I have debated on the _'mandata impossibilia volentibus et conantibus.'_ I have written against the formulary and the pope, and I thought myself a confessor. I have been put in prison, and I thought myself a martyr. I now no longer interfere in anything, and I believe myself to be reasonable." "What are your occupations?" said I to him. "Sir," replied he, "I am very fond of money." It is thus that almost all men in their old age inwardly laugh at the follies which they ardently embraced in their youth. Sects grow old, like men. Those which have not been supported by great princes, which have not caused great mischief, grow old much sooner than others. They are epidemic maladies, which pass over like the sweating sickness and the whooping-cough.
There is no longer any question on the pious reveries of Madame Guyon.
We no longer read the most unintelligible book of Maxims of the Saints, but Telemachus. We no longer remember what the eloquent Bossuet wrote against the elegant and amiable Fénelon; we give the preference to his funeral orations. In all the dispute on what is called quietism, there has been nothing good but the old tale revived of the honest woman who brought a torch to burn paradise, and a cruse of water to extinguish the fire of hell, that God should no longer be served either through hope or fear.
I will only remark one singularity in this proceeding, which is not equal to the story of the good woman; it is, that the Jesuits, who were so much accused in France by the Jansenists of having been founded by St. Ignatius, expressly to destroy the love of God, warmly interfered at Rome in favor of the pure love of Fénelon. It happened to them as to M. de Langeais, who was pursued by his wife to the Parliament of Paris, on account of his impotence, and by a girl to the Parliament of Rennes, for having rendered her pregnant. He ought to have gained one of these two causes; he lost them both. Pure love, for which the Jesuits made so much stir, was condemned at Rome, and they were always supposed at Paris to be against loving God. This opinion was so rooted in the public mind that when, some years ago, an engraving was sold representing our Lord Jesus Christ dressed as a Jesuit, a wit--apparently the _loustic_ of the Jansenist party--wrote lines under the print intimating that the ingenious fathers had habited God like themselves, as the surest means of preventing the love of him: _Les ces pères ingénieux:_ _Ils vous ont habillé comme eux,_ _Mon Dieu, de peur qu'on ne vous aime._ At Rome, where such disputes never arise, and where they judge those that take place elsewhere, they were much annoyed with quarrels on pure love. Cardinal Carpegne, who was the reporter of the affairs of the archbishop of Cambray, was ill, and suffered much in a part which is not more spared in cardinals than in other men. His surgeon bandaged him with fine linen, which is called cambrai (cambric) in Italy as in many other places. The cardinal cried out, when the surgeon pleaded that it was the finest cambrai: "What! more cambrai still? Is it not enough to have one's head fatigued with it?" Happy the disputes which end thus!
Happy would man be if all the disputers of the world, if heresiarchs, submitted with so much moderation, such magnanimous mildness, as the great archbishop of Cambray, who had no desire to be an heresiarch! I know not whether he was right in wishing God to be loved for himself alone, but M. de Fénelon certainly deserved to be loved thus.
In purely literary disputes there is often as much snarling and party spirit as in more interesting quarrels. We should, if we could, renew the factions of the circus, which agitated the Roman Empire. Two rival actresses are capable of dividing a town. Men have all a secret fascination for faction. If we cannot cabal, pursue, and destroy one another for crowns, tiaras, and mitres, we fall upon one another for a dancer or a musician. Rameau had a violent party against him, who would have exterminated him; and he knew nothing of it. I had a violent party against me, and I knew it well.
WHYS (THE).
Why do we scarcely ever know the tenth part of the good we might do?
Iris clear, that if a nation living between the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the sea, had employed, in ameliorating and embellishing the country, a tenth part of the money it lost in the war of 1741, and one-half of the men killed to no purpose in Germany, the state would have been more flourishing. Why was not this done? Why prefer a war, which Europe considered unjust, to the happy labors of peace, which would have produced the useful and the agreeable?
Why did Louis XIV., who had so much taste for great monuments, for new foundations, for the fine arts, lose eight hundred millions of our money in seeing his cuirassiers and his household swim across the Rhine in _not_ taking Amsterdam; in stirring up nearly all Europe against him?
