04/09/2008

Voltaire

Discourse Addressed to the Welsh

François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

(1694–1778)

Discourse Addressed to the Welsh

Discours aux Welches

(1764)

Extracted from Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version. Volume: 37.

Translated by William F. Fleming.

Publisher: E. R. DuMont.

Place of Publication: Paris.

Publication Year: 1901

Discourse Addressed to the Welsh

[A satire on his own countrymen]

OH Welsh! my countrymen, if you surpass the ancient Greeks and Romans, never bite the bosom of your nurses, never insult your masters, be modest in your triumphs; consider who you are, and from whom you descend.

It is true you had the honour to be subdued by Julius Caesar, who caused all the members of your Parliament of Vannes to be hanged, sold the remainder of the inhabitants, ordered the hands of the inhabitants of Quercy to be cut off, and then governed you with great mildness. You remained for more than five hundred years subject to the laws of the Roman Empire: your Druids, who treated you as slaves and animals, who piously burned you in osier baskets, no longer retained their influence when you became a province of the Roman Empire. But honestly confess that you were always somewhat barbarous.

In the fifth age of your vulgar era, Vandals, to whom you gave the sonorous appellation of Bourgonsions, or Bourguignons, people of great genius, and extremely cleanly, who rubbed their hair with strong butter, to use the phrase of Sidonius Apollinaris, “infundens acido comam butiro;” these people, I say, made you all slaves, from the territory of your town of Vienne to the source of your river Seine; and it is one of the remaining customs of that illustrious age, for monks and canons to have vassals in this country. This fine prerogative of the human species subsists among you as a testimony of your wisdom.

One part of your remaining provinces, which you so long called the provinces of Oc, and which you so nobly distinguished from the provinces of Oui, were invaded by the Visigoths: and as to your provinces of Oui, they were taken from you by a Sicambrian named Clovis, whose ancestors had been condemned to be devoured by wild beasts at Trier, by the emperor Constantine. This Sicambrian, dignified with the title of the Roman Patrician, reduced you to slavery with a handful of Franks, who came out of the marshes of the Rhine, the Main, and the Meuse. The noble exploits of this great man were the assassinations of three petty kings, his friends and relations, one near the town of Boulogne upon the sea, the other near the village of Cambray, and the third near the village of Mans, which your chronicles call cities: it was at that time that the Welsh country had the melodious name of Frankreich, the ancient name of France, in commemoration of its conquerors; and you were the first nation of the world, for you had the standard of St. Denis.

Northern pirates came some time after to pillage you, and took from you the province which has been since called Normandy. You were afterward divided into many different nations under different masters, and each nation had its peculiar laws, as well as its peculiar jargon.

One-half of your country soon belonged to the inhabitants of the island called Britain, or England, in their idiom, which was then as harmonious as yours. Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Saintonge, Guienne, Gascony, Angoumois, Périgord, Rouergue, and Auvergne were a long time in the hands of this people, the Angles; while you had neither Lyons, nor Marseilles, nor Dauphiny, nor Provence, nor Languedoc.

Notwithstanding this your miserable situation, your compilers, whom you take for historians, often call you “the first people of the earth,” and your kingdom “the first kingdom.” This is treating other nations somewhat impolitely. You are a brilliant and amiable people; and if you add modesty to your graces, the rest of Europe will be highly pleased with you.

Return your hearty thanks to God for delivering you from the Angles, by the factions of the red and white roses; and above all, return thanks that the civil wars of Germany prevented Charles V from swallowing up your country, and making it a province of the empire.

You had a brilliant moment under Louis XIV, but don’t for that reason think yourselves superior in everything to the ancient Romans and Greeks.

Consider that during the space of six hundred years scarcely anybody among you, except a few of your new Druids, could either read or write. Your excessive ignorance gave you up to the Flamen of Rome and his associates, like children, whom pedagogues govern and correct as they think proper.

Your contracts of marriage, when you made contracts, which was but seldom, were written in bad Latin, by clerks; you did not know what you had stipulated: and when you had children, there came a shaven monk from Rome, who proved to you, that your wife was not your wife, that she was your cousin in the last degree, that your marriage was sacrilegious, that your children were bastards, and that you were damned if you did not, without delay, make over one-half of your property to the chamber called Apostolical.

