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even if he regretted it afterwards, but he is not left to himself; and it is worth noting how his wife brings her terrible strength to bear on him. Without wasting time in attempting to argue down his scruples, she plants the goad of her sneer just where it tells most, by the insinuation that he is afraid. She keeps this idea before him, so that it shuts out everything else; she forces him to feel as if it were mere cowardice which makes him hold back now; she appals him with her scorn of the possibility of his changing his mind at this last moment, after wishing and planning for such a deed, till he is like wax in her hands. Then as to failure, she answers for all that, has every detail at her fingers'-ends, and makes him feel that, with her mingled courage and cunning to back him, failure is impossible. So she nerves him for the time and persuades him to the deed, having twisted round his feelings with extraordinary skill, so that he is absolutely ashamed that he hesitated an instant to sacrifice his honour, loyalty, and faith at the bidding of ambition.

A breath of fresh night-air comes with Banquo, crossing the court on his way to bed, and stopping for a moment's chat with his host on the road. Surely the old king's kindly message ought to make Macbeth wince, but he gives no sign. Though Banquo has no suspicion of impending harm, he is not quite easy in his mind, his last night's dream has left an uncomfortable impression on him, and he half shrinks from sleeping again. Still, his careless way of owning that the weird sisters had been haunting his slumbers, and that part of their predictions had certainly come true, is curiously different from Macbeth's quick protestations that he thinks not of them, which he promptly contradicts in the same breath by proposing to discuss the matter with Banquo on a future occasion. Some half-defined notion of sounding Banquo seems to underlie Macbeth's words; he seems to want to suggest to his comrade to stick to him whatever happens, half hinting at some sort of bribe. But such a suggestion is repugnant to Banquo's honest instincts; there is honour as well as a touch of Scotch canniness in the qualifi cations of his promise to listen to what Macbeth wants to say when the time comes. As a matter of fact, that time never does come; we feel certain that the broken conversation is never renewed after Duncan's death.

Then for a few instants Macbeth stands alone, awaiting the signal which tells him that all is prepared and his victim left unguarded. It is an instant of terrible suspense, and his strong imagination and excited nerves combine to create an illusion which gives a name to the famous dagger soliloquy. This scene stands apart from all the others, in which some sort of apparition is introduced, for though the illusion is so strong that Macbeth stretches his hand to grasp the visionary dagger, he knows that his eyes are deceived, and that it is a creation of his own brain. It grows more and more distinct, pointing to the king's chamber and showing the blood which is to

flow there, and then the illusion suddenly breaks, leaving Macbeth in a strangely high-strung condition, which carries him on through the murder. He seems to revel in the images of horror which he calls up-a seeming dead world, evil dreams abusing innocent sleep, witchcraft's most unholy rites, the howling wolf, the stealthy murderer, Tarquin the type of treachery and dishonour-even the echoing flagstones of his own court add to his wild condition of mind. In no other play is the association of darkness and evil so insisted on as here. Other people in plenty have dwelt on it, but here it is pressed on us with a sense of mysterious horror recurring again and again like a nightmare. It is never stronger than in the moment of deadly silence after Macbeth disappears and before his wife glides in, breathlessly awaiting his return. With all her strength, even with the borrowed courage her draught has given her, she cannot entirely control her agitation, each sound makes her start, though she has done all her part in drugging the attendants and making all ready for Macbeth. This is an awful picture, that terrible woman standing by the sleeping king's bed and laying the daggers ready to kill him, and yet it is exactly at this point that Shakspere throws in one of the few humanising touches which he allows Lady Macbeth, a gentle memory of her father. In spite of the iron strength of her will, the chance likeness between him and Duncan is enough to stay her hand from actually murdering him herself, but it is not enough to turn her purpose. She is all her cool self again, ready to pour contempt on any sign of feeling, when Macbeth bursts out of the chamber of death, all unnerved and shaken, shuddering at the blood on his hands, shuddering at the half-heard words of the sleepers, shuddering worse at the weird voice pronouncing the curse which should follow his crime. How strangely the tender description of innocent sleep' comes into all this horror, culminating in the ringing, knell-like 'sleep no more,' which sounds to Macbeth's frantic imagination as if it must rouse the whole castle. Worse than all these terrors is the thought of what he has done. It seems as if all the reluctance which Lady Macbeth temporarily conjured away returns upon her husband now in a paroxysm of useless remorse, when he loathes the crime and himself and all connected with it. To Lady Macbeth this reaction seems mere imbecility, nor, with all her knowledge of her husband, is she able to understand his rapidly changing moods and want of self-control. The usually accepted parts of the man and woman are reversed when she goes unflinching back to the scene of blood, not hesitating to stain her little hands to carry out her plan, while he quivers in horror, and simply dares not face the sight of what he has done. The sarcasms which stung him out of all his better resolutions a few hours before take no effect on him now, he is beyond feeling anything of that sort in his present agonised condition.

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(To be continued.)

PAPERS ON FRENCH LITERATURE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE ATELIER DU LYS,' 'IN THE OLDEN TIME,' ETC.

XI.

LA FONTAINE.

IN the sixteenth century, when the influence of the Renaissance re-cast both prose and poetry in France, the fable, dear from old time to the people, seemed worthy also of the attention of the learned, since it could claim the protection of Æsop and Phædrus. We find Pope Pius IV. desiring a scholar to turn the fables of Æsop into Latin verse, which he did with great success, introducing among them the immortal apologue of the trees, spoken by Jotham to the inhabitants of Sychem! Weiss, or Candidus, as he latinised his name after the pedantic fashion of the day, also translated Æsop's fables with some others into Latin, as did Gilles Corrozet, and several more. Besides these versions we find abundance of fables in French by forgotten writers, some of which Marot and Régnier introduced into their own works. Marot writes from prison to a friend—

'Je ne t'escry (écris) de l'amour vaine et folle;
Tu veois assez s'elle sert ou affolle;

Je ne t'escry ne d'armes ne de guerre;

Tu veois qu'il peult bien ou mal y acquerre;

Je ne t'escry de fortune puissante;

Tu veois assez s'elle est ferme ou glissante..
Je ne t'escry qui est rude ou affable,

Mais je te veulx dire une belle fable:

C'est à savoir du Lyon et du Rat

The lion, seeing the rat in a trap, whence he cannot come out, the more that he had eaten much bacon and raw meat, breaks open the cage and releases him. 'Maistre Rat, eschappe vistement;' and note

the arch naïveté of the description

'Puis met à terre un genouil gentement,

Et, en ostant son bonnet de la teste,

A mercyé mille fois la grant' beste.'

By-and-by it is the lion's turn. The rat finds him 'tied to a firm

stake.'

'Adonc le Rat, sans serpe ne coulteau,

Yarriva joyeux et esbaudy,

Pour secourir le Lyon secourable.
Auquel a dict: Tais-toi, Lyon lié;

Par moy seras maintenant deslyé;

Tu le veulx bien, car le cueur joli as:
Bien y parut quand tu me deslyas.
Secouru m'as fort lyonneusement;
Or secouru seras rateusement.'

Upon this the lion, with a lowly condescension and kindness-'ses deux grands yeux vertit' on the rat, saying, 'O povre verminière, Tu n'as sur toy instrument ne manière. . . Va te cacher que le chat ne te voye.' We all know how it ends. The lion to depart was prompt,' observing, 'No service in sooth is wasted, no matter where it is done.'

That prince of fabulists, La Fontaine, never did anything better; indeed, his version of this fable is decidedly below that of Marot, but it contains one famous line: 'On a souvent besoin d'un plus petit que soi.'

We have seen how the Fabliaux sported with all subjects-religion, priests, the great, the humble, women, marriage, with arch and covert mockery. La Fontaine is true to his models. He is gaily satirical where other people's satire hurts like the lash of a whip. He rallies, smiling so wittily that it is impossible not to smile back.

