V

THE WORKS OF CYRANO DE BERGERAC

The extant writings of Cyrano de Bergerac are: (1) A few poems, including the libel on Mazarin; (2) Three or four political pamphlets (doubtful); (3)Entretiens Pointus; a set of quibbling jokes; (4) Three sets of Letters; (5) A prose comedy,Le Pédant Joué; (6) A verse tragedy,La Mort d'Agrippine; (7)Les Estats et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil; (8)Traité de Physique, fragmentary.

The first three are unimportant. The best of Cyrano's few short poems is the sonnet to Jacqueline d'Arpajon. The political pamphlets interest the researcher and are not certainly Cyrano's. TheEntretiens Pointus, orMerry Conceited Jestsare verbal quibbles and jokes, supposedly memories of conversation in the Gassendi group.

With the letters we come to the first of Cyrano's works of literary value and are at once met with a difficulty which makes the study of Cyrano's work so troublesome. Whenever there exists a MS. of any of his writings the differences between this and all the printed editions before that of Gourmont (1908) is so considerable that in many cases the whole intention of the work is different. Most of the passages omitted in the printed editions are philosophical or satirical arguments or sarcasms directed against the Church and religion and were omitted in the 17th century for obvious reasons. No editions of Cyrano show the MSS. texts prior to 1908; the editions of Gourmont and particularly of Lachèvre have shown us a different Cyrano.

The Cyrano created by Gautier and Rostand was, of course, a chimera; but there was something curious in his work which gave some support to the theory that he was mad or at least very eccentric. He was not mad, he was simply heavily censored. Essential words, sentences, paragraphs, whole pages were omitted; always modifying the meaning, sometimes making it absurd.

These Letters belong to a confused period of French literature, a sort of interregnum between the age of Rabelais and Montaigne and the age of Louis XIV. The literary influences in Cyrano's time were the précieux, the satyriques and the burlesques. The letters of Guez de Balzac (1594-1654) and Voiture (1598-1648) made polite letter-writing fashionable. The libels of the Fronde, the satire of Regnier's disciples, the burlesque of Sorel and Scarron formed, in the first half of the century, the opposition to the Italianated schools of preciosity and politeness—Marini, the Scudérys, Voiture, the Rambouillet salon. Cyrano's Letters are a curious hotch-potch of these conflicting styles. These fifty odd letters are Amorous, Descriptive and Satirical, sometimes at the expense of real persons. Most of them are rhetorical exercises; a few are serious. Nothing could be more creditable to Cyrano than his letterAgainst Sorcerers. It is a vigorous and well-expressed protest against the stupid belief in sorcery, the grotesque legal proceedings and the barbarous sentences carried out upon nervously hallucinated or innocent people. It is a wonderfully just attack upon ignorance and superstition and contains his famous saying:

"Not the name of Aristotle (more learned than I), not that of Plato, nor that of Socrates, shall ever convince me if my judgment is not convinced by reason that what they say is true."

TheLove-Lettersare made of clever and wholly frigid conceits, which glitter and clink like chains of icicles; nothing could be farther from the language of genuine feeling. The Satirical Letters are abusive and filled with "clenches." They do not denounce types, they blackguard individuals. TheLettres Diversesare mostly descriptive pieces on themes like the seasons, a lady with red hair, a country house; written in the highly conceited vein then affected by Cyrano. Some of them are vigorous and well-expressed. They are well translated as to style by the anonymous person who publishedBergerac's Satyrical Charactersin 1658. The first edition of these Letters is dated 1654, but one of them was published as early as 1648; others may have been written earlier. They were probably rewritten before publication and were certainly censored.

Cyrano de Bergerac is the author of a comedy,Le Pédant Joué, written 1645, published 1654, probably never played; and of a tragedy,La Mort d'Agrippine, written in 1646, published 1654, played in 1653 or 1654 and revived for one performance on the 10th November 1872.

These plays alone would provide a theme for a very long essay; but here I must necessarily be brief.