Your basiloi—kings—were not better, treated than yourselves: you had nine excommunicated—if I am not mistaken—by the servant of the servants of God. Excommunication implied, of consequence, the confiscation of goods; so that your basiloi lost all right to their crown, which the Roman pontiff presented to whichever of his friends he thought proper.

You will tell me, my dear Welsh, that the people of Britain, or England, and even the Teutonic emperors, have been worse used than you, and that they were fully as ignorant. That is true, but that does not justify you: and if the British nation was so stupid as to be a long time a feudatory province to a Druid beyond the Alps, you will acknowledge that it contrived to revenge the affront; endeavour to follow the example if you can.

You had formerly a king who, though unfortunate in all his designs and expeditions, deserves some praise for having taught you to read and write; he even sent to Italy for persons who taught you the Greek language, and for others who taught you painting and statuary: but there passed more than a hundred years before you had a tolerable painter or sculptor; and as for those who learned the Greek, and even the Hebrew, they were almost all burned alive, having incurred the suspicion of reading certain Judaical books; a thing highly dangerous.

I am willing to allow you, my dear Welshmen, that your country is the first country in the world; and yet you do not possess the largest domain in the smallest of the four quarters of the earth. Consider that Spain is of somewhat greater extent, that Germany is still more so, that Poland and Switzerland are bigger, and that there are provinces in Russia of which the country of the Welsh would not make a fourth part.

I wish your country may prove the first in the world for the fertility of its soil: but, for God’s sake, think of your forty leagues of lands toward Bordeaux, of that part of your Champagne to which you have given the noble appellation of “the Lousy,” of whole provinces where the inhabitants live entirely upon chestnuts, and of others, where there is no bread to be had but rye bread: take notice of the prohibition you lie under to export corn out of your country; a prohibition founded upon your want, and perhaps, too, upon your character, which would excite you to sell all you have as fast as possible, in order to purchase it again at a very high price three months after; in this you resemble certain Americans, who sell their beds in the morning, forgetting that they will want them at night.

Add to this, that the expense which the fashionable part of the nation is at, in flour to powder themselves, whether you have your hair dressed in the royal bird fashion, or whether you wear it loose, like King Clodio and the privy councillors, is an expense so universal that it is very reasonable to prevent the exportation of a commodity of which you make so good a use.

First people of the earth, consider that you have in your kingdom of Frankreich about two millions of inhabitants who walk in wooden shoes during six months of the year, and who go barefooted during the remaining six.

Are you the first people of the earth for commerce and maritime glory? Alas! I have heard it said, but I cannot believe that yours is the only nation in the world that buys the right of judging men, and even of leading them to be killed in battle. I have been assured that you make the public treasure pass through fifty hands before it arrives at the royal treasury; and when it has gone through all these strainers, it is at last reduced to the fifth part of its value at most.

In answer to this you will allege that you are extremely successful in comic operas: but can you deny that you are indebted to Italy for your comic as well as your serious operas? I will own that you have invented some modes, though you now adopt almost all those of the people of Britain. But was it not a Genoese who discovered the fourth part of the world, where you possess only two or three little islands? Was it not a native of Portugal who opened to you a passage to the East Indies, where you lately lost your little factories?

Perhaps you may be the first people in the world for the invention of arts: yet, was not the compass invented by John Goya, of Melphi? Was it not the German, Schwarz, who discovered the secret of inflammable powder? Was not printing, of which you make so much use, the fruit of a German’s ingenious labour?

When you are disposed to read the new pamphlets, which represent you as so learned a people, you sometimes make use of spectacles: thank Francis Spina for this; for without him you would never have been able to read small characters. You have telescopes; for them thank James Metius, the Dutchman, and Galileo, the Florentine.

If you sometimes amuse yourselves with barometers and thermometers, to whom are you indebted for them? To Torricelli, who invented the latter.

Many of you study the true system of the planetary world: it was a man born in Polish Prussia who discovered this secret of the Creator. You are aided in your calculations by logarithms; it is to the immense labour of Lord Napier and his associates that you are obliged for them: it is Guericke of Magdeburg that you should thank for the air-pump.

It was this same Galileo, whom I have just mentioned, who first discovered the satellites of Jupiter, the spots in the sun, and its rotation upon its axis. The Dutchman, Huygens, could see the ring of Saturn; an Italian could see its satellites when you could perceive nothing at all.

In fine, it was the great Newton who demonstrated to you the nature of light, and who discovered the great law which causes the stars to move, and which directs heavy bodies toward the centre of the earth.

First people of the world, you love to adorn your closets, you hang up fine prints in them; but reflect, that the Florentine Finiguerra is the father of this art, which immortalizes what the pencil cannot preserve. You have also fine clocks; this likewise is an invention of the Dutchman, Huygens.

You sometimes wear brilliants upon your fingers; reflect that it was the people of Venice that first began to cut them, and to imitate pearls.

You sometimes contemplate yourselves in a looking-glass; it is to Venice likewise that you are indebted for this invention.

I should therefore be glad if you would show in your books a little more respect for your neighbours. You don’t indeed do like Rome, where all those who discover any truth are brought before the Inquisition, let that truth be of what nature it will; and where Galileo was obliged to fast upon bread and water, for having taught them that the planets move round the sun. But what do you do? As soon as a useful discovery renders another nation illustrious, you combat it, and that for a long time. Newton shows the astonished world the seven primitive and unchangeable rays of light; you, for twenty years, deny what has been proven by experiments, instead of making those experiments yourselves. He demonstrated gravitation to you: and during forty years, you, in opposition to him, maintain the impertinent romance of the Cartesian vortices. In a word, you never yield, till all Europe has laughed at your obstinacy.

In other countries, inoculation saves the lives of thousands; you exert yourselves for above forty years in endeavours to decry this salutary practice. If sometimes, in carrying to the grave your wives or your children, dead of a natural smallpox, you feel a moment’s remorse—as you happen to have a moment of grief and regret—if you then repent not having adopted the practice of nations more wise and more resolute than you; if you sometimes venture to do that which is so common among them, this resolution does not hold, prejudice and lightness resume their ancient empire over you.

You either are ignorant, or pretend to be ignorant, that in the London hospitals set apart for the natural and artificial smallpox, one-fourth of the patients who have common smallpox die, while scarcely one out of four hundred of those that have been inoculated dies.

Thus you let one-fourth of your fellow-citizens perish; and when you are shocked at this calculation, which shows you to be so imprudent and so blameworthy, what do you do? You consult licentiates, either those of the foundation of Robert Sorbon, or others: you present requisitions! It is thus you maintained these against Harvey, when he had discovered the circulation of the blood: in this manner were decrees issued by the Parliament of Paris, which condemned to the galleys those who wrote against the “Categories” of Aristotle.

Oh, first people of the earth, when will you become reasonable? You are under the necessity of acknowledging the truth of all I have said to you. You make answer, that all your follies do not prevent Mademoiselle du Chap from selling female habits and ornaments all over the North, no more than it prevents your language from being spoken at Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Moscow. I shall not take into consideration the importance of the first of these articles; the second is alone the subject of my discourse. You make it your boast that your language is almost as universal as the Greek and Latin were formerly. To whom are you indebted for this? To about a score of authors of genius; all of whom you neglected, persecuted, and tormented, during their lives. You chiefly owe this triumph of your language in foreign countries, to the multitudes of natives who were obliged to quit their country about 1613: Bayle, Leclerc, Basnage, Bernard, Rapin Thoiras, Beausobre, Lenfant, and. many more, departed to make Holland and Germany illustrious: literary commerce was one of the greatest advantages of the United Provinces, and was entirely lost to you. The misfortunes of your countrymen contributed greatly to make your language known to so many nations: the Racines, the Corneilles, the Molières, the Boileaus, the Quinaults, the La Fontaines, and your good writers in prose, have doubtless greatly contributed to spread abroad your language and your reputation; it is a great advantage, but it does not justify you in thinking that you surpass the Greeks and Romans in everything.

In the first place, be so good as to consider that you have no art or science for the knowledge of which you are not indebted to the Greeks; the very names of those arts and sciences sufficiently prove this; poetry, logic, dialectics, geometry, metaphysics, geography, even theology, if it be a science, all declare to you the source from which you derive them.

