The Fables of La Fontaine | Page 8

originality, and an immortality every way equal to that of the matter which he gathered up from all parts of the great storehouse of human experience. His fables are like pure gold enveloped in solid rock-crystal. In English, a few of the fables of Gay, of Moore, and of Cowper, may be compared with them in some respects, but we have nothing resembling them as a whole. Gay, who has done more than any other, though he has displayed great power of invention, and has given his verse a flow worthy of his master, Pope, has yet fallen far behind La Fontaine in the general management of his materials. His fables are all beautiful poems, but few of them are beautiful fables. His animal speakers do not sufficiently preserve their animal characters. It is quite otherwise with La Fontaine. His beasts are made most nicely to observe all the proprieties not only of the scene in which they are called to speak, but of the great drama into which they are from time to time introduced. His work constitutes an harmonious whole. To those who read it in the original, it is one of the few which never cloy the appetite. As in the poetry of Burns, you are apt to think the last verse you read of him the best.
But the main object of this Preface was to give a few traces of the life and literary career of our poet. A remarkable poet cannot but have been a remarkable man. Suppose we take a man with native benevolence amounting almost to folly; but little cunning, caution, or veneration; good perceptive, but better reflective faculties; and a dominant love of the beautiful;--and toss him into the focus of civilization in the age of Louis XIV. It is an interesting problem to find out what will become of him. Such is the problem worked out in the life of JEAN DE LA FONTAINE, born on the eighth of July, 1621, at Chateau-Thierry. His father, a man of some substance and station, committed two blunders in disposing of his son. First, he encouraged him to seek an education for ecclesiastical life, which was evidently unsuited to his disposition. Second, he brought about his marriage with a woman who was unfitted to secure his affections, or to manage his domestic affairs. In one other point he was not so much mistaken: he laboured unremittingly to make his son a poet. Jean was a backward boy, and showed not the least spark of poetical genius till his twenty-second year. His poetical genius did not ripen till long after that time. But his father lived to see him all, and more than all, that he had ever hoped.[4]
[4] The Translator in his sixth edition replaced the next paragraph by
the following remarks:--"The case is apparently, and only apparently, an exception to the old rule Poeta nascitur, orator fit--the poet is born, the orator is made. The truth is, without exception, that every poet is born such; and many are born such of whose poetry the world knows nothing. Every known poet is also somewhat an orator; and as to this part of his character, he is made. And many are known as poets who are altogether made; they are mere second-hand, or orator poets, and are quite intolerable unless exceedingly well made, which is, unfortunately, seldom the case. It would be wise in them to busy themselves as mere translators. Every one who is born with propensities to love and wonder too strong and deep to be worn off by repetition or continuance,--in other words, who is born to be always young,--is born a poet. The other requisites he has of course. Upon him the making will never be lost. The richest gems do most honour to their polishing. But they are gems without any. So there are men who pass through the world with their souls full of poetry, who would not believe you if you were to tell them so. Happy for them is their ignorance, perhaps. La Fontaine came near being one of them. All that is artificial in poetry to him came late and with difficulty. Yet it resulted from his keen relish of nature, that he was never satisfied with his art of verse till he had brought it to the confines of perfection. He did not philosophize over the animals; he sympathized with them. A philosopher would not have lost a fashionable dinner in his admiration of a common ant-hill. La Fontaine did so once, because the well-known little community was engaged in what he took to be a funeral. He could not in decency leave them till it was over. Verse-making out of the question, this was to be a genuine poet, though, with commonplace mortals, it was