Corneille, Racine, and Molière were not isolated literary phenomena without predecessors and contemporaries; any more than Shakespeare. There is a large pre-Corneille and pre-Molière drama.[17]Du Ryer, Rotrou, Gombaud, Scudéry, Hardy, Théophile de Viau, Boisrobert, are some of the best known dramatists of the thirties and forties of the seventeenth century. Among them was Cyrano de Bergerac. I cannot wholly share the contempt expressed by official French criticism for early French drama, though my acquaintance with it is superficial; I certainly cannot agree with the contemptuous estimates of Cyrano's plays. The fact that the plot ofThe Pedant Outwittedis taken from Lope de Vega seems very unimportant, when one considers the amazing gusto and energy Cyrano put into his uncouth comedy. Here his curious fustian style of ranting hyperbole serves him admirably; inThe Pedant Outwittedbombast, exaggeration and caricature are carried to a superlative degree. Nothing could be more pedantic than Granger, the pedant, or more bombastic than the bragging poltroon, Chasteaufort. Some of the best scenes, situations and scraps of dialogue inThe Pedant Outwittedhave been appropriated by more famous dramatists, particularly by Molière. This may be seen inLe Dépit Amoureux,Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and particularly inLes Fourberies de Scapin, where the whole of the famous "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère" scene is imitated from Cyrano.

The theme of the comedy is the outwitting of Granger by his son, Charlot. Both wish to marry Genevotte; Granger attempts to send his son away from Paris, and on various pretexts Charlot remains; by the device of a play within a play Charlot marries Genevotte before Granger's eyes. The whole is quite incredible, but amusing. The character Cyrano most enjoyed was Granger, a caricature of his old schoolmaster. It must be admitted that the long speeches of Granger and Chasteaufort, ingenious and fertile as they are, grow somewhat tedious in a play; all the characters, even the heroine, are infected with preciosity and burlesque. Extraordinary hyperbolical epithets are piled one upon another until the whole heap topples to absurdity; as for the rant of Chasteaufort, it leaves that of Tamburlaine a mild understatement; Bobadil and Bessus are realistic sketches in comparison with this. With all its faults the play is a remarkable piece of work and ought to interest anyone who likes Elizabethan drama.

The tragedyThe Death of Agrippinaprovides us with another surprise. WhereasThe Pedant Outwittedseems extremely archaic for 1645,The Death of Agrippinahas been compared favourably with Corneille's minor tragedies. All the "precious" affectations of style, the recondite allusions which makeThe Pedant Outwitteda test of one's knowledge of old French, all the oddities, the quiddities, the "humours", disappear and we have a formal French tragedy written in good Alexandrines, moving according to the rules and containing a well-concerted action as well as good subsidiary scenes. Nothing could better illustrate the versatility of Cyrano's literary personality; the plays seem to have been written by two totally different persons. The subject of the tragedy is the conspiracy of Sejanus against Tiberius; Sejanus is in love with Agrippina, Livilla with Sejanus; Agrippina takes part in the conspiracy to avenge herself upon Tiberius with the hope of destroying Sejanus afterwards; the conspiracy is revealed by Livilla and both Sejanus and Agrippina lose their lives. There is one very fine scene at the end, where Sejanus is taunted by Agrippina; this contains the "horrible impieties" complained of by Tallemant; but why Sejanus should have talked like a Christian not even Cyrano's severest censurers have yet explained. The play is well-written and impressive.

Cyrano's fragmentary treatise on Physics needs only the remark that it is almost identical with Rohault's similar work and was either derived from it or from a common source. It was in part to popularize these studies and the sceptical ideas they inspired in him that Cyrano wrote his famousVoyages to the Moon and Sun, so often reprinted in France.

The Moonis supposed to have been written as early as 1648;The Sunwas begun about 1650 and was left unfinished. Two versions ofThe Moonexist. One is contained in the MSS. of Paris and Munich and the other in the first edition, on the last of which all editions before Gourmont's incomplete reprint were founded. The MSS. undoubtedly contain the work as Cyrano wrote it and privily circulated it. The 1657 edition was heavily censored by Henry Le Bret, who was afraid to publish many passages reflecting upon the Church, of which he was a comfortably settled pillar. The early editions—and consequently all previous English translations—mark the places of some of these omissions with dots or the word "hiatus". The effect of this expurgation was in some cases to make nonsense; in most to destroy the point of Cyrano's sarcasm. Apart from merely variant readings and single words or phrases (which often, by the way, greatly alter the point of a passage), there are no less than fourteen out of a total of ninety-six pages in M. Lachèvre's edition omitted by Le Bret, and these are precisely the most daring and satirical parts of the whole work. The last four pages are different in MSS. and in the printed editions; I have given the MSS. These MSS. have only been recently available in France and have never before been translated into English. Thus, if the reader were familiar with Lovell's (1687) version and had also read the French Bibliothéque Elzivirienne or Garnier editions, he would yet find that about one-seventh of the matter given in this translation ofThe Moonwould be new to him.