There is not a single woman that does not speak Greek without being aware of it; for if she says that she has seen a tragedy or a comedy; that an ode has been read to her; that one of her relations has had a fit of apoplexy, or is paralytic; that he has quinsy, or that a surgeon has bled him in the cephalic vein; that she has been at church, where a deacon has sung the litany; if she speaks of bishops, priests, archdeacons, pope, liturgy, anthem, eucharist, baptism, mysteries, decalogue, evangelists, hierarchy, etc., it is very certain that she has pronounced scarcely a word that is not Greek.

True it is, that those who derive all these terms from a foreign language may make so happy a use of them that the disciples may at last surpass the masters. But when, in process of time, you had formed your language of the ruins of the Greek and Latin, blended with your ancient Welsh and Teutonic terms, did you then succeed so far as to compose a language sufficiently copious, expressive, and harmonious? Does not your sterility sufficiently appear from the dry and barbarous terms you employ upon all occasions? Bout du pied, bout de doigt, bout d’oreille, bout de nez, bout de fil, bout de pont, etc. —End of the foot, end of the finger, end of the ear, end of the nose, end of the thread, end of the bridge, etc., whilst the Greeks express all these different things by terms full of energy and harmony. You have been likewise reproached with using the expressions un bras de rivière, un bras de mer, un cul d’artichaud, un cul de lampe, un cul de sac, etc. Scarcely do you allow yourselves to use the word “cul” in its proper sense before matrons worthy of respect; and yet you make use of no other word to express things with which it has no sort of connection. Jerome Carré has proposed to you the word “impasse,” to signify your streets that have no passage from them; this term is noble and significant; yet, to your shame be it spoken, it is constantly printed in your royal almanac, that one of you lives in the “cul de sac,” and the other in the “cul de Blancs-manteaux.” Fie! are you not ashamed? The Romans called such streets as had no issue “angiportus;” they could not find any resemblance between a street and the thing signified by the word “cul.”

What shall I say of the word “trou,” of which you make so frequent and so noble a use?

Do you not think that the names of your gates, your streets, and your temples would have a fine effect in an epic poem? We take pleasure in seeing Hector run from the temple of Pallas to the Scaean gate. The ear is as much pleased as the imagination delighted, when the Greeks advance from Tenedos to the Trojan shore, upon the banks of the rivers Simois and Scamander; but, speak honestly, could a poet represent your heroes descending from the church of St. Pierre aux Boeufs, St. Peter with oxen; or St. Jaques du haut pas, St. James of high step; advancing with fury by the street of Pet au diable, devil’s fort; and by the street Troussevache, drive-cow; embarking upon the gallery of St. Cloud, and going to join battle at the square of Longjumeau, long-twin.

The curious among you preserve a prodigious number of memoirs of the transactions that passed between the death of Henry II and Henry IV. These are monuments of rudeness produced by the itch of writing; they are collections of satires occasioned by shocking events transmitted to posterity in the low style of the populace: at that time you had but one historian, and he was obliged to write in Latin.

At last you have cleared your language of this barbarous rust, of this sordid meanness; you have composed some good books; but have you in them surpassed Cicero and Demosthenes? Have you written better than Livy, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Xenophon? What author, of a genius above mediocrity, has hitherto written your annals?

Is it becoming in Daniel to say, in the very first page of his history: “It was not till the reign of the great Clovis, that the French made themselves forever masters of these vast provinces?” Certain it is, that the great Clovis did not make himself master of them forever; as his successors lost the whole tract that lies between Cologne and Franche-Comté. This Daniel tells you, from the romancer Gregory of Tours, that the soldiers of Clovis, after the battle of Tolbiac cried out, as it were in concert: “We renounce mortal gods; we will no longer adore any but the eternal God; we no longer acknowledge any other God but Him whom the holy Bishop Rémi preaches to us.”

It is not indeed possible that a whole French army should, in concert, pronounce these words, and these antitheses of mortal and immortal. Your Daniel resembles your La Motte, who, in an abridgment of the “Iliad,” makes the whole Grecian army pronounce this verse, when Achilles is reconciled to Agamemnon:

Que ne vaincra-t-il point? il s’est vaincu lui-même.

