From Temple Bar. LA FONTAINE, WHO shall express the charm of La Fontaine ? It is easy to say what one means about the bottomless depth of Molière's knowledge of human folly, and his boundless power of putting that knowledge to effective purpose on a stage, or about Boileau's admirable wit, and still more admirable good sense; or again about Racine's formal perfections, or De Musset's force of passion; but charm, such charm as every one who possesses a sense of humor and a little French, has felt in La Fontaine, is another thing altogether, and one far more difficult to define. Brilliancy, eloquence, passion, wit, are all things definitely feltthings of which, rightly or wrongly, we fancy ourselves to be easily able to give a clear account; but that quality by virtue of which a man's books make us wish to know him, and think of him as a delightful person to meet strolling in the Elysian fields, is a far less visible thing, less tangible, less easy to get hold of. ter; and if we had to confess ourselves to them, and lay out before them all our weaknesses and worse than weaknesses exactly as they are, it would be with a shy if not with a guilty shrinking that we should do it. But Herodotus, we are sure, would only smile at us, Horace would still find a place for us at supper, La Fontaine would at worst laugh at us in a fable. And it is men of this sort that possess charm. They do not need an intellect of the very highest order, but their intelligence must be intensely alive, full of curiosity, receptive of influences from every side, instinct with sympathy for the most varied characters, and for forms of life the most unlike their own. Everything interests them, nothing absorbs them. They are lookers-on at the great games of religion, and politics, and fortune played by other men, and they watch each rise and fall with amused curiosity, chronicle it, point its moral, and pass by. Herodotus puts them all alike down in his note-book : the Thracians who make lamentations when their children are born, the PerAnd it is also a far rarer thing. He- sians who hold their state councils first rodotus has it, alone among the Greeks, in the evening when drunk, and then I think, unless Plato should be added. again when sober in the morning; Horace has it more than any one among Croesus, who misunderstands wise saythe Romans; La Fontaine more than ings, and obstinately inclines to think any one who ever lived. It may come himself happy although not dead; and more easily to the French than to other Xerxes impiously and recklessly repeople, for several of their great writ-fusing to turn back from his expedition ers, Molière and Montaigne, for in- into Greece, although warned by so stance, have at least a touch of it. But clear a portent as that of a mare being there is nothing it is so much afraid of as rhetoric, and the tendency to rhetoric is the besetting sin of French literature; so that it is only the very elect that can be saved. They are by no means necessarily the greatest men. The greatest, in fact, can hardly stoop to possess charm. Who could think of being familiar with Dante or Milton, or dare to break in lightly upon the Olympian dignity of Goethe? Our place in their presence would be at their feet; our feelings before them would be reverence and awe, and, if also love, the humble, grateful, halffearful love of the pupil for the mas-taine saying: delivered of a hare; and no doubt he On cherche les rieurs ; et moi je les évite Cet art veut, sur tout autre, un suprême mérite : Dieu ne créa que pour les sots but there is nothing that spoils pleasant company so much as the presence of a bore who is always wanting to say something good; and the man of genuine humor is the first to resent a nuisance of that sort. One may be quite sure that no one enjoyed a really good thing more than La Fontaine. But it must be perfectly natural and simple; there must be absolutely nothing like attitudinizing. That is why the French, whose national brightness and amiability take them half-way to the possession of charm, have not produced more writers possessing it. They have been too like the bull in La Fontaine's fable of "The Man and the Serpent: Faisons taire Cet ennuyeux déclamateur: That has been a weak point in French literature, and in the character of the French nation, from Corneille to Victor Hugo. And I suppose nowhere but in France could that theatrical flourish of M. Carnot's "J'embrasse la Russie," at which Punch and everybody else was laughing the other day, have been perpetrated. Things of that sort are quite fatal to charm; but the simple fact that a man, without going so far as that, never lets himself be seen in his books, except in a sort of court dress, is nearly equally fatal. We cannot pretend to know Corneille, or Racine, or Bossuet. They are voices from behind a curtain