The fact is, that there is less love in the world than there was; and the stock is daily diminishing. The reason is clear—there is less idleness, and consequently less of the concentration which goes to make passion. That terrible school-master too, who has, some how or other got abroad, whips out poor little Love, wherever he finds him,—“a domineering pedant o’er the boy;” and the utilitarians will not hear of the brat, with his anti-Malthusian doctrines, but hunt him from the boudoir to the tread-mill, to suffer and repent, with other young offenