Chapter II (1)

You cannot end a book of prose as you can a poem, for the simple reason that prose does not appeal to the emotions directly, as poetry does, but by way of the reason. By emotion you can carry off anything that you may have had the passion to begin and continue; but the reason asks another satisfaction. You may win emotional assent to a proposition that two and two make three, or five. In the heat of the moment it will pass. Reason won’t take it in on the mere statement. If some such result is to be the outcome of your book--and it is that of many and many a novel--you must be careful how you conclude; and it will be seen, I think, that so the novelists have been.

The simplest way of ending a story, you might think, would be to say That’s all, and get off your tub. It was the way, we saw, of the rough-and-ready intelligence which carved the _Song of Roland_ out of some huge rhymed chronicle: _Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet_. It is the way of the colophon. But even the colophon must be meditated and prepared for; so it is not the real end but only part of it. Sir Thomas Malory had a long colophon to the _Mort d’Arthur_, including a bidding prayer on his own account; and then Caxton his printer puts in a word for himself; but it is led up to by a page which sees Lancelot and Guinevere dead and buried, the realm of England disposed of, and the later fortunes of the few knights left alive. It is a deliberate, not a summary end to a great book--the end “in calm of mind, all passion spent,” which such a book should have. It is, again, the way chosen by Gibbon for _The Decline and Fall_. You have a dignified and sufficient summary of the whole work in a sentence of twelve co-ordinate clauses, set stately apart by their semicolons. Then comes a brief reflection of the author’s--“It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which....” And then, after that momentary tribute to his personal share in it, he makes a formal submission of it “to the curiosity and candour of the public.” Mannerly and contained to the last, the good Gibbon. Nobody ever came down from a tub with more self-respect; yet Boswell came down pretty well too:

“Such,” he concludes, “was Samuel Johnson, a man whose talents, acquirements and virtues were so extraordinary, that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence.” He was, at least, sufficiently moved to forget himself altogether--which is very much to his credit. Yet he does not satisfy like Gibbon.

Carlyle was tired with _Frederick_, and, may be, out of conceit with it. His conclusion is short, and his colophon barbarous. “Adieu, good readers; bad also, adieu,” is rather bravado than bravery. More courteous, more inclusive, serener and braver is the conclusion of _The French Revolution_. One sniff there is, at the “Citizen King, frequently shot at, not yet shot,” recollection of a Teufelsdröckian prophecy, neither here nor there; and then a paragraph of valediction. “Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence; but it is done.... Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely; thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.” A beautiful colophon.

Carlyle was a scolding philosopher; Montaigne had been a shrugging one. His last essai, _De l’Expérience_, is very long, but appropriately the conclusion of a ripe and profitable book. The end of the matter deals with what, according to him, is the end of life itself, “de scavoir jouyr loyallement de son estre.” “So much art thou God,” he continues, “as thou knowest thyself for man.” His bidding prayer is on behalf of old age, addressed to the God of Health and Wisdom--“mais gaye et sociale.” It is very French to lay down in terms at once the nature of your God and your need of him. Compare with it old Burton’s “corollary and conclusion” of the _Anatomy_:

“Be not alone, be not idle”:

then, as he must always be quoting,

“Hope on, ye wretched,
Beware, ye fortunate”--

encouragement and warning in one.

The novelist, whose aim has been your entertainment, and who has never lost the habit of the market-place in which he certainly began, had his own peculiar cares as the time approached for his last words. If he had earned applause and assent to heights and moments of his tale, could he make sure of them by a quiet end? Or must he earn them by a final shock? Should he burst into a bouquet of stars in the upper air, like a rocket, or come down like its stick? Each way has been chosen. _The Mill on the Floss_ ends sublimely in the air, or, strictly, the water; so in its own way--not at all sublimely--does _Tristram Shandy_; but the majority of novelists have favoured the gentle decline of the narrative to the marriage or death-bed, and generally speaking, the longer the novel the quieter the end. Efforts to endear, however, can always be discerned. The earliest novel of all shows us an expedient in practice which has remained in use down to the Victorian age, and only been discarded by the ultra-moderns even now. Daphnis and Chloe in Longus’s old tale are married at the end of the book. The last picture in it shows the lovers in each other’s arms; and the last words of it are these:

“And Daphnis now profited by Lykainion’s lesson; and Chloe then first knew that those things that were done in the wood were only the sweet sports of children.”

The shift is very plain. It is to recall to the memory the most moving or provocative episodes in your tale, in the hope that the thrill they afforded him once will revive in the reader and lift you over the end. It is a sound rhetorical device by no means disdained by high practitioners in the art. Sir Walter used it in _Waverley_, when, on the last page, he recovered the _poculum potatorium_ for the Baron of Bradwardine. He had an affection for the Baron, it is obvious; but he rightly felt him to have been his strongest card, and relied on him to win him the last trick. Often the novelist may be mistaken and table the wrong card, as Dickens certainly was when he ended _Nicholas Nickleby_ with tears upon Smike’s grave, believing that shadow to have been a trump. He should have led Mrs. Nickleby. How wisely Jane Austen played out her hand in _Emma_, whose last paragraph is enjewelled with reflections of Mrs. Elton’s:

“Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! Selina would stare when she heard of it!”

Jane Austen was incomparable alike in beginnings and endings.

