefs and rituals. Though he did not get on
well with his father, he remembers with affection the
old religion of the New Year's Eve when his father
used to repeat the old country observance, and pour
a libation on the burning log for the gods of the house-
hold. In the same temper as Sidney's praise of the
ballads, he finds the spirit of poetry in the old wives'
fairy tales at the fireside in the winter nights. One of
his greatest achievements in poetry, the confirmation
of the octave stanza as the Italian heroic measure, is
due to his trust in Italian manners and traditions. The
ottava rima is a popular, not a learned, form of verse-
It is not a rude or barbarous measure ; it is ultimately
derived no doubt from the courtly schools ; but still it
is popular, because the common people of Italy, and
more especially of Tuscany, have chosen to make it so.

KER 369

The stanzas of the early popular romances oi Tuscany
show distinctly their relation to the lyrical form of
the rispetti, which are to this day, it would seem, the
favourite form among the Tuscan villagers. Thus
the following example, from the Cantare di Florio e
Biancifiorey shows the same device of repetition (ripresa)
which is obligatory in the l)rrical rispetti : —

Alora dise Fiorio: E io vi vo' andare,
e metere mi voglio per la via,
e cercaragio la terra e lo mare,
con tutta quanta la Saracinia ;
e giamai non credo in quk tornare
s' io non ritnioTo la speranza mia;
giamai a voi io non ritomeraggio,
8* io non riveggio '1 suo chiaro visaggio.

The mode of the rispetti is this : —

Non ti maravigliar ae tu sei bella,

Perchd sei nata accanto alia marina;

L' acqna del mar ti mantien fresca e bella

Come la rosa in sulla verde spina :

Se delle rose ce n' d nel rosaio,

Nel tno vise ci sono di gennaio;

Se delle rose nel rosaio ne fosse,

Nel tuo viso ci sono blanche e rosse'.

Boccaccio, in adopting this popular stanza for his
romantic and epic verse, was acknowledging his reliance
on the genius of the popular poetry. This, together
with his command of the vulgar idiom in his prose,
gives him his authority in Italian literature at the
beginning of the new age. It is the good fortune of
Italian poetry that at a time when there was so much
danger of pedantry and formalism, of mere classical
imitation, Boccaccio was there to set the force of his

* Tigri, CanUPopolari Toacani (1856), p. 15.

I

370 BOCCACCIO

example and influence against the encroachments of
fanatic precisians. He had too much learning, too
strong a faculty for design, too great variety and live*
liness of elocution, to be ignored by any scholar. He
could not be dismissed as a barbarian ; and he was too
ingenuous, too fond of the Tuscan earth, the Tuscan
air, to admit the sterile blight of the false classicism.
In his own way and degree he did what Catullus and
Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid, had done before him — by
taking all he could get from the universal sources of
learning, while he kept his loyalty to the native genius
of Italy. Thus he appears at the beginning of the
Renaissance well protected against some of its most
insidious vanities ; just as the great Latin poets were
saved by the same Italian genius from the dangers
of a too absolute subservience to Greece.

1899.

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