which is never raised. Even the ever-delightful Molière, like Shakespeare, very rarely betrays to us which of his hundred voices is his But with the men of whom I am speaking it is just the opposite. The face is always peering from behind the curtain. own. Bornons ici cette carrière : Les longs ouvrages me font peur, says La Fontaine at the end of the first half of his fables, and we think at once of the easy-going bonhomme, who early in life found theological studies a weariness of the flesh, gave them up without hesitation, and "lived happily ever afterwards," like a princess in a fairy tale. And the beautiful ending of the fable of "The Two Pigeons" is not only fuller of poetry than much of La Fontaine, but also, we cannot help feeling it, a heart confession from a man who was nearly always in love after one fashion or another: Je Amants, heureux amants, voulez-vous voyager? Que ce soit aux rives prochaines. Soyez-vous l'un à l'autre un monde toujours beau, Toujours divers, toujours nouveau : Tenez-vous lieu de tout, comptez pour rien le reste. J'ai quelquefois aimé; je n'aurais pas alors, Contre le Louvre et ses trésors, Contre le firmament et sa voûte céleste, Changé les bois, changé les lieux Honorés par les pas, éclairés par les yeux De l'aimable et jeune bergère Pour qui, sous le fils de Cythère, servis, engagé par mes premiers ser ments. Hélas! quand reviendront de semblables moments ? Faut-il que tant d'objets si doux et si charmants Me laissent vivre au gré de mon âme inquiète ? Ah! si mon cœur osait encore se renflammer! Ne sentirai-je plus de charme qui m'arrête ? Ai-je passé le temps d'aimer ? Who can miss the personal note here ? and who can refuse to be charmed by it? And yet we too often treat this book of fables, the most perfect thing perhaps in French poetry, as nothing and leave it to the tender mercies of more than a story-book for children, the schoolroom and the French governess! The fact is that La Fontaine is the true French Homer, as I think Sainte Beuve first called him. More than any other of the great French classics except Molière, he speaks to all the world, and it is only the fact that his best-known work is called "Fables" that has stood in the way of his being recognized as what he is. | saved his great-granddaughter from the No one is more human than La Fon- guillotine. And yet, if you ask what taine. If he can hardly be said to be makes every one so fond of him, I can one of those rarely gifted men who see hardly say; not his virtues, certainly, life "whole," he at least sees a large for he had very few; there is very part of it, and his criticism of life, if it little in his life that we can grow enlays no claim to the profundity of the thusiastic about, and a good deal, I am greatest men, is at least everywhere afraid, which we had better leave alone. large, tolerant, shrewd, kindly, and He is anything but a hero, and if I touched with a delightful humor. His were pressed to say why we almost wisdom may be worldly wisdom, but it love him, I could only fall back upon is the best sort of worldly wisdom my first answer and say, for his charm. genial and epicurean, without a touch The truth is that his life was the of cunning or greed. He takes the pleasant, easy-going life natural to an world as he finds it, and makes the epicurean born with enough to live on, best of it; which is, after all, exactly and in days before people thought what most of us have to do; and if we there was any crime in being comfortwant to learn how to do it, we cannot able. His father had a place in the forgo to a pleasanter school than La Fon-estry department at Château Thierry, taine's. a town on the Marne, about fifty, or sixty miles from Paris. He seems to have done two important things for his son, besides his part in bringing him into the world. When La Fontaine was about twenty-six, he handed over his place to him, and presented him with a girl of fifteen for his wife. Neither gift can be said to have been very successful, for La Fontaine neglected the forests, and deserted his wife. There was no public scandal, And there is another thing. He has a unique place in French literary history. He stands between the old and the new, and has learned the clearness and order of the age of Louis XIV., without unlearning the freedom and humor of the French of the Renaissance. Above all, though he lived chiefly in Paris, he still breathes in his writings the fresh air of the country, which his contemporaries and successors were exchanging for the close at- and certainly no divorce; they lived mosphere of the court and the capital. He still knows the French peasant, and his curé, and his seigneur, and all the varied population of the fields. And that is a help to his popularity; the land and the people who live on it are the same from generation to generation, while