Instead of recalling with insistence your strongest points, you may make a last effort to carry off what you doubt have been your weakest. There is much of that in both Dickens and Thackeray. In _Dombey and Son_, for example, it is evident that Dickens desired to extenuate what he felt had been an excess of starch in Mr. Dombey. The last page and a half of the book deglutinates him with a vengeance. The man of buckram ends up as a weeping goose. Agnes Wickfield in _Copperfield_ had never been convincing, nor had Estella in _Great Expectations_. The last pages of those novels are devoted to the service of the pair of ladies; but the effort is too plain, and the reader withholds assent. So with Thackeray, who spends his last drop of ink in _Pendennis_ on Laura, and in _Esmond_ to pulling off the amazing marriage of a man and his grandmother. In vain! The end of _Vanity Fair_ is tame, because Dobbin is tame; the true end of _The Newcomes_ is the _Adsum_ of Colonel Newcome: very beautiful and not to be bettered. The epilogue, with its trite exhibition of strings and wires, had been better omitted. It is on all fours with _Don Quixote_, which really ends with the epitaph of Samson Carrasco upon the Ingenious Gentleman. The ensuing reflections of Cid Hamet Benengeli are not to the purpose, but, in fact, counter to it.

I have left almost to the last that conventional ending to novels best described as the Wedding Bells ending, or, in the consecrated fairy-tale phrase, “And they lived happily ever after.” I wonder what is the attitude of the ordinary novelist to that? Fielding, now. Did he write the end of _Tom Jones_ and _Amelia_ with a shrug, or did he really believe that all was going to be for the best for the two charming women married to a couple of scamps? Moralist and satirist as he was to the roots, are those cynical endings? I cannot help suspecting it. No such doubt afflicts you with Anthony Trollope, who nearly always tied all his knots at the close. But Trollope worked in sober tones. His heroes and heroines had few rapturous moments, but loved temperately, hoped moderately, and if they longed, said little about it. His fondness for carrying over shows us some of his young people sedately and reasonably jogging along: Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gresham, Lord and Lady Lufton, Dr. Thorne and his Dunstable. We see them seated in the mean, contented if not happy. On the whole, I commend the cradle rather than the altar as a more hopeful ending. It is charmingly used by M. Anatole France in the most charming of all his books. M. France does not often incline to the idyll. The French do not. Consider the last words of Stendhal’s _Chartreuse de Parme_:

“Les prisons de Parme étaient vides, le comte immensément riche, Ernest V. adoré de ses sujets, qui comparaient son gouvernement à celui des grands-ducs de Toscane.”

Well may he have added to that the final address, To the happy few! I should do him wrong if I did not remark that it is on the last page of the novel that Stendhal mentions, for the first and only time in it, the Chartreuse de Parme itself.

The French novelists favour irony at the close. It may be that they owe it to Voltaire:

“Pangloss used to say sometimes to Candide: All the things that happen to us are linked one to another in this best of all possible worlds; for indeed if you had not been driven out of a fine castle by kicks behind for Cunégonde’s sake, if you had not endured the Inquisition, traversed America on your two feet, driven your sword through the Baron’s body, lost all your fine sheep of Eldorado, you would not at this moment be eating lemon preserve and pistachio nuts. It is well said, replied Candide; but we must go on digging our garden.”

Flaubert adopted that sort of thing for _l’Education Sentimentale_, whose last is its best page. It is good to have arrived there, anyhow; and pleasant to depart on a happy thought.

How nearly the latter-day, strictly modern method allies the novel to the story of Cambuscan bold, I have no space left in which to tell the strictly modern reader--who also knows more about it than I do. Aposiopesis has its points, one of which certainly is that as anything you please has happened already, it can happen again, and may as well. But it presumes too much upon the immunity afforded by the printing-press. If the modern story-teller tried that game upon an auditorium, and proposed to take himself off with his characters left sitting, it is long odds that he himself would not have anything worth talking about left to sit upon. The only requital open to the reader, unfortunately, is to cease to be one; and that is very much what I understand him to be doing.

BEAUMARCHAIS

I have often wondered what were the feelings of the growing boy upon whom it slowly dawned that his sponsors had had him christened Hyacinth, or Achilles. Was he conscious of inspiration or the reverse? The discovery must have been frequent in France, where the reign of Louis XV in particular was a flowering time for names. There was an Anarcharsis Klootz, there was a Maximilien Robespierre. When to the unremarkable patronym of Caron there were prefixed the resounding syllables, Pierre-Augustin, to the wearer of them at least the things became a trumpet. He shrilled himself upon them into the far corners of Europe. The Empress Catherine chuckled over him in her Winter Palace; her august neighbour had him read to her, evenings, in Vienna. Horace Walpole, while declining his acquaintance, wrote of him with astonishment to Mme. du Deffand; Voltaire at Ferney thought that there must be something in him. And there was. First and always, impudence. He would look anyone in the face, and never be discountenanced himself. Next, good humour: in his worst hours he bore no grudges, and in his best so few as make no matter. When he had his enemy face to face, and was really at grips with him, he could always hold back from the fray to let off a joke or turn an attack by a compliment. There was a Madame Goëzman with whom he was badly embroiled in civil process. When they were before the registrar, and she was asked, Did she know the plaintiff--“I neither know nor desire ever to know him,” said she. “Neither have I the honour of Madame’s acquaintance,” said Pierre-Augustin in his turn; “but having seen her, I am constrained to a desire exactly the opposite of hers.” A happy gallantry which ought to have touched the court, but did not.