Whom can he not conquer? he himself subdues.

How could the army of the Franks renounce mortal gods? Did it worship men? Were not Theut, Irminsul, Odin, and Fridda, whom these barbarians adored, immortal in their opinion? Daniel should not have been ignorant, that all the inhabitants of the North adored a Supreme Being, who presided over the secondary divinities; he had nothing to do but to cite the ancient book of Edda, quoted by the learned Huet, bishop of Avranches; he had nothing to do but to read what Huet has said expressly in his treatise concerning the manners of the Germans: “Regnator omnium Deus”—“God, the ruler of all;” this deity was called God, or Goth, Goth the good; and it is matter of much surprise that barbarians should give the deity a title so worthy of him. Daniel should not therefore have put such an absurdity into the mouth of a whole army; a folly which suits only a Christian pedagogue. But pray in what language did Rémi preach to these Bructeri and Sicambri? He spoke either Latin or Welsh; and the Sicambri spoke the ancient Teutonic. Rémi, in all appearance, renewed the miracle of the Pentecost: “Et unusquisque intendebat linguam suam,”—“And each understood his own language.” If you examine Mézeray carefully, what a heap of fables, what confusion, and what a style do you meet with! Deserve Livys, and you will have them.

I am inclined to think that among you the eloquence of the bar and the pulpit have had all the improvement they are capable of. The division of your sermons into three heads, when there is no occasion for such division; an address to the Virgin Mary, which precedes this division; a long Welsh discourse upon a Latin text, which is suited, the best it can, to that discourse; and, finally scraps of commonplace, repeated a thousand times over, are masterpieces of composition, no doubt; the pleadings of your lawyers upon the customs of Hurepoix or Gatinois will pass to the latest posterity; but I doubt much whether they will cause the Greek and Roman eloquence to be forgotten.

I am far from denying that Pascal, Bossuet, and Fénelon were extremely eloquent. It was upon the appearing of these geniuses that you ceased to be Welsh, and that you became French. But don’t compare the “Provincial Letters” to the “Philippics.” First, consider that the importance of the subject is something: the names of Philip and Mark Antony are somewhat above the names of Father Annat, Escobar, and Tambourini. The interests of Greece, and the civil wars of Rome are objects more considerable than sufficient grace which is insufficient; co-operating grace which does not operate; and efficacious grace which is without efficaciousness. The great attraction of these “Provincial Letters” is lost with the Jesuits; but the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero still instruct Europe, while the objects of these harangues exist no longer; while the Greeks are only slaves, and the Romans only monks.

I am very sensible that the funeral orations of Bossuet are exceedingly fine; that they do not even want sublimity; but what is a funeral oration? a discourse of mere ostentation, a declamatory piece, a collection of commonplace, and often a violation of the truth. Should these poetical harangues be placed in the same class with the solid orations of Cicero and Demosthenes?

Your Fénelon, an admirer of the ancients, whose genius was formed by reading their works, lighted his waxen taper by their immortal flames; you will not be so presumptuous as to maintain that his Calypso abandoned by Telemachus, comes near the Dido of Virgil: the cold and unaffecting passion of Telemachus, whom Mentor pushes into the sea with his fist, in order to cure him of his love, does not seem to be one of the most sublime inventions. And will you presume that the prose of that work is comparable to the poetry of Homer and Virgil? Oh my Welsh countrymen, what is a poem in prose, but an acknowledgment of its author’s deficiency in point of genius? Do you not know, that it is easier to compose ten volumes of tolerable prose in your language, than ten good lines in verse, in this language overloaded with articles, deprived of inversions, poor in poetical terms, sterile in bold turns of expression, subjected to an eternal monotony of rhyme, and void of rhymes in the most noble subjects?

Do not you recollect that when Louis XIV, whom readers were resolved to take for Idomeneus, was dead; when Louvois was forgotten, whose character they discovered in Protesilaus; when the marquise de Maintenon (Mme. Scarron), whom they compared to the old Asterbe, was no longer envied; Telemachus lost much of its esteem. But the “tu Marcellus eris” of Virgil will always live in the memory of men; these lines and those which precede them, will be always cited with admiration:

Ter sese attollens cubitoque innixa levavit,

Ter revoluta toro est, oculisque errantibus alto

Quasivit caelo lucem, ingemuitque reperia.