the town life of one century is unintelligible or ridiculous to the next. And so for all these reasons La Fontaine has a place in our hearts such as no other French poet can claim. We love him, and laugh with him, even at him sometimes, and, as I said, should like some day to come across him in the Elysian fields. That is how people have always felt towards him, and we cannot help believing that the servant girl was right when she said that "God would never have the heart to send him to hell." Even in the days of the Terror the mere name of La Fontaine some years together, and had a sop, and for a long time after that they occasionally corresponded and even met; but Madame La Fontaine was a frivolous and unpractical woman, just the sort of wife to be impossible for a helplessly unbusiness-like man of the stamp of La Fontaine, who wanted a wife who could look after him, and see that he did not forget his dinner or put his clothes on inside out. And in fact something of this sort became necessary for him in the end; and after the death of the Duchess of Orleans, in whose household he had had a place, his friend Madame de la Sablière took him to live in her house, and he lived there for twenty years, remaining even when she broke up her establishment: ("J'ai renvoyé tout mon monde," she said, "je n'ai gardé que mon chien, mon chat, et La Fontaine "); and indeed staying there even after she herself had left it to devote herself | accompanied him on his journey, of entirely to hospital nursing, and when which he has left us a charming picture he left it at her death, it was only to go in the letters he wrote to his wife on to his friend D’Hervart, in whose house he died. Every one knows the story of M. d'Hervart meeting him in the street after Madame de la Sablière's death, and saying, "My dear La Fontaine, I was just looking for you to ask you to come and live with me; " and La Fontaine's answer, "I was on my way there" (j'y allais). It is often said that we can show nothing like the ancient friendships; but what Roman friendship is so complete as this? no the way. Perhaps some wives would De quoi sert tant de dépense? And then a few days later, with ami- Altogether he seems to have enjoyed himself very much, and gives us pleasant enough pictures of himself and his party, worth quoting, as there are very Born in 1621, and married in 1647, La Fontaine continued to live with his wife at Château Thierry, and discharge his official duties after a fashion doubt his own fashion — till about 1654, when one Januart, a relation of his wife's, who held some post under Fouquet, the all-powerful controller of the finances, took him to Paris and presented him to Fouquet, who at once added La Fontaine to the crowd of men of letters under his patronage, and gave him a pension of a thousand francs. From that time Paris was La Fontaine's home, though for many 'years he paid an annual visit to Chateau Thierry, generally accompanied by Boileau and Racine. His relations with Fouquet do him as much honor as anything in his life; for when Fouquet fell in 1661, struck down in a moment by Louis XIV.'s sudden outbreak of furious suspicion as by a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, La Fontaine did not desert him, as his political partisans did, but did all the little he could for We left very early on Sunday. Madame him wrote letters to friends, and an c- and our aunt went with us as far as ode to the king asking for his pardon, Bourg-la-Reine. We waited there nearly and finally that lament over his pa- three hours; and to make the time pass tron's fall which is among the finest of French elegies. C'est être innocent que d'être malheureux was a doctrine certain to commend itself to the good-natured La Fontaine, who had not a grain of vindictiveness in his composition, and was besides in favor of every one enjoying himself. La Fontaine's friend Jannart shared Fouquet's disgrace, and had to retire to Limoges; and La Fontaine few of his letters left. Here is what he writes from Amboise : Your uncle's occupations and mine at Clamart were very different. He did nothing worth speaking of, only such amusing things as expeditions to this place and that, lawsuits and other business. It was just went to sleep, and spent my time with the the opposite with me: I strolled about and ladies who came to see us. quicker, or to make it pass slower (I don't know which I ought to say), we heard the village mass. There was nothing wanting, procession, holy water, hymn and the rest. Luckily for us, the curé was an ignoramus and did not preach. At last, by God's grace, came the coach; the king's servant was there; there were no monks, but to make up for them, three women, a commercial traveller, who never said a word, and a lawyer who never stopped singing, and sang very badly-he was carrying home four |