What could he not have done with his eight hundred millions?
Why, when he reformed jurisprudence, did he reform it only by halves?
Ought the numerous ancient customs, founded on the decretals and the canon law, to be still suffered to exist? Was it necessary that in the many causes called ecclesiastical, but which are in reality civil, appeal should be made to the bishop; from the bishop to the metropolitan; from the metropolitan to the primate; and from the primate to Rome, "_ad apostolos_"?--as if the apostles had of old been the judges of the Gauls "_en dernier ressort_."
Why, when Louis XIV. was outrageously insulted by Pope Alexander VII.--Chigi--did he amuse himself with sending into France for a legate, to make frivolous excuses, and with having a pyramid erected at Rome, the inscriptions over which concerned none but the watchmen of Rome--a pyramid which he soon after had abolished? Had it not been better to have abolished forever the simony by which every bishop and every abbot in Gaul pays to the Italian apostolic chamber the half of his revenue?
Why did the same monarch, when still more grievously insulted by Innocent XI.--Odescalchi--who took the part of the prince of Orange against him, content himself with having four propositions maintained in his universities, and refuse the prayers of the whole magistracy, who solicited an eternal rupture with the court of Rome?
Why, in making the laws, was it forgotten to place all the provinces of the kingdom under one uniform law, leaving in existence a hundred different customs, and a hundred and forty-four different measures?
Why were the provinces of this kingdom still reputed foreign to one another, so that the merchandise of Normandy, on being conveyed by land into Brittany, pays duty, as if it came from England?
Why was not corn grown in Champagne allowed to be sold in Picardy without an express permission--as at Rome permission is obtained for three giuli to read forbidden books?
Why was France left so long under the reproach of venality? It seemed to be reserved for Louis XIV. to abolish the custom of buying the right to sit as judges over men, as you buy a country house; and making pleaders pay fees to the judge, as tickets for the play are paid for at the door.
Why institute in a kingdom the offices and dignities of king's counsellors: Inspectors of drink, inspectors of the shambles, registrars of inventories, controllers of fines, inspectors of hogs, péréquateurs of tailles, fuel-measurers, assistant-measurers, fuel-pilers, unloaders of green wood, controllers of timber, markers of timber, coal-measurers, corn-sifters, inspectors of calves, controllers of poultry, gaugers, assayers of brandy, assayers of beer, rollers of casks, unloaders of hay, floor-clearers, inspectors of ells, inspectors of wigs?
These offices; in which doubtless consist the prosperity and splendor of an empire, formed numerous communities, which had each their syndics.
This was all suppressed in 1719; but it was to make room for others of a similar kind, in the course of time. Would it not be better to retrench all the pomp and luxury of greatness, than miserably to support them by means so low and shameful?
Why has a nation, often reduced to extremity and to some degree of humiliation, still supported itself in spite of all the efforts made to crush it? Because that nation is active and industrious. The people are like the bees: you take from them wax and honey, and they forthwith set to work to produce more.
Why, in half of Europe, do the girls pray to God in Latin, which they do not understand? Why, in the sixteenth century, when nearly all the popes and bishops notoriously had bastards, did they persist in prohibiting the marriage of priests; while the Greek Church has constantly ordained that curates should have wives?
Why, in all antiquity, was there no theological dispute, nor any people distinguished by a sectarian appellation? The Egyptians were not called Isiacs or Osiriacs. The people of Syria were not named Cybelians. The Cretans had a particular devotion for Jupiter, but were not called Jupiterians. The ancient Latins were much attached to Saturn, but there was not a village in all Latium called Saturnian. The disciples of the God of Truth, on the contrary, taking the title of their master himself, and calling themselves, like him, "anointed," declared, as soon as they were able, eternal war against all nations that were not "anointed," and made war upon one another for upwards of fourteen hundred years, taking the names of Arians, Manichæans, Donatists, Hussites, Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists, etc. Even the Jansenists and Molinists have experienced no mortification so acute as that of not having it in their power to cut one another's throats in pitched battle. Whence is this?
Why does a bookseller publicly sell the "Course of Atheism," by the great Lucretius, printed for the dauphin, only son of Louis XIV., by order and under the direction of the wise duke of Montausier, and of the eloquent Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, and of the learned Huet, bishop of Avranches? There you find those sublime impieties, those admirable lines against Providence and the immortality of the soul, which pass from mouth to mouth, through all after-ages: _Ex nihilo, nihil; in nihilum nil posse reverti._ From nothing, nought; to nothing nought returns.
_Tangere enim ac tangi nisi corpus nulla protest res._ Matter alone can touch and govern matter.
_Nec bene pro meretis capitur, nec tangitur ira (Deus)._ Nothing can flatter God, or cause his anger.
_Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum._ How great the evil by religion caused!
_Desipire est mortale eterno jungere et una_ _Consentire putare, et fungi mutua posse._ 'Tis weak in mortals to attempt to join To transient being that which lasts forever.
_Nil igitur mors est, ad nos neque pertinet hilum._ When death is, we are not; the body dies, and with it all.
_Mortalem tamen esse animam fatere necesse est._ There is no future; mortal is the soul.
_Hinc Acherusia fit stultorum denique vita._ Hence ancient fools are superstition's prey.
And a hundred other lines which charm all nations--the immortal productions of a mind which believed itself to be mortal. Not only are these Latin verses sold in the Rue St. Jacques and on the Quai des Augustins, but you fearlessly purchase the translations made into all the patois derived from the Latin tongue--translations decorated with learned notes, which elucidate the doctrine of materialism, collect all the proofs against the Divinity, and would annihilate it, if it could be destroyed. You find this book, bound in morocco, in the fine library of a great and devout prince, of a cardinal, of a chancellor, of an archbishop, of a round-capped president: but the first eighteen books of de Thou were condemned as soon as they appeared. A poor Gallic philosopher ventures to publish, in his own name, that if men had been born without fingers, they would never have been able to work tapestry; and immediately another Gaul, who for his money has obtained a robe of office, requires that the book and the author be burned.
Why are scenic exhibitions anathematized by certain persons who call themselves of the first order in the state, seeing that such exhibitions are necessary to all the orders of the state, and that the laws of the state uphold them with equal splendor and regularity?
Why do we abandon to contempt, debasement, oppression, and rapine, the great mass of those laborious and harmless men who cultivate the earth every day of the year, that we may eat of all its fruits? And why, on the contrary, do we pay respect, attention, and court, to the useless and often very wicked man who lives only by their labor, and is rich only by their misery?
Why, during so many ages, among so many men who sow the corn with which we are fed, has there been no one to discover that ridiculous error which teaches that the grain must rot in order to germinate, and die to spring up again--an error which has led to many impertinent assertions, to many false comparisons, and to many ridiculous opinions?
Why, since the fruits of the earth are so necessary for the preservation of men and animals, do we find so many years, and so many centuries, in which these fruits are absolutely wanting? why is the earth covered with poisons in the half of Africa and of America? why is there no tract of land where there are not more insects than men? why does a little whitish and offensive secretion form a being which will have hard bones, desires, and thoughts? and why shall those beings be constantly persecuting one another? why does there exist so much evil, everything being formed by a God whom all Theists agree in calling good? why, since we are always complaining of our ills, are we constantly employed in redoubling them? why, since we are so miserable, has it been imagined that to die is an evil--when it is clear that not to have been, before our birth, was no evil? why does it rain every day into the sea, while so many deserts demand rain, yet are constantly arid? why and how have we dreams in our sleep, if we have no soul? and if we have one, how is it that these dreams are always so incoherent and so extravagant? why do the heavens revolve from east to west, rather than the contrary way? why do we exist? why does anything exist?
WICKED.
We are told that human nature is essentially perverse; that man is born a child of the devil, and wicked. Nothing can be more injudicious; for thou, my friend, who preachest to me that all the world is born perverse, warnest me that thou art born such also, and that I must mistrust thee as I would a fox or a crocodile. Oh, no! sayest thou; I am regenerated; I am neither a heretic nor an infidel; you may trust in me.