In a prose translation of Virgil—for it is impossible for you to translate him in verse, and you have not yet had any success in rendering the sense of the Latin authors in prose—an imitation of the admirable speech of Dido, which follows, has been cited:

Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,

Qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos.

Littora littoribus contraria, fluctibus undas

Imprecor, arma armis, pugnent ipsique nepotes.

This is the pretended imitation of Virgil, which is represented as a faithful copy of this grand picture.

Puisse après mon trépas s’élever de mon cendre

Un feu qui sur la terre aille au loin se répandre:

Excités par mes vux puissent mes successeurs,

Jurer dès le berceau qu’ils seront mes vengeurs,

Et du nom de Troyens ennemis implacables,

Attaquer en tous lieux ces rivaux redoutables.

Que l’univers en proie a ces deux nations

Soit le théâtre affreux de leurs dissensions,

Que tout serve à nourrir cette haine invincible;

Qu’elle croisse toujours jusqu’au moment terrible

Que l’un ou l’autre cède aux armes du vainqueur,

Que ses derniers efforts signalent sa fureur!

When I am dead, may from my fatal urn

Arise a fire which half the earth may burn:

Roused by my vows, may my successors swear

In childhood to make my revenge their care,

And of the Trojan name eternal foes,

May they my rivals in each clime oppose.

Be earth a prey to these two nations’ rage,

Let it to their contentions be a stage;

May all things serve to feed this direful hate,

May it grow till the moment marked by fate;

Till one or t’other party yield of course,

May its last efforts signalize its force!

Do but consider how weak, vicious, forced, and languishing this pretended copy is:

Puisse après mon trépas s’élever de mon cendre

Un feu qui sur la terre aille au loin se répandre:

When I am dead, may from my fatal urn

Arise a fire which half the earth may burn!

What means this fire which is to spread itself far and wide over the earth? Do we find in these verses filled with breaks, the least word which recalls the ideas of grief, of terror, and of vengeance, which breathe in this striking line:

Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.

The author has an avenger in view, and the bald imitator speaks of a fire which is to burn half the earth. How much do the rhyming epithets, “implacables,” “redoubtables,” “invincibles,” “terribles,” weaken the painting of Virgil! How puerile is any epithet that adds nothing to the sense.

I do not know who is the author of these lines; but this I know, that when the rhyming of a Welsh poet comes in competition with the most beautiful passages of an ancient author, it must suffer by the comparison.

Oh, ye French, I take pleasure in joining with you in the admiration of your great poets; it is chiefly they who have spread your language to the polar circle, and who have forced even the Italians and Spaniards to learn it. I begin with your natural and pleasing La Fontaine: most of his fables are borrowed from Aesop, the Phrygian, and Phaedrus, the Roman: there are about fifty which are masterpieces for nature, for grace, and for diction. This species of writing is altogether unknown to the rest of the moderns. I must own, I could wish that this extraordinary man had been less negligent in his other fables; that he had written this language, which he has made so familiar to neighbouring nations, with greater purity; that his style had been more chaste and exact; that while he greatly surpassed Phaedrus in delicacy, he had equalled him in purity of elocution. I am sorry to see him begin by a short dedication to a prince, in which he says to him:

Et si de l’agréer je n’emporte le prix,

J’aurai du moins l’honneur de l’avoir entrepris.

To please him should the glory be denied,

’Twill be at least an honour to have tried.

It is a comical sort of glory to attempt to please a person; and what an absurd phrase is that of “le prix d’agréer”—“the prize of pleasing!” Phaedrus does not express himself in this manner: Phaedrus does not make the ant say, “ni mon grenier ni mon armoire ne se remplit à babiller”—“Neither my barn nor my chest are filled by prate.” The fox in Phaedrus says, “the grapes are too green,” but he does not add, “they are good only for little brats.”