Before speaking of his works, we must say a few words of the man himself—few, for this moralist, whose fables we can hardly praise enough, was the least moral of men. Louis Quatorze marked his displeasure at his profligate life- he was only a commoner, not a king -by withholding all marks of royal favour. Boileau passed his name over in sad and eloquent silence. He reproved others, yet seems not to have realised vice as vice when handling it himself. His Contes are shamelessly licentious, and yet he was so unaware of it that he dedicated one of the worst to the saintly Arnauld of Port Royal! He protested,' the Abbé Pouget, his confessor, tells us, that this book never affected him for evil as he wrote it, and he could not comprehend how it could be so harmful to those who read it.'

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Probably he was so used to profligate thoughts that they no longer startled him. Above him,' writes Taine, in an excellent study on La Fontaine, 'sounds the serious melody of noble style and fine verse. Preachers, philosophers, poets form in chorus to sing the imposing beauty of disciplined morality; literature is a solemn motett accompanied by the ecclesiastical organ. Bossuet leads it, and the audience contemplate respectfully the august display of violet robes, plumed hats and embroidered skirts which take their places in the order beneath the eye of the king. In a corner is a poor fellow who is yawning or laughing. This sermon wearies him; he has no love for ceremonies-thinks the ranks too straight and the organ too loud. He lays down the St. Augustin, which has been put into his hand, slips a Rabelais stealthily out of his pocket, makes a sign to his neighbour Chaulieu and the Grand Prior, and whispers some bit of fun to them. He runs the risk of being rebuked, reprimanded before every one. He will be so; but meanwhile he amuses himself as gaily as a schoolboy guilty of an escapade.' This gay little

apologue exactly describes La Fontaine. How he must have hated the formal decorum, the decent hypocrisy of the Court-a hypocrisy covering such corruption! The outburst of profligacy in the next reign shows how insupportable it had become to those who, under Louis Quatorze, submitted to it. Those who set up barriers against sin are the first to cross them, La Fontaine seems to say. Why should others observe them?

Yet he makes for a certain kind of morality in his fables-not a high one, indeed, but still morality. He began to write late in life, and his first attempts were failures. He had not yet found the style which he was to make supremely his own. By-and-by he shook himself free of the classic taste of the day, and drew from nature and the world around him. Kings and clergy, nobles and lawyers, and, above all, animals, all play their part in his wonderful fables with admirable wit and spirit. He is true to nature, but not realistic, never dull-above all, never lengthy. It is worth noticing that, at a period when man alone was supposed to have any dignity, and the tender-hearted Malebranche beat his dog mercilessly, declaring that animals did not feel, and its cries were only air vibrating in a passage, La Fontaine would have none of the theory which made beasts into mere machines. Rousseau protested against the theory, but La Fontaine had practically done so long before.

At a time when no one in France thought Nature worth observing, La Fontaine observed her closely, with an appreciative and sometimes a poetical eye-as in his description of Night

'Par des calmes vapeurs mollement soutenue,

La tête sur son bras, et son bras sur la nue,
Laissant tomber des fleurs, et ne les semant pas.'

How closely he must have remarked the ways of animals! The <héron sur ses longs pieds emmanché d'un long cou,' the pretended lameness of the partridge, the great wheat-fields where the owner walks in the early morning and where the lark builds; the little world of insects swarming in the heather and the brushwood; the dispute between the hornets and bees as to which the honeycomb belonged when the witnesses testified that

'Des animaux ailés, bourdonnants, un peu longs,
De couleur fort tannée et tels que les abeilles

Avaient longtemps parus. Mais quoi! dans les frélons
Ces enseignes étaient pareilles !'

And Maître Corbeau-the crow, in his black notary's robe; the frightened frogs, plunging into the reeds, then, growing bolder, venturing out again, one after the other; we might quote a hundred

more.

He calls the cat 'l'archipatelin,' 'sa majesté fourrée.'

It would be a curious study to notice the various types of men whom we find either as human beings or animals in these fables. Did Louis Quatorze sit as a model for his king, or was La Fontaine painting kings in general? Observe with what superb indifference

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