Morally, he was like an india-rubber ball: the harder you hit him the higher he leapt. The Goëzman pair, husband and wife, in the legal broil just referred to, thought to crush him out of hand by scorn of his degree in the world. They more than hinted that his father had been a watchmaker, that they themselves were “noble.” Pierre-Augustin saw his chance and took it. He held up the Mémoire in which those injudicious nods and winks had appeared. “You open your _chef d’œuvre_ by reproaching me with the fortunes of my ancestry. It is too true, Madame, that the latest of them added to other branches of industry some celebrity in the art of watchmaking. Forced as I am to suffer judgment upon that point, I confess with sorrow that nothing can cleanse me from your just reproach that I am the son of my father.... But there I pause, for I feel that he is behind me at this moment, looking at what I write, and laughing while he pats my shoulder.”

“You,” he goes on, “who think to shame me through my father, have
little conception of the generosity of his heart. Truly, apart
altogether from watchmaking, I have never found another for which
I would exchange it. But I know too well the worth of time,
which he taught me how to measure, to waste it in picking up such
trifles. It is not everyone who can say with M. Goëzman:

‘Je suis le fils d’un Bailli; oui:
Je ne suis pas Caron; non.’”

And so he left it.

However high he leapt, his aims were not high. I don’t think he ever failed of his heart’s desire. He wanted a title of nobility, and obtained one, or indeed, some. He was “Ecuyer, Conseiller-Secrétaire du Roi, Lieutenant Général des Chasses, Baillage et Capitainerie de la Varenne du Louvre, Grande Vénerie et Fauconnerie de France,” which can hardly mean more, and may mean considerably less than it sounds; and all that, when he had earned a territorial name by marriage, enabled him to become Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Next, he wanted money, and had it, and lost it, many times over. Then he wanted to be talked about; and for a long time Paris, and for some time Europe, talked of little else. That was when he was conducting two interminable lawsuits, one growing out of the other, and not only conducting them with a vivacity and geniality which nothing could tire, but issuing from the press bulletins of progress of the kind I have attempted to sample above. It was those Mémoires which entertained equally Petersburg and Strawberry Hill. Delightful as they must have been to read when all the actors were alive and buzzing in the courts or on the quays, they are difficult to follow now. The original suit, which was to recover a debt on an estate from an executor, was made complex by French legal process, but the second (in which the Goëzmans were involved) was complex in itself. The exceedingly delicate point in it was that Beaumarchais had attempted to bribe a member of the Court, and actually got the money as far as his wife, where some of it remained, though the bulk was restored. To recover by law what was still held it was necessary for Beaumarchais to reject with vehemence the suggestion that he had tried to suborn justice, while bringing home the fact that Madame Goëzman had undoubtedly taken his money. He did not, naturally, succeed; but he incriminated the Goëzman pair, and with them was condemned in “infamy and civil degradation.” But in reporting his daily engagements with them, and his verbal victories, he became simply the hero of the hour, and ultimately carried his main action against the Comte de la Blache with damages and costs.

That must be a parenthesis, to show how Beaumarchais climbed to his point of desire, whatever it was at the moment, serving himself alike of disaster and success. Many were his affairs of the kind, all pursued with unflagging _enjouement_--as, a breach of promise in Madrid on behalf of his sister, a row with the mad Duc de Chaulnes about an “unfortunate female,” a more than dubious, a not at all dubious, plant upon Maria-Teresa, underground transactions with the Chevalier d’Eon, gun-running for the United States of America; and finally that upon which his present fame rests--two comedies which broke all the records of the theatre for anticipation and realisation. I would not go so far as to say that he engineered the repeated delays in their performance which brought expectation up to hysteria if not delirium, but have no doubt that he courted them, and deserved, if not earned, the proud result that more people were crushed to death crowding in to the _Barbier de Seville_ than had ever been so crushed before, and that it and its sequel, _Le Mariage de Figaro_, ran longer on end than any such things had ever done. When they threatened to flag their author was the man to revive them. He knew as much about advertising as Mr. Selfridge, and had as little use for modesty as Mr. Bernard Shaw. Like that salient dramatist, he published his plays, and wrote prefaces to them which are better reading than the text. The pair still hold the stage, as they were written, and as opera; and I should not be surprised to hear that they and their author were as generally known as most of Molière’s and theirs. After all, the same could be said of Sheridan, with his pair, at the expense of Shakespeare.

Mr. John Rivers,[1] Beaumarchais’ first English biographer, I believe, has evidently enjoyed his work, and will be read with enjoyment. He is right in claiming the Life of his hero as a challenge to fiction. It is first-rate picaresque, nearly as good as Gil Blas, and much better than Casanova. But I think he rates him too highly as a dramatist. He considers that Figaro ranks with “Falstaff or Tartufe.” If he does, it is thanks to Rossini and Mozart: without their help the claim is surely preposterous. Luckily, he has taken the trouble to translate large portions of both plays, and so furnished the best corrective to exaggerated pretensions that we could wish to have. Taken in such liberal doses, they don’t march. In their original they are not easy reading, for Beaumarchais, though a brisk, was not a good writer. One does not ask for fine writing necessarily of a dramatist, but that he shall attend to his business. Beaumarchais conceives his to be the making of points. He is apt to be diffuse in reaching them, and to clinch them tightly when he has them. In French he is often difficult; in English he is both dull and difficult. It is like reading bad handwriting on foreign letter-paper. You never seem to get on with the thing.

The _Barbier_ is not much more than a Commedia dell’ Arte. It is a play of manœuvring, intrigue the whole affair. Stock characters will do for that, and you can manage without humour, if you have a sufficiency of wit. There is perhaps more effervescence than wit, and what wit there is not of the best kind. It is not concerned with ludicrous appositions; rather it is paradox, verbal antithesis, the Gratiano vein. Here is an example. Figaro is reporting to Rosine that Lindor is her lover, and asks leave to tell her so:

“_Rosine_: Vous me faites trembler, monsieur Figaro.

“_Figaro_: Fi donc, trembler! mauvais calcul, madame. Quand on
cède à la peur du mal, on ressent déjà le mal de la peur....

“_Rosine_: S’il m’aime, il doit me le prouver en restant
absolument tranquille.

“_Figaro_: Eh! madame! amour et repos peuvent-ils habiter en meme
cœur? La pauvre jeunesse est si malheureux aujourd’hui, qu’elle
n’a que ce terrible choix: amour sans repos, ou repos sans amour.”

Beaumarchais can better that, though it is a fair sample of his handling. In the second Act, where Bartholo (Pantaloon) has patched up a reconciliation with Rosine (Columbine), whom he intends to marry, he closes the scene like this:

“_Bartholo_: Puisque la paix est faite, mignonne, donne-moi ta
main. Si tu pouvais m’aimer, ah! comme tu serais heureuse!

“_Rosine_ (baissant les yeux): Si vous pouviez me plaire, ah!
comme je vous aimerais!

“_Bartholo_: Je te plairai, je te plairai; quand je te dis que je
te plairai! (Il sort.)”

That is very happy, because it has humour as well as wit. Pantaloon and Columbine have become human beings.

It is not all so good as that, and some of it is not good at all. It was written originally for an opera libretto, for which it is well suited. It would do equally well for marionettes. To such things the spectator can lend himself, because in the former the music, and in the latter the puppets, take the responsibility off him; nothing of his own is involved. But in a play the action and the dialogue perform the resolution of life into art, with the audience as accomplice. Human nature is implicated; if we allow the cheap, we must cheat ourselves. If there is any resolution in the _Barbier_, it is into a jig, and condescension is difficult. Life is only there in so far as some of the personages wear breeches, and some petticoats. It is a mere trifle that the scene is laid in Spain, while all the characters are Italian.

The _Mariage de Figaro_ is a more considerable work, if only because it is much longer and more complicated. Everybody is older, including Beaumarchais. Since the end of the _Barbier_, Count Almaviva has pursued hundreds of ladies, Rosina has almost left off being jealous, Figaro has become a cynic, and is inclined to give lectures. The romance would seem to have been rubbed off seduction, as you might expect when you consider that the Count has been at it all his life, and is now a middle-aged man, old enough to be Ambassador. It has been said--and Mr. Rivers says it--that Beaumarchais was deliberate in contriving the effect of satiety, which he certainly obtains--as if an author would set himself to work to be wearisome! Subversion, Mr. Rivers thinks, was his aim, moral revolt. He wrote, and it was played, on the eve of the Revolution. Was the _Mariage_ not, therefore, a contributory cause?

“_Figaro_, soliloquising: Parceque vous êtes un grand seigneur,
vous vous croyez un grand génie!... Noblesse, fortune, un rang,
des places, tout cela rend si fier! Qu’avez-vous fait pour tant de
biens? Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus.
Du reste, homme assez ordinaire; tandis que moi, morbleu! perdu
dans la foule obscure, il m’a fallu déployer plus de science et de
calculs pour subsister seulement, qu’on n’en a mis depuis cent ans
à gouverner toutes les Espagnes: et vous voulez jouter ...!”

Is that contributory to revolution--or revolution contributory to it? It was surely current coin in 1784. Voltaire and Rousseau had encouraged cats to look at kings; everybody had made fun of the nobility. Titles of honour can have held little intimidation since Louis XIV had had the handling of them, and turned out dukes where his grandfather made marquises. What little there might be left to do had been done handsomely by his grandson. It is far more likely that Beaumarchais was easing grudges of his own, or that in the famous flight of paradoxes aimed at “la politique” he was recalling recent experiences in London and Vienna, where he came into collision with the real thing. Much out of character as it is, it is a good example of what both Figaro and Beaumarchais had become by 1784:

“Feindre ignorer ce qu’on sait, de savoir tout ce qu’on ignore;
d’entendre ce qu’on ne comprend pas, de ne point ouïr ce qu’on
entend; surtout de pouvoir au delà de ses forces; avoir souvent
pour grand secret de cachet qu’il n’y en a point; s’enfermer pour
tailler des plumes, et paraître profond quand on n’est, comme on
dit, que vide et creux; jouer bien ou mal un personnage; répandre
des espions et pensionner des traîtres; amollir des cachets,
intercepter des lettres, et tacher d’ennoblir la pauvreté des
moyens par l’importance des objets: voilà toute la politique, ou
je meure!”

Very brisk. But when Count Almaviva shortly comments, “Ah! c’est l’intrigue que tu définis!” the criticism is final, because it is completely just. Curious that a playwright should light up his Roman candle, and damp it down the next moment. Such speeches imperil the character of Figaro by making him so dominant a personality that there can be no fun in seeing him dupe his betters. Beaumarchais, I think, may have felt that objection, and attempted to restore the balance by having Figaro duped himself in the last act.