The MS. ofThe Sunhas disappeared; were it ever discovered we should no doubt find that the printed editions had been mutilated, while if the lostStory of the Sparkwere recovered, we might find a still more daring satire on Christianity. The first printed edition ofThe Voyage to the Sunappeared in 1662.

These imaginary voyages are often described by French writers as 'Utopias'; they are no more Utopias thanPantagruelandGulliver's Travels. They lack the political system of the Utopian romance, whose purpose is to recommend speciously some abominable form of tyranny under the pretext of making everybody happy. At different times I have read theRepublicof Plato, theUtopiaof Sir Thomas More, Campanella'sCittà del Sole, William Morris'sNews from Nowhere, and Hudson'sA Crystal Age; and I am bound to say, with all reverence to these great men, that Morris'sNowheresounded least unendurable, while the rest were nightmares, visions of meddlesome cranks. I have a deep reverence for Plato so far as I am able to comprehend him, but I think I would rather die than be enslaved by his ideal state.

Now, Cyrano de Bergerac had no intention of creating one of these ideally unpleasant tyrannies. His purpose was similar to that of Rabelais and Swift. He wanted to satirise existing institutions, humbugs and prejudices; he wanted to mock at a literal belief in the Old Testament; he wanted to hold up to odium the fundamental villainy of man; and he wanted to convey amusingly a number of quasi-scientific and philosophical ideas which it was highly dangerous then to publish and still more dangerous to try to popularise. Even then Cyrano dared not publish the book in his lifetime; and it was mutilated when it appeared after his death. The censorship of theancien régimewas almost exactly the antithesis to the police interference of to-day; great licence in morals and personalities was allowed, obscenities and even blasphemies were tolerated, but when an author, however eminent and serious, trenched upon the authority of the Church or the State, or offered new ideas which seemed likely to prove subversive, he was certain of persecution and punishment. Both systems have their defects. The tremendous hubbub raised againstTartuffe, the self-exile of Descartes,[18]the prosecution of Théophile de Viau, the outcry against Cyrano, the fact that Gassendi'sSyntagmadid not appear in print until after his death; all show the working of the ancient censorship and the prejudices it appealed to in the populace. One feels that many of the deplorable traits in Cyrano's character are the result of a deliberate and high-spirited revolt against what he thought was oppressive. He attacked the Church and war and paternal authority as fiercely and recklessly as he attacked thebraviat the Porte de Nesle.

Even in Cyrano's time there was nothing original in a fanciful voyage to the Moon. Brun quotes a formidable list of predecessors—most of whom one has never heard of—whose work Cyrano may or may not have known. All probably derive directly or indirectly from Lucian of Samosate. It is certain that Cyrano copied Rabelais, that he took whole paragraphs and many ideas from Sorel'sFrancionand several hints from Bishop Godwin'sMan in the Moon. Campanella furnished him with numerous hints. The philosophic and quasi-scientific passages came from Descartes, Gassendi, and Rohault. Cyrano is a Gassendist inThe Moonand a Cartesian towards the end ofThe Sun. To trace these in detail would be laborious; it is sufficient to say that the theory which made Cyrano the predecessor of Rohault is now wholly disproved, while those who have compared Cyrano with Gassendi and Rohault declare that the author of the Voyages advances little that cannot be found in their works. M. Juppont's endeavour to prove that Cyrano was a marvellous scientific genius anticipating modern discoveries will hardly bear investigation; to make his points he has to attribute to Cyrano ideas derived from others and to wrest his language from the scientific jargon of one period into the worse jargon of another. After translating the Voyages, which implies a certain familiarity with them, I conclude that when Cyrano attempts to be scientific he often fails to understand thoroughly what he is talking about. As soon as he begins to discourse of atoms, or attraction, or the magnet, his language becomes vague, involved and hesitating; he is metaphorical at the moment he should not be, and the thought obviously is not his own; the lack of clarity in his speech suggests that he failed to comprehend the ideas he pretends to expound, that he did not think them for himself but was indoctrinated with them by others. He makes use of the anacoluthon too often for a translator's comfort; for though the practice may be defended in poetry, sermons and other inspired works, it is unsuitable to the logical exposition of science. Finally, a certain lack of common-sense often precipitates him into absurdity; he chooses grotesque illustrations, wrecks ingenious ideas by some incongruity he might easily have avoided. It is significant that when great men like Molière and Swift have borrowed from Cyrano they improve on him chiefly by purging him of what is grotesque and absurd.