But the rest of mankind, which are either heretic, or what thou callest infidel, will be an assemblage of monsters, and every time that thou speakest to a Lutheran or a Turk, thou mayest be sure that they will rob and murder thee, for they are children of the devil, they are born wicked; the one is not regenerated, the other is degenerated. It would be much more reasonable, much more noble, to say to men: "You are all born good; see how dreadful it is to corrupt the purity of your being.
All mankind should be dealt with as are all men individually." If a canon leads a scandalous life, we say to him: "Is it possible that you would dishonor the dignity of canon?" We remind a lawyer that he has the honor of being a counsellor to the king, and that he should set an example. We say to a soldier to encourage him: "Remember that thou art of the regiment of Champagne." We should say to every individual: "Remember thy dignity as a man."
And indeed, notwithstanding the contrary theory, we always return to that; for what else signifies the expression, so frequently used in all nations: "Be yourself again?" If we are born of the devil, if our origin was criminal, if our blood was formed of an infernal liquor, this expression: "Be yourself again," would signify: "Consult, follow your diabolical nature; be an impostor, thief, and assassin; it is the law of your nature."
Man is not born wicked; he becomes so, as he becomes sick. Physicians present themselves and say to him: "You are born sick." It is very certain these doctors, whatever they may say or do, will not cure him, if the malady is inherent in his nature; besides, these reasoners are often very ailing themselves.
Assemble all the children of the universe; you will see in them only innocence, mildness, and fear; if they were born wicked, mischievous, and cruel, they would show some signs of it, as little serpents try to bite, and little tigers to tear. But nature not having given to men more offensive arms than to pigeons and rabbits, she cannot have given them an instinct leading them to destroy.
Man, therefore, is not born bad; why, therefore, are several infected with the plague of wickedness? It is, that those who are at their head being taken with the malady, communicate it to the rest of men: as a woman attacked with the distemper which Christopher Columbus brought from America, spreads the venom from one end of Europe to the other.
The first ambitious man corrupted the earth. You will tell me that this first monster has sowed the seed of pride, rapine, fraud, and cruelty, which is in all men. I confess, that in general most of our brethren can acquire these qualities; but has everybody the putrid fever, the stone and gravel, because everybody is exposed to it?
There are whole nations which are not wicked: the Philadelphians, the Banians, have never killed any one. The Chinese, the people of Tonquin, Lao, Siam, and even Japan, for more than a hundred years have not been acquainted with war. In ten years we scarcely see one of those great crimes which astonish human nature in the cities of Rome, Venice, Paris, London, and Amsterdam; towns in which cupidity, the mother of all crimes, is extreme.
If men were essentially wicked--if they were all born submissive to a being as mischievous as unfortunate, who, to revenge himself for his punishment, inspired them with all his passions--we should every morning see husbands assassinated by their wives, and fathers by their children; as at break of day we see fowls strangled by a weasel who comes to suck their blood.
If there be a thousand millions of men on the earth, that is much; that gives about five hundred millions of women, who sew, spin, nourish their little ones, keep their houses or cabins in order, and slander their neighbors a little. I see not what great harm these poor innocents do on earth. Of this number of inhabitants of the globe, there are at least two hundred millions of children, who certainly neither kill nor steal, and about as many old people and invalids, who have not the power of doing so. There will remain, at most, a hundred millions of robust young people capable of crime. Of this hundred millions, there are ninety continually occupied in forcing the earth, by prodigious labor, to furnish them with food and clothing; these have scarcely time. In the ten remaining millions will be comprised idle people and good company, who would enjoy themselves at their ease; men of talent occupied in their professions; magistrates, priests, visibly interested in leading a pure life, at least in appearance. Therefore, of truly wicked people, there will only remain a few politicians, either secular or regular, who will always trouble the world, and some thousand vagabonds who hire their services to these politicians. Now, there is never a million of these ferocious beasts employed at once, and in this number I reckon highwaymen. You have therefore on the earth, in the most stormy times, only one man in a thousand whom we can call wicked, and he is not always so.
There is, therefore infinitely less wickedness on the earth than we are told and believe there is. There is still too much, no doubt; we see misfortunes and horrible crimes; but the pleasure of complaining of and exaggerating them is so great, that at the least scratch we say that the earth flows with blood. Have you been deceived?--all men are perjured. A melancholy mind which has suffered injustice, sees the earth covered with damned people: as a young rake, supping with his lady, on coming from the opera, imagines that there are no unfortunates.