The balance is really adjusted in quite another way. Two new characters are brought in, one of whom, Marceline, a _vieille fille_, designs to marry Figaro, but presently finds out that she is his long-lost mother! The other is Chérubin, who saves the play, to my thinking, just as surely as Polly Peachum saves _The Beggar’s Opera_. Chérubin--“création exquise et enchanteresse,” says Sainte-Beuve--is the making of the _Mariage_, partly because he keys it down to its proper pitch, which is that of children playing grown-ups, and partly because he is truly observed and poetically presented. I don’t see how the adage, “Si jeunesse savait,” could be more tenderly exploited. All his scenes are good--the first with Suzanne, in which the young scamp, after betraying his occupation with three love affairs at once, snatches his mistress’s hair-ribbon and dodges behind tables and chairs while the maid pursues him; the second, with the Countess, where she is dressing him as a girl, and discovers her ribbon staunching a cut in his arm: in each of these scenes the delicious distress of his complaint is painted with a subtlety and sensibility combined which are first-rate art. Delicate provocation can go no further, or had better not. Beaumarchais’ triumph is that he knows that, and does not add a touch in excess. The final touch is that the Countess, instead of feigning a desire for the restoration of the ribbon (which she did very badly), now really does desire, and obtains it. Enough said: there is no more. “Tu sais trop bien, méchante, que je n’ose pas oser,” says the youth to Suzanne. That is his trouble, and a real one it is.

The imbroglio in this play is a thing of nightmare. “Que diable est-ce qu’on trompe ici?” The answer is the audience. Everybody deceives everybody, twice over and all the time. It surprises, if you like, by “a fine excess.” It is not surprising, anyhow, that the last act was too much for Sainte-Beuve, has been too much for Mr. Rivers, and is too much for me. I do not, simply, know what is happening, but I do know that none of it is very funny. Compare it with _Sganarelle_, and you will see. In that little masterpiece you have four characters: Lélie and Clélie, the lovers, Sganarelle the jealous husband, and Sganarelle’s wife. Clélie lets drop Lélie’s portrait in the street, Sganarelle’s wife picks it up, and is caught by Sganarelle admiring it. Presently, when Clélie faints, and is picked up by Sganarelle, it is his wife’s turn to be jealous. Then Lélie, overcome by his feelings, is pitied by Madame Sganarelle and helped into her house. The fat is in the fire. Madame Sganarelle flies at Clélie for carrying on with her husband; Lélie believes that Sganarelle has married Clélie. Sganarelle pursues Lélie with a sword, and when he is confronted, pretends that he brought it out because the weather looked threatening. It is a complete cat’s cradle of a play, and as easily untied. The action is swift, the intrigue is easy to follow, the appositions are really comic. But who believes that Almaviva seriously wants Suzanne, or that Figaro has really promised Marceline, or that the Countess really loves Chérubin? The lack of plausibility causes the _Mariage_ to turn unwillingly, like a mangle. It took four hours and a half to play: I can hardly believe that Figaro’s inordinate soliloquy in the last act survived the first night. Figaro himself is overweight; Marceline is a very bad shot. She has at first a good Polly-and-Lucy slanging match with Suzanne; but in the discovery scene she grows serious--very serious, and rightly serious, no doubt, in any other play but this. But to suspend all the gallantries in progress for the sake of her diatribes upon gallantry, to shake the head over them, to say “True,” and “Too true”--and then immediately to resume gallantries, has the effect of exhibiting neither gallantry nor the reprobation of it as serious; and as something in a play must be taken seriously, the Comédie Française, rightly deciding in favour of gallantry, cut out the whole scene; and it is so marked in my edition of Beaumarchais. It would have been a pleasant toil for Edward FitzGerald, who loved such work, to hew and shape this comedy. It has fine moments, but wants both the speed and the gaiety of the _Barbier_. Mozart gave it them--we owe to Beaumarchais the most delightful opera in the world.

Mr. Rivers translates the two plays freely, but I don’t think very successfully. I have said already that Beaumarchais is not a good writer--too diffuse at one time, too terse at others--but no doubt he is very difficult. Literal translation is useless. “Miss” is not a translation of “Mademoiselle.” “Mistress,” or “Young Lady” would be better--and so on. You cannot get the points sharply enough unless you translate ideas as well as idiom; and to do that you must take a wide cast. Rhetoric is rhetoric in whatever language you cast it. It has its own rules. Dialogue is another matter. There come in the familiarities, secrets of the toilette, secrets of the bower. How are these things to be done? I don’t know; but if Andrew Lang could not be natural with the 15th Idyll of Theocritus, it is no shame to Mr. Rivers to have failed with Beaumarchais.

If he desired to try his hand I wonder why he omitted one of his liveliest and wittiest sallies--the letter which he addressed to _The Morning Chronicle_ in 1776, on one of his confidential visits to London. It is too long to give entire, but I must have a shot at pieces of it:

“Mr. Editor,” he says, “I am a stranger, a Frenchman and the soul
of honour. If this will not completely inform you who I am, it
will at least tell you, in more senses than one, who I am not; and
in times likes these, that is not without its importance in London.