I must confess I view Cyrano's plagiarisms more coolly than recent French commentators; for Cyrano criticism has violently revolted from the theory that he was a perfect, beplumed hero, the most original man of his age, to the other extreme of a theory that he had no originality whatever, that he was affected, vain, debauched, dirty, hypocritical; ending up with a sort of Johnsonian "let us hear no more on't". Cyrano deserves some severity in the matter of plagiarism on account of his own stupid boast that he only read books to detect the plagiarisms of the authors. We are all plagiarists; every word we use is the creation of a poet; and a completely original author would probably be completely incomprehensible. This scientists' prejudice about priority of ideas is out of place in literature; we are engaged in creating a temper of the mind, in civilizing, not in riding an intellectual steeplechase. In works intended for amusement what matters plagiarism? Cyrano took an idea, say, from Sorel; Cyrano amuses us, Sorel bores us; are we not to read Cyrano because he plagiarized? And, in any event, these sarcasms of his which are merely amusing to-day were perilous matters then; if Cyrano had published an unexpurgatedMoonin 1650, exile, imprisonment or some other torture might easily have been his lot. The ideas in the Voyages are derived indeed, but they were then new and worth circulating. Cyrano has been sneered at because, when he had written these dangerous matters, he evaded the possibility of martyrdom by refraining from publication; I confess I think he was wise; Naaman bowed himself in the house of Rimmon, and there is no obligation upon any man to sacrifice his life for his opinions.

Moreover, when we read an author whose purpose is "to instruct by entertaining" we care little for the origins of the instruction so long as the entertainment be there. Examined from this point of view the Voyages emerge very well. In spite of all their faults, real and alleged, they are entertaining. One would certainly rather spend an evening with Cyrano than with his enemy, Father Garasse, that terrific old bore, the "flail of the libertins". Moreover, the dullest passages inThe Voyagesare those he stole from his scientific friends and the most entertaining those he took from Rabelais or Godwin or Sorel or invented himself. By far the best part ofThe Voyagesis contained in the early pages ofThe Sun, where Cyrano relates the persecutions and inconveniences supposed to arise from the publication ofThe Moon, together with his adventures with the police. The whole thing bustles along admirably, reminding one of the adventures of the boys in theSatyricon, and it is a dismal moment when Cyrano produces an "icosahedron mirror" and we know we are in for some more quasi-science. The satire on mankind in the story of the birds is very happy and furnished Tom d'Urfey with an opera. The talking trees are quite good until they get on to loadstones and iron filings and the poles and such trash.

A large part of the opening ofThe Moonis occupied with a parody of the Old Testament, which Cyrano and his friends probably found more amusing than we do. The influence of the burlesque school on Cyrano has been noticed. Travesties then were a kind of craze; Virgil, Ovid, all the classics were burlesqued. There was one book it was dangerous to parody and Cyrano with his usual impetuosity rushed into a burlesque of the Old Testament. Here indeed he may claim to have given Voltaire several hints for his wickedly wittyRomans.

It is not my intention to discussThe Voyagesat greater length. The reader has here the full text before him and will form his own opinion. He has in the introduction sufficient information to understand at least in outline the writer of the book and his work, themilieuin which it was produced, the intellectual movement which helped to create it and its historical position.

The text used for the translation is that printed by M. Lachèvre in hisŒuvres Libertines de Cyrano de Bergerac, 2 vols., Champion, Paris, 1921. I wish to thank M. Lachèvre for the generosity with which he has allowed me to make use of his book and his kindness in answering my queries and supplying me with information. I am also indebted to the work of Brun, Gourmont, Perrens, Lacroix, Juppont, Magne and of course Cyrano's friend Le Bret. The only English work I have examined is an essay by Henry Morley, which should be read with great caution.

RICHARD ALDINGTON

Title-page to Lovell's expurgated translation.

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