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BOUND by thy hands, but with respect unto May bring my heart's content once more;

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 would have added, if he had known of them, that delightful people the Celts, who, according to Aristotle, pushed their courage beyond the due mean, being afraid neither of earthquakes nor of breakers; all in his eyes simply curious items in the long list of human eccentricities. That is the mood; it comes out one way of course in a historiau, and another in a poet; but it is the same spirit, the same cast of mind, large and tolerant, and above all, perhaps, gifted with a sense of humor. It sounds strange at first to find La Fon

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
Les méchants diseurs de bons mots.

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 gen-
uine humor is the first to resent a nui-
sance 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 amiabil-
ity take them half-way to the posses-
sion 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 :
Il cherche de grand mots.

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 be

own.

hind the curtain.

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

Me laissent vivre au gré de mon âme inquiète ?

Ah! si mon coeur 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 book of fables, the most perfect thing by it? And yet we too often treat this perhaps in French poetry, as nothing more than a story-book for children, and leave it to the tender mercies of the schoolroom and the French gov

erness! The fact is that La Fontaine is the true French Homer, as I think Sainte Beuve first called him. More Bornons ici cette carrière : than any other of the great French Les longs ouvrages me font peur, classics except Molière, he speaks to says La Fontaine at the end of the all the world, and it is only the fact first half of his fables, and we think that his best-known work is called at once of the easy-going bonhomme," Fables" that has stood in the way

makes every one so fond of him, I can hardly say; not his virtues, certainly, for he had very few; there is very little in his life that we can grow enthusiastic about, and a good deal, I am afraid, which we had better leave alone. He is anything but a hero, and if I were pressed to say why we almost love him, I could only fall back upon my first answer and say, for his charm.

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 one of those rarely gifted men who see life "whole," he at least sees a large part of it, and his criticism of life, if it lays no claim to the profundity of the greatest men, is at least everywhere large, tolerant, shrewd, kindly, and touched with a delightful humor. His wisdom may be worldly wisdom, but it is the best sort of worldly wisdom genial and epicurean, without a touch of cunning or greed. He takes the world as he finds it, and makes the best of it; which is, after all, exactly what most of us have to do; and if we want 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.

The truth is that his life was the pleasant, easy-going life natural to an epicurean born with enough to live on, and in days before people thought there was any crime in being comfort

a town on the Marne, about fifty or And there is another thing. He has sixty miles from Paris. He seems to a unique place in French literary his- have done two important things for his tory. He stands between the old and son, besides his part in bringing him the new, and has learned the clearness into the world. When La Fontaine and order of the age of Louis XIV., was about twenty-six, he handed over without unlearning the freedom and his place to him, and presented him humor of the French of the Renais- with a girl of fifteen for his wife." sance. 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 atmosphere 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

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 certainly no divorce; they lived some years together, aud had a son, 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