It vexes me, when I meet with the expression “la cigale ayant chanté tout l’été,” the grasshopper having sung the whole summer; to which the ant answers, “Vous chantiez! j’en suis fort aise, hé bien, dansez maintenant” “You sang! I am glad to hear it; well then, now dance.”

The wolf might say to the dog with the chain, that he would not buy plenty with his liberty; but this wolf makes me uneasy when he adds:

Je ne voudrois pas même à ce prix un trésor;

Cela dit maître loup s’enfuit & court encor.

Bought at this price, I’d not a treasure prize;

This said, away he fled, and still he flies.

A wolf never desired gold or silver.

The man who blows his fingers because he is cold, and who breathes upon his soup because it is too hot is quite in the right: he does not at all deserve to have it said of him,

Arrière ceux dont la bouche

Souffle le chaud & le froid.

Avaunt the man, I like him not,

Who blows what’s cold as well as hot

It is abusing a trivial proverb which is not here properly applied: but these little blemishes do not prevent the fables of La Fontaine from being an immortal work.

His tales are, doubtless, the best we have; this merit, if it be a merit, is unknown to Greek and Roman antiquity. La Fontaine has, in this respect, surpassed Rabelais, and often equalled the simplicity and precision which are to be met with in three or four works of Marot; in his best tales, you meet with that pleasing vein, that nature of Passerat, who lived in the reign of Henry III., and has left us the metamorphosis of the cuckoo, a work too little known, in which we discover nothing of the rusticity of the age in which it was written, and which one would be tempted to think a work of La Fontaine himself.

Thus Passerat ends the tale of this poor, jealous wretch, who being metamorphosed into a cuckoo:

S’envole au bois, au bois se tient caché,

Honteux d’avoir sa femme tant cherché;

Et néanmoins quand le printemps s’enflamme

Nos coeurs d’amour, il cherche encor sa femme:

Parle au passants & ne peut dire qu’OU,

Rien que ce mot ne retint le coucou

D’humain parler: mais par oeuvres il montre

Qu’onc en oubli ne mit sa malencontre,

Se souvenant qu’on vint pondre chez lui,

Venge ce tort & pond au nid d’autrui:

Voilà comment sa doleur il allège.

Heureux ceux-là qui ont ce privilège.

Flies to the woods, there shuns the throng,

Vexed to have sought his spouse so long;

Yet when the spring revives love’s flame

In every heart, he seeks his dame:

To all that pass he speaks and mutters

OU, for no other word he utters;

But by his actions plainly shows,

He recollects his wrongs and woes;

Remembers how birds on a day

Came in his nest their eggs to lay;

For which he just revenge prepares,

Resolved in turn to lay in theirs,

Thus he alleviates his grief;

Blessed who can thus procure relief.

Upon this style La Fontaine formed his; for all your poets of the age of Louis XIV began by imitating their predecessors; Corneille at first imitated the style of Mairet and Rotrou; Boileau that of Regnier.

Perhaps the grand defect of La Fontaine’s tales is that they almost all turn upon the same subject; it is always the debauching of a daughter or a wife: the style of them is not always correct and elegant; they are disfigured by negligences, by prolixities, and by proverbial and trivial expressions.

He seems to be inferior to Ariosto in the tales which he has borrowed from that author. Ariosto not only has the merit of being the inventor, but he has woven those little adventures into a long poem, wherein they are related as there occurs occasion. His style is always pure; there is in him no prolixity, no defect of style, no foreign ornaments; in a word, he is a painter, and a very great painter; that is the first merit of poetry; and it is what la Fontaine has neglected. Observe, in the “Joconda” of Ariosto, the young Greek who finds Fiammetta in her bed while she lies between King Astolpho and Joconda.

Viene all’uscio, e lo spinge; e quel gli cede;

Entra pian piano, e va a tenton col piede.

Fa lunghi i passi, e sempre in quel di dietro

Tutto si ferma, e 1’altro par che muova

A guisa che di dar tema nel vetro

Non che’l terreno abbia a calcar, ma l’uova;

E tien la mano innanzi simil metro,

Va brancolando in fin che’l letto trova;

E di là dove gli altri avean le piante,

Tacito si cacciò col capo innante.

(C. xxviii. 62–63.)