“The day before yesterday at the Pantheon, after the concert and
during the dancing which ensued, I found at my feet a lady’s cloak
of black taffetas, turned back with the same and edged with lace.
I do not know to whom it belongs; I have never seen, even at the
Pantheon, the person who wore it; all my inquiries since the
discovery have taught me nothing about her. I beg of you then, Mr.
Editor, to announce in your journal the discovery of the cloak, in
order that I may punctually return it to her who may lay claim to
it.

“That there may be no possible mistake in the matter, I have
the honour to give you notice that the loser, upon the day in
question, had a head-dress of rose-coloured feathers. She had, I
believe, diamond ear-rings; but of that I am not so positive as
of the remainder of my description. She is tall and of elegant
appearance; her hair is a flaxen blonde, her skin dazzlingly
white. She has a fine and graceful neck, a striking shape, and the
prettiest foot in the world. I observe that she is very young,
very lively and inattentive, that she carries herself easily, and
has a marked taste for dancing.”

He then proceeds to deduce all these charming properties from the taffetas cloak--some from a single hair which he finds in the hood, some from minute particles of fluff and fur; others, more carefully, from measurements; others, again, from the position in which the cloak was lying--all of which led him to conclude infallibly that “the young lady was the most alert beauty of England, Scotland and Ireland, and if I do not add, of America, it is because of late they have become uncommonly alert in that particular country.” Sherlock Holmes!

“If I had pushed my inquiries,” he concludes, “it is possible that
I might have learned from her cloak what was her quality and rank.
But when one has concluded that a woman is young and handsome, has
one not in fact learned all that one needs to learn? That at any
rate was the opinion held in my time in many good towns in France,
and even in certain villages, such as Marly, Versailles, etc.

“Do not then be surprised, Mr. Editor, if a Frenchman who all
his life long has made a philosophical and particular study of
the fair sex, has discovered in the mere appearance of a lady’s
cloak, without ever having seen her, that the fair one with the
rosy plumes who let it fall unites in her person the radiance of
Venus, the free carriage of the nymphs, the shape of the Graces,
the youth of Hebe; that she is quick and preoccupied, and that
she loves the dance, to the extent of forgetting everything else
in order to run to it, on a foot as small as Cinderella’s, and as
light as Atalanta’s own.”

He has done it with the unfailing humour and neatness which carried him in and out of the lawcourts, took him to prison and enlarged him again. And he was then only forty-four, and had another twenty years before him. Impudence and good humour. The first was his shield and buckler--triple brass. The other enabled him to support it in all companies without offence. When at long last his suit with La Blache was ended, and in his favour, the Comte not only restored the estate without a murmur, but gave him a fine portrait of the testator. Beaumarchais may have been a bad lot; but he was evidently a good sort.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] “Figaro: the Life of Beaumarchais,” by John Rivers. Hutchinson. 18s.

THE CARDINAL DE RETZ

No student of France and literature can afford to neglect this gay and hardy little sinner, though the use of that very word might show that I was not fitted to expound him. It has here, however, an æsthetic significance and not an ethical. Poets and moralists have this in common that, owing their power to the strength of their prejudice, they make bad historians. Carlyle, very much of a poet, illuminating his heroes with his own fire, did no harm to Cromwell, whose wart was a part of his glory; but Frederick the Great showed up oddly. The higher the light rayed upon him the more ghastly stared his gashes under the paint. Michelet was a good deal of a poet too, and rootedly a moralist. Naturally he came to blows with the history of his country. The Fronde made him angry, the _grand siècle_ shocked him. Edification may be served that way, not truth. It is, I grant, difficult to read the History of France as that of a sane, hard-working, penurious people; difficult to decide why the Revolution, instead of coming in 1789, did not come in 1689; or why, having begun in 1649, it did no more, as Bossuet said, than “enfanter le siècle de Louis.” To understand that would be to understand the Fronde, but not how the state of things which evoked the Fronde and made possible the Memoirs of de Retz, could have come about. A royal minority, a foreign regent, a foreign minister, and a feudal aristocracy will account for a good deal--not for all. The Italianisation of manners which began with the last Valois kings, and was renewed by Henry’s Florentine wife, has to be reckoned up. To a nobility convinced of privilege it opened the ways of _Il Talento_.

_Il Talento_ is the Italian description of the state of mind induced by desire and the means to gratify it on the spot. Iago is the standing type; but Cæsar Borgia is a better. For him and his likes, _The Prince_ of Machiavelli was the golden book. In France the princely families--those of Lorraine, Bouillon, Condé and Savoie--found it a kindly soil; and one of its best products was naturally the Cardinal de Retz, whose memoirs are as good as Dumas, very much like him, and the source of the best chapters of _Vingt Ans Après_. Here was _Il Talento_ in fine flower, existing for its own sake; whereas Mazarin hid it in avarice, and Richelieu had lost it in statecraft. You cannot read Retz with pleasure, to say nothing of profit, if you do not allow for the point of view--which you will have no difficulty in doing if you remember that, less than a hundred years before the Cardinal’s day, his ancestor, Alberto Gondi, had been as familiar with the Ponte Vecchio as he himself was with the Pont-Neuf.