WILL.
Some very subtle Greeks formerly consulted Pope Honorius I., to know whether Jesus, when He was in the world, had one will or two, when He would sleep or watch, eat or repair to the water-closet, walk or sit.
"What signifies it to you?" answered the very wise bishop of Rome, Honorius. "He has certainly at present the will for you to be well-disposed people--that should satisfy you; He has no will for you to be babbling sophists, to fight continually for the bishop's mitre and the ass's shadow. I advise you to live in peace, and not to lose in useless disputes the time which you might employ in good works."
"Holy father, you have said well; this is the most important affair in the world. We have already set Europe, Asia, and Africa on fire, to know whether Jesus had two persons and one nature, or one nature and two persons, or rather two persons and two natures, or rather one person and one nature."
"My dear brethren, you have acted wrongly; we should give broth to the sick and bread to the poor. It is doubtless right to help the poor! but is not the patriarch Sergius about to decide in a council at Constantinople, that Jesus had two natures and one will? And the emperor, who knows nothing about it, is of this opinion."
"Well, be it so! but above all defend yourself from the Mahometans, who box your ears every day, and who have a very bad will towards you. It is well said! But behold the bishops of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, and Morocco, all declare firmly for the two wills. We must have an opinion; what is yours?"
"My opinion is, that you are madmen, who will lose the Christian religion which we have established with so much trouble. You will do so much mischief with your folly, that Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, and Morocco, of which you speak to me, will become Mahometan, and there will not be a Christian chapel in Africa. Meantime, I am for the emperor and the council, until you have another council and another emperor."
"This does not satisfy us. Do you believe in two wills or one?"
"Listen: if these two wills are alike, it is as if there was but one; if they are contrary, he who has two wills at once will do two contrary things at once, which is absurd: consequently, I am for a single will."
"Ah, holy father, you are a monothelite! Heresy! the devil!
Excommunicate him! depose him! A council, quick! another council!
another emperor! another bishop of Rome! another patriarch!"
"My God! how mad these poor Greeks are with all their vain and interminable disputes! My successor will do well to dream of being powerful and rich."
Scarcely had Honorius uttered these words when he learned that the emperor Heraclius was dead, after having been beaten by the Mahometans.
His widow, Martina, poisoned her son-in-law; the senate caused Martina's tongue to be cut out, and the nose of another son of the emperor to be slit: all the Greek Empire flowed in blood. Would it not be better not to have disputed on the two wills? And this Pope Honorius, against whom the Jansenists have written so much--was he not a very sensible man?
WIT, SPIRIT, INTELLECT.
A man who had some knowledge of the human heart, was consulted upon a tragedy which was to be represented; and he answered, there was so much wit in the piece, that he doubted of its success. What! you will exclaim, is that a fault, at a time when every one is in search of wit--when each one writes but to show that he has it--when the public even applaud the falsest thoughts, if they are brilliant?--Yes, doubtless, they will applaud the first day, and be wearied the second.
What is called wit, is sometimes a new comparison, sometimes a subtle allusion; here, it is the abuse of a word, which is presented in one sense, and left to be understood in another; there, a delicate relation between two ideas not very common. It is a singular metaphor; it is the discovery of something in an object which does not at first strike the observation, but which is really in it; it is the art either of bringing together two things apparently remote, or of dividing two things which seem to be united, or of opposing them to each other. It is that of expressing only one-half of what you think, and leaving the other to be guessed. In short, I would tell you of all the different ways of showing wit, if I had more; but all these gems--and I do not here include the counterfeits--are very rarely suited to a serious work--to one which is to interest the reader. The reason is, that then the author appears, and the public desire to see only the hero; for the hero is constantly either in passion or in danger. Danger and the passions do not go in search of wit. Priam and Hecuba do not compose epigrams while their children are butchered in flaming Troy; Dido does not sigh out her soul in madrigals, while rushing to the pile on which she is about to immolate herself; Demosthenes makes no display of pretty thoughts while he is inciting the Athenians to war. If he had, he would be a rhetorician; whereas he is a statesman.