The door yields to her hand, she enters slow,

And groping cautious, forward tries to go;

Her steps she lengthens, onward tries to pass,

As if she feared to strike against a glass;

Her hand before resembling motions kept,

Thus she approached the bed wherein they slept;

And then, from where the others’ legs were placed

Advancing forward, passed with eager haste.

It is surprising that your Boileau, in the judgment he has passed upon the “Joconda” of Ariosto, and upon that of La Fontaine, should reproach the Italian author with certain liberties; he does not recollect that it is an innkeeper that speaks; every person should preserve his peculiar character. Ariosto, while he attends to this costume, as the painters call it, does not let a single word escape him that is not pure Tuscan; an extraordinary merit in a work of such length, written entirely in doubled stanzas.

I have spoken too long of this trivial species of writing, which, trivial as it is, contributes to the glory of literature;

In tenui labor at tenuis non gloria.

The subject’s trivial, but not so the praise.

I should enlarge upon the superior merit of your theatre, whose only defect is that it is not sufficiently tragical, if this subject had not been so often treated of already.

It is my opinion that Euripides would blush at his glory, that he would hide himself through shame, if he was to see the “Phaedra” and “Iphigenia” of Racine. The tragedies of Racine, and many of the scenes of Corneille, are some of the finest pieces in your language. Many of the scenes of Quinault are admirable, in a species of poetry no more known to the ancients than that of La Fontaine’s tales. Your Molière surpasses both Terence and Plautus; I will acknowledge, likewise, that Boileau’s “Art of Poetry” is more poetical than that of Horace; that he set the example in giving the precept, and that his copy is superior to the original. This is your glory; strive to preserve it: you excel in these two sorts of composition alone, you have rivals or masters in all others. You have been so affected by the charms of verse, that nowadays your treatises upon physics and metaphysics unhappily breathe the spirit of poetry; no longer able to write poems in the same taste in which they were written in the age of Louis XIV you have only discovered the secret of how to spoil your prose.

You are threatened with another plague; I am informed that there rises among you, a set of rigid people who call themselves solid; gloomy geniuses, who pretend to judgment because they are void of imagination; men of learning, enemies to letters, who are forever banishing polite antiquity and fable. Do not give ear to their insinuations, oh, Frenchmen! If you do, you will soon become Welsh again.

Imagination, daughter of heaven, built formerly in Greece a temple of transparent marble; with her own hands she painted upon the walls of the temple all nature in allegorical pictures: there Jupiter, the sovereign of gods and men, was seen to bring forth the Goddess of Wisdom from his brain; the Goddess of Beauty is likewise his daughter, but she did not spring from his head: this Beauty is the mother of Love: that this Beauty may have the power of enchanting hearts, she should be never unattended by the three Graces: and who are these necessary companions of Beauty? One is Aglaia, who burns all; another Euphrosyne, who inspires hearts with tranquil joy; and the third Thalia, who strews flowers upon the footsteps of the goddess; this is the signification of their three names. The muses teach all the elegant arts; they are daughters of Memory, and their birth informs you that, without the assistance of Memory, man can neither invent nor combine two ideas.

This then is what barbarians would destroy; and what can they substitute in the place of these divine emblems? The pleadings of M. de Saci, with some other works of equal merit? The harangue of M. Stephen le Dain, pronounced in the secretary’s office?

Oh, ye Welsh, if Janus with a double forehead, representing the year which begins and ends, retains among you still the rude and unintelligible name of January; if your April, which signifies nothing, is with the ancients the month consecrated to Aphrodite, to Venus, to the principle that makes nature young; if the barbarous names, Vendredi and Mercredi, Friday and Wednesday, recall the ideas of Venus and Mercury; if the whole heaven in its constellations is still filled with the fables of Greece; respect your masters, if you have not a mind to resemble that learned Welshman, who maintained that the twelve patriarchs, sons of Jacob, had invented the twelve signs of the zodiac; that the Ram was that of Isaac, the Twins that of Jacob and Esau, the Virgin that of Rebecca, Aquarius, the pitcher of Rebecca; and that the other signs had been given wrongly.

Believe me, my dear brethren, you would not do amiss to retain the beautiful profane inventions of your predecessors.

The End

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