In his “portrait” of Mazarin, Retz accused his brother-cardinal of common origin, but if you went back to his own family’s beginnings I do not know that the Gondis were more than respectable according to French standards. But the future Cardinal, Jean-Francois-Paul, was born the son of a Duc de Retz, a great man of Brittany, was a Knight of Malta in the cradle, and when, later, it was thought well to make a churchman of him, tumbled into abbacies as became a young prince, and had a bishopric as soon as he cared. He says of Mazarin’s youth that it was shameful, that he was by bent and disposition a cardsharper. He might have said worse and not been wrong; yet the account he gives of himself is so frank, shameless and extremely flagrant that the reproof has an odd sound.

“I did not affect devotion,” he says of himself as Abbé, “because
I could never be sure that I should be able to keep up the cheat.
But I had great consideration for the devout, and from their point
of view that is in itself a mark of piety. I suited my pleasures
to the rest of my habits. I could hardly get on without gallantry,
but I continued it with Madame de Pommereux, young and a coquette,
whose ways suited me because, as she had all the young people not
only about her but in her confidence, her apparent affairs with
them were a mask for mine with her.”

This equivocal conduct so far succeeded that the pious agreed with St. Vincent de Paul that, though the Abbé de Retz was not truly religious, he was “not far from the Kingdom of Heaven”--quite as near, in fact, as the young gentleman desired to be. And then he tells a story which he thinks is to his credit:

“A short time after I left college, my governor’s valet, who was
my humble servant, found living with a wretched pin-maker a niece
of hers, fourteen years old and of remarkable beauty. After he had
shown her to me, he bought her for one hundred and fifty pistoles,
took a little house for her at Issy, and put his sister in to
look after her. I went there the day after she was installed, and
found her extremely cast down, but attributing it to her modesty,
was not at all surprised. She was still more so the next day, a
fact about her even more remarkable than her good looks, which
is saying a great deal. She talked with me straightforwardly,
piously, without extravagance, and cried no more than she could
possibly help. I saw that she was so much afraid of her aunt that
I felt truly sorry for her, admired her disposition, and presently
her virtue. I tested that so far as it could be done, and took
shame to myself. I waited till it was dark, then put her into my
coach and took her to my aunt de Meignelais. She put the child
into a convent of religious, where eight or ten years later she
died in the odour of sanctity.”

One must not expect too much from a _grand seigneur_ in a cassock. The story has more implication than he was able to perceive; but at least it shows that he had pity in him, if not piety.

In time he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, with a promise of survivorship, and a fancy title of Archbishop of Corinth. He tells us that he took six days to consider how he should regulate his conduct, how restore the credit of the archiepiscopate (which was very necessary) without losing any of his pleasures. “I decided to do evil with deliberation--no doubt the most criminal course in the eyes of God, but no doubt also the most discreet in those of the world.” In his opinion that was the only way open to him of avoiding “the most dangerous _absurdity_ which can be met with in the clerical profession, that of mixing sin and devotion.” “Absurdity” is remarkable.

His first duty as coadjutor was a severe trial to his fortitude. It was necessary to make a Visitation of the Nuns of the Conception; and as the convent held eighty young ladies, “of whom several were handsome and some adventurous,” he had many qualms about exposing his virtue to such a test. “It had to be done, though; and I preserved it to the edification of my neighbour. I did not see the face of a single one, and never spoke to one unless her veil was down. This behaviour, which lasted six weeks, gave a wonderful lustre to my chastity. I believe, however, that the lessons which I received every evening from Madame de Pommereux strengthened it materially against the morrow.”

Such was the Coadjutor-Archbishop of Paris, and such his efforts to restore the credit of that see. He did not continue them long. Other things engrossed him, one being to obtain from Mazarin a recommendation to the Cardinalate, another by all, or any, means to obtain his benefactor’s disgrace. Before the first could take effect, or the second be effected, the parliamentary Fronde began, and Retz was in it to the neck. What he wanted, except to enjoy himself, is not at all clear. He despised rather than hated Mazarin; he forsook the only man--Condé--for whom he seems to have had any real regard; he invited his country’s enemies to Paris; and he got nothing out of it. But I am sure he enjoyed himself.

His strong card was his popularity with the Parisians. He earned that partly by hard money--the Barricades, he says, cost him some thirty-six thousand _écus_--and somewhat on his own account too. After he had been enthroned as Coadjutor, he gave himself no airs. On the contrary, “Je donnai la main chez moi à tout le monde; j’accompagnai tout le monde jusqu’au carrosse.” Then, when he was firmly established as the most affable seigneur in the city, suddenly he jumped in a claim for precedence before M. de Guise, and had it adjudged him. It enhanced his prestige incalculably. “To condescend to the humble is the surest way of measuring yourself against the great,” is the moral he draws, but another is that if you aim at popularity, you should stand up to a great man, and beat him. Retz had courage, and the Parisians loved him for it. So did the Parisiennes, according to his own account, though many things were against him. He was an ugly little man, a little deformed, black man, Tallemant reports him, very nearsighted, badly made, clumsy with his hands, unable to fasten his clothes or put on his spurs. No matter. Whatever he could or could not do, there is no doubt he could give a good account of himself in the world, upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber. Not only does he say so in Memoirs, written, as he is careful to say, for the instruction of Madame de Caumartin’s children, but his enemies allowed it. It may even be that Mazarin paid him the compliment of being jealous of his midnight conferences with Anne of Austria; at any rate, Retz seriously thought of cutting him out. Then he was a good preacher, a ready debater, and a born lobbyist to whom intrigue was daily bread. Those were his cards for beggar-my-neighbour with Mazarin, and not bad ones. The weakness of the hand resided in the player. He had as little heart as conscience. He cared nothing for his country, for his friends or for his mistresses when their interests conflicted with what for the moment were his. If he had an affection for anyone it was for Condé. Yet he was against him all through, and chose rather to back the poor creature, Monsieur--to his own undoing, as he must have foreseen if he had given it a moment’s thought. Gaston simply let in Mazarin again, through mere poltroonery; and Mazarin once in, Retz must be out. And so he was.

