his way through Calais, he visits father Laurent's grave, and seating himself beside it takes out the horn snuff-box and bursts into a flood of tears. Elsewhere, in Tristram Shandy, we have the story of Marie de Moulines, by Garat considered superior to Clementina's madness or the funeral of Clarissa, and again, in the Journey, the incident of the starling. Sterne, alone in Paris, is without a passport, and in danger of the Bastille; a starling, hanging in a cage, begins to sing; forthwith the miseries of confinement present themselves to his mind: he sees a captive in his dungeon, pale and wasted by fever, a rude calendar of notched sticks by his side; he sees him take a rusty nail and scratch the little stick in his hand; his chains rattle with the movement; he gives a deep sigh. . . . Here, as on so many other occasions, Sterne's heart overflows, not without satisfaction to himself. "Dear Sensibility !" he exclaims elsewhere, "source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!" 1 Sterne's readers, like himself, felt some self-gratitude for their own emotion. Like him they easily persuaded themselves that the gift of tears is a proof of the excellence and loftiness of our nature, and exclaimed when their tears were over: "I am positive I have a soul!" With him, said one of them, "we become more susceptible of every possible emotion of the heart, and of enjoying the multitude of good things strewn by nature in every path of life, yet lost to all, because their hearts are dried up by poverty or wealth, by meanness or by pride." 3 Accordingly Sterne commits himself to the turbulent current of his impressions. His manner of confession is not only ingenuous, but cynical. And he too, moreover, flatters the sociable tendencies of his age. One evening he reaches, at nightfall, a farm in Anjou. Everyone is seated at table: the bill of fare consists of a wheaten loaf, a bottle of wine, and lentil soup -a "feast of love and friendship." Invited by his hosts the traveller takes a seat; with the old man's knife he cuts himself a large slice of bread, and reads in every eye an expression of gratitude for the liberty he takes a subject ready to hand for 1 Sentimental Journey, The Bourbonnois. 2 Ibid., Maria: Moulines. 3 Garat, ibid. T a Greuze. Supper over, there follows a dance on the sward to the sound of the vielle; youths and maidens dance together in decorous freedom; in the midst of the second dance the traveller notices that all eyes are raised heavenward, and "I fancied," he says, "I could distinguish an elevation of spirit different from that which is the cause or the effect of simple jollity." He questions the father of the family, who explains that it is in this manner they express their gratitude to God, believing "that a cheerful and contented mind is the best sort of thanks to Heaven that an illiterate peasant can pay." This combination of the religious spirit with the spirit of enjoyment, of moral improvement with the pleasures of a ball, this uplifting of conscience amid the intoxication of a dance, seemed delightful to the readers of Jean-Jacques. Sterne was hailed as a philosopher, and it was even complacently asserted that he stood "above all philosophers and above all preachers in his power of solving the most mysterious problems." Suard went further,— he compared Laurence Sterne to the Bible. Such was the revolution effected by the influence of Rousseau in the manner of judging the productions of literary art. Let us suppose that the work of Sterne, disconnected, paradoxical, and almost maudlin in its pathos, had made its appearance in France thirty or forty years earlier, and had come under the observation of Montesquieu or Fontenelle. I imagine it would have caused a certain amount of astonishment, and would have incurred some contempt. It was not the practice, in 1730, to present a succession of desultory impressions to the public as a work of art. traveller's note book, which was neither novel, pamphlet, moral treatise, nor satire, but each and all of these at the same time, and was also meant to be a noble monument of literature, could never have been offered to the world. A Still less would an author have been forgiven for speaking of himself with such unblushing sentimentality. The man of feeling, "the sport and plaything of temperature and season, whose happiness is at the mercy of the winds," has got on in the world since that day. His soul, sometimes joyful, sometimes disconsolate, has been allowed to roam hither and thither at the mercy of northern gales or western breezes; to them he has shouted his sorrows and his victories; he has found a strange delight in fusing himself with the elements, in incorporating himself with the universe, in feeling that, puny creature as he is, his life forms a part of the mighty symphony or tempest of the heavens. " is not so Of this melancholy and poetic race Rousseau was the first representative. Was Sterne the second? To-day we can hardly connect the two names without hesitation, for