The art of the admirable Racine is far above what is called wit; but if Pyrrhus had always expressed himself in this style: _Vaincu, chargé de fers, de regrets consumé,_ _Brûlé de plus de feux que je n'en allumai..._ _Hélas! fus-je jamais si cruel que vous l'êtes?_ Conquered and chained, worn out by vain desire, Scorched by more flames than I have ever lighted...Alas! my cruelty ne'er equalled yours!
--if Orestes had been continually saying that the "Scythians are less cruel than Hermione," these two personages would excite no emotion at all; it would be perceived that true passion rarely occupies itself with such comparisons; and that there is some disproportion between the real flames by which Troy was consumed and the flames of Pyrrhus' love--between the Scythians immolating men, and Hermione not loving Orestes. Cinna says, speaking of Pompey: _Le ciel choisit sa mort, pour servir dignement_ _D'une marque éternelle à ce grand changement;_ _Et devait cette gloire aux manes d'un tel homme,_ _D'emporter avec eux la liberté de Rome._ Heaven chose the death of such a man, to be Th' eternal landmark of this mighty change.
His manes called for no less offering Than Roman liberty.
This thought is very brilliant; there is much wit in it, as also an air of imposing grandeur. I am sure that these lines, pronounced with all the enthusiasm and art of a great actor, will be applauded; but I am also sure that the play of "Cinna," had it been written entirely in this taste, would never have been long played. Why, indeed, was heaven bound to do Pompey the honor of making the Romans slaves after his death? The contrary would be truer: the manes of Pompey should rather have obtained from heaven the everlasting maintenance of that liberty for which he is supposed to have fought and died.
What, then, would any work be which should be full of such far-fetched and questionable thoughts? How much superior to all these brilliant ideas are those simple and natural lines: _Cinna, tu t'en souviens, et veux m'assassiner!_ Thou dost remember, Cinna, yet wouldst kill me!
_Soyons amis, Cinna; c'est moi qui t'en convie._ --ID., act v, scene iii.
Let us be friends, Cinna; 'tis I who ask it.
True beauty consists, not in what is called wit, but in sublimity and simplicity. Let Antiochus, in "Rodogune," say of his mistress, who quits him, after disgracefully proposing to him to kill his mother: _Elle fuit, mais en Parthe, en nous perçant le cœur._ She flies, but, like the Parthian, flying, wounds.
Antiochus has wit; he makes an epigram against Rodogune; he ingeniously likens her last words in going away, to the arrows which the Parthians used to discharge in their flight. But it is not because his mistress goes away, that the proposal to kill his mother is revolting: whether she goes or stays, the heart of Antiochus is equally wounded. The epigram, therefore, is false; and if Rodogune did not go away, this bad epigram could not be retained.
I select these examples expressly from the best authors, in order that they may be the more striking. I do not lay hold of those puns which play upon words, the false taste of which is felt by all. There is no one that does not laugh when, in the tragedy of the "Golden Fleece," Hypsipyle says to Medea, alluding to her sorceries: _Je n'ai que des attraits, et vous avez des charmes._ I have attractions only, you have charms.
Corneille found the stage and every other department of literature infested with these puerilities, into which he rarely fell.
I wish here to speak only of such strokes of wit as would be admitted elsewhere, and as the serious style rejects. To their authors might be applied the sentence of Plutarch, translated with the happy naivete of Amiot: "_Tu tiens sans propos beaucoup de bons propos_."
There occurs to my recollection one of those brilliant passages, which I have seen quoted as a model in many works of taste, and even in the treatise on studies by the late M. Rollin. This piece is taken from the fine funeral oration on the great Turenne, composed by Fléchier. It is true, that in this oration Fléchier almost equalled the sublime Bossuet, whom I have called and still call the only eloquent man among so many elegant writers; but it appears to me that the passage of which I am speaking would not have been employed by the bishop of Meaux. Here it is: "Ye powers hostile to France, you live; and the spirit of Christian charity forbids me to wish your death...but you live; and I mourn in this pulpit over a virtuous leader, whose intentions were pure..."