The Fronde, the first Fronde, began seriously, like our Civil War, on a question of principle. The Parlement of Paris took advantage of the Regency to restore its old claim to be more than a Court of Record. It claimed the right to examine edicts before registering them--in fact, to be a Parliament. Atop of that came the grievance of the Masters of Requests, who, having paid heavily for their offices, found their value substantially reduced by the creation of twelve new ones. The masters struck, and their offices were sequestrated. Then came the 26th August 1648, when the Court, exalted by Condé’s victory at Lens, first celebrated the occasion by _Te Deum_ in Notre Dame, and immediately afterwards by causing Councillor Broussel, Father of the People, to be arrested and carried off to Saint-Germain. Retz, the coadjutor, was in both celebrations, as we can read in _Vingt Ans Après_. It was the day before the Barricades. Directly the news of the arrest became known the town, as he says, exploded like a bomb: “the people rose; they ran, they shouted, they shut up their shops.” Retz went out in rochet and hood--to watch, no doubt, over the harvest of his 36,000 sown _écus_. “No sooner was I in the Marché-Neuf than I was encompassed by masses of people who howled rather than shouted.” He extricated himself by comfortable words, and made his way to the Pont-Neuf, where he found the Maréchal de La Meilleraye, with the Guards, enduring as best he could showers of stones, but far from happy at the look of things. He urged Retz, who (though he had had an interchange of repartees with the Queen overnight) did not need much urging, to accompany him to the Palais-Royal and report. Off they went together, followed by a horde of people crying, “Broussel! Broussel!”

“We found the Queen in the great Cabinet with the Duc d’Orléans,
Cardinal Mazarin, Duc de Longueville.... She received me neither
well nor ill, being too proud and too hot to be ashamed of what
she had said the night before. As for the Cardinal, he had
not the decency to feel anything of that kind. Yet he did seem
embarrassed, and pronounced to me a sort of rigmarole in which,
though he did not venture to say so, he would have been relieved
if I had found some new explanation of what had moved the Queen.
I pretended to take in all that he was pleased to tell me, and
answered him simply that I was come to report myself for duty, to
receive the Queen’s commands, and contribute everything that lay
in my power towards peace and order. The Queen turned her head
sharply as if to thank me; but I knew afterwards that she had
noticed and taken badly my last phrase, innocent as it was and
very much to the point from the lips of a Coadjutor of Paris.”

Then follows one of his famous Machiavellian aphorisms: “_But it is very true that with princes it is as dangerous, almost as criminal, to be able to do good as to wish to do harm._”

Retz might play the innocent, no one better, but neither Queen nor minister were fools. It is not to be supposed that they had heard nothing of his distribution of _écus_. Then the Maréchal grew angry, finding that the rioting was taken lightly, and said what he had seen. He called for Retz’s testimony, and had it.

“The Cardinal smiled sourly, the Queen flew into a rage.... ‘There
is a revolt even in the intention to revolt,’ she said. ‘These are
the stories of people who desire revolt.’ The Cardinal, who saw
in my face what I thought of such talk, put in a word, and in a
soft voice replied to the Queen: ‘Would to God, madame, that all
the world spoke with the same sincerity as M. le Coadjuteur. He
fears for his flock, for the city, for your Majesty’s authority. I
am persuaded that the danger is not so great as he believes; but
scruple in such a matter is worthy of his religion.’ The Queen,
understanding this jargon, immediately altered her tone, talked
civilly, and was answered by me with great respect, and a face so
smug that La Rivière whispered to Bautru, ... ‘See what it is not
to spend day and night in a place like this. The Coadjutor is a
man of the world. He knows what he is about, and takes what she
says for what it is worth.’”

The whole scene, he says, was comedy. “I played the innocent, which I by no means was; the Cardinal the confident, though he had no confidence at all. The Queen pretended to drop honey though she had never been more choked with gall.” But what comedy there was was not there very long. The Queen, who had declared that she would strangle Broussel with her own hands sooner than release him, was to change her mind. La Meilleraye and Retz were sent out again to report, and La Meilleraye, losing his head, nearly lost his life. At the head of his cavalry, he pushed out into the crowd, “sword in hand, crying with all his might, ‘Vive le Roi! Broussel au large!’” More people, naturally, saw him than could hear what he said. His sword had an offensive look; there was a cry to arms, and other swords were out besides his. The Maréchal killed a man with a pistol-shot, the crowd closed in upon him; he was saved by Retz, who himself escaped by the use of his wits. An apothecary’s apprentice, he says, put a musket at his head.

“Although I did not know him from Adam, I thought it better not
to let him know that. On the contrary, ‘Ah, my poor lad,’ I said,
‘if your father were to see this!’ He thought that I had been
his father’s best friend, though in fact I had never seen his
father, and asked me if I was the Coadjutor. When he understood
that I was, he cried out, ‘Vive le Coadjuteur!’ and they all came
crowding round me with the same cry.”