we no longer have the same belief in Sterne as readers who were contemporary with him. Yet such readers-and the fact is significant-were conscious of a gift in him similar to that of Rousseau. "Man, under Sterne's treatment," to quote Garat once more, much held captive, as tossed hither and thither." His characters, "in some vague borderland between sleeping and waking, tread the brink of every form of error and of crime, like the somnambulist upon the verge of roof or precipice." of roof or precipice." In a word, Sterne, like Rousseau, reveals "the somnambulist" in man-the creature of instinct, given over to the fluctuations of sensation and of feeling. And he reveals himself also, quite artlessly it would seem, in his true colours-passionate, sensitive, and not particularly reasonable. "He makes us smile," said Ballanche-one of his warmest admirers-" but it is the smile of the soul; he makes us weep, but the tears we shed are gentle as drops of dew." It gave the impression of perfect sincerity, and this was the secret of his success. His readers were grateful to him for speaking of himself, and of himself alone. The time had come when, impelled by the genius of Rousseau, literature was becoming ever more and more narrowed down to "the confession of a soul," and when all that was needed to obtain the public ear was to tell the story of oneself,-provided only one happened to be Yorick, "jester to his Majesty the King of England." Chapter III ENGLISH INFLUENCE AND THE LYRICISM OF ROUSSEAU I. The Love of nature-Rousseau's English predecessors-Thomson: his talent II. Melancholy-English melancholy proverbial in France-Popularity of Gray NOT only however did Rousseau excite in readers of his day the taste for sentimental confession; he opened their eyes at the same time to physical nature, and inspired them with the taste for melancholy. Sensibility, the feeling for nature, and the sadness of the poet are simply three forms of the same disposition of soul, and constitute the whole of Rousseau's lyricism. How far, in this further respect, was he in harmony with foreign writers, both among his predecessors and his contemporaries? I "The picturesque❞—wrote Stendhal—“ like our good coaches and our steam-boats, comes to us from England," 1 and he adds, 66 a fine landscape is no less essential to an Englishman's religion than to his aristocratic station." Frenchmen of the eighteenth century had already remarked this characteristic, and, in the frenzy of their anglomania, had endeavoured to appropriate it themselves. Fashion, following the example set by the English, had driven them to live in the country,-" certainly one of the best customs," wrote Arthur Young, "they have 1 Mémoires d'un touriste, vol, i., p. 87. taken from England." And it was in imitation of the English that they planted those strange parks in which crooked paths, flights of winding steps and mazes took the place of the broad avenues of Versailles; in which antique statues were replaced by grottoes, tombs and hermitages; in which you beheld a castle in flagrant discord with a Hindoo temple, or a Russian cottage with a Swiss chalet, and in which Petrarch's urn stood side by side with the tomb of Captain Cook. They merely mimicked nature, under the impression that they were imitating her. The English garden was a school of virtue: "When you are thinking," wrote a famous amateur,2" how to make a ravine shady, or trying to control the course of a stream, you have too much to do to become a dangerous citizen, a scheming general or a plotting courtier. One whose head is full of his stand of flowers, or his clump of judas-trees," cannot be a bad man. Preoccupied in so virtuous a manner, one cannot commit a guilty act. "One would scarcely arrive in time to take advantage of the frailty of a friend's wife, and afterwards would hastily make one's escape to the country, there to expiate the sweetest of crimes." Such was the character of descriptive literature from 1760 to the Revolution. Rousseau's beautiful pages apart, it is inferior and insipid, nor did the influence of Rousseau bear fruit until five-and-twenty years after the publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse. The love of nature is not a feeling to be acquired in a day. It demands a whole education of eye and heart. And it may be that certain races, prepared by certain climates or certain conditions of social life, can more easily sustain that abrupt disturbance of the moral equilibrium which must precede the love of physical nature. It was neither central nor northern France-the France which produced most of the French classical writers, the gentle France of Touraine or Anjou, the nursery of the Pléiadethat gave birth to Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre one of them came from the Alps, the others from the sea. 1 Travels, vol. i., p. 72. The prince de Ligne, quoted by de Lescure: Rivarol, p. 310. 3 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: Études de la nature, 1784; Paul et Virginie, 1788. |