An apostrophe in this taste would have been suitable to Rome in the civil war, after the assassination of Pompey; or to London, after the murder of Charles I.; because the interests of Pompey and Charles I.
were really in question. But is it decent to insinuate in the pulpit a wish for the death of the emperor, the king of Spain, and the electors, and put in the balance against them the commander-in-chief employed by a king who was their enemy? Should the intentions of a leader--which can only be to serve his prince--be compared with the political interests of the crowned heads against whom he served? What would be said of a German who should have wished for the death of the king of France, on the occasion of the death of General Merci, "whose intentions were pure"?
Why, then, has this passage always been praised by the rhetoricians?
Because the figure is in itself beautiful and pathetic; but they do not thoroughly investigate the fitness of the thought.
I now return to my paradox; that none of those glittering ornaments, to which we give the name of wit, should find a place in great works designed to instruct or to move the passions. I will even say that they ought to be banished from the opera. Music expresses passions, sentiments, images; but where are the notes that can render an epigram?
Quinault was sometimes negligent, but he was always natural.
Of all our operas, that which is the most ornamented, or rather the most overloaded, with this epigrammatic spirit, is the ballet of the "Triumph of the Arts," composed by an amiable man, who always thought with subtlety, and expressed himself with delicacy; but who, by the abuse of this talent, contributed a little to the decline of letters after the glorious era of Louis XIV. In this ballet, in which Pygmalion animates his statue, he says to it: _Vos premiers mouvemens ont été de m'aimer._ And love for me your earliest movements showed.
I remember to have heard this line admired by some persons in my youth.
But who does not perceive that the movements of the body of the statue are here confounded with the movements of the heart, and that in any sense the phrase is not French--that it is, in fact, a pun, a jest? How could it be that a man who had so much wit, had not enough to retrench these egregious faults? This same man--who, despising Homer, translated him; who, in translating him, thought to correct him, and by abridging him, thought to make him read--had a mind to make Homer a wit. It is he who, when Achilles reappears, reconciled to the Greeks who are ready to avenge him, makes the whole camp exclaim: _Que ne vaincra-t-il point? Il s'est vaincu lui-même._ What shall oppose him, conqueror of himself?
A man must indeed be fond of witticisms, when he makes fifty thousand men pun all at once upon the same word.
This play of the imagination, these quips, these cranks, these random shafts, these gayeties, these little broken sentences, these ingenious familiarities, which it is now the fashion to lavish so profusely, are befitting no works but those of pure amusement. The front of the Louvre, by Perrault, is simple and majestic; minute ornaments may appear with grace in a cabinet. Have as much wit as you will, or as you can, in a madrigal, in light verses, in a scene of a comedy, when it is to be neither impassioned nor simple, in a compliment, in a "novellette," or in a letter, where you assume gayety yourself in order to communicate it to your friends.
Far from having reproached Voiture with having wit in his letters, I found, on the contrary, that he had not enough, although he was constantly seeking it. It is said that dancing-masters make their bow ill, because they are anxious to make it too well. I thought this was often the case with Voiture; his best letters are studied; you feel that he is fatiguing himself to find that which presents itself so naturally to Count Anthony Hamilton, to Madame de Sévigné, and to so many other women, who write these trifles without an effort, better than Voiture wrote them with labor. Despréaux, who in his first satires had ventured to compare Voiture to Horace, changed his opinion when his taste was ripened by age. I know that it matters very little, in the affairs of this world, whether Voiture was or was not a great genius; whether he wrote only a few pretty letters, or that all his pieces of pleasantry were models. But we, who cultivate and love the liberal arts, cast an attentive eye on what is quite indifferent to the rest of the world.
Good taste is to us in literature what it is to women in dress; and provided that one's opinions shall not be made a party matter, it appears to me that one may boldly say, that there are but few excellent things in Voiture, and that Marot might easily be reduced to a few pages.
Not that we wish to take from them their reputation; on the contrary, we wish to ascertain precisely what that reputation cost them, and what are the real beauties for which their defects have been tolerated. We must know what we are to follow, and what we are to avoid; this is the real fruit of the profound study of the belles-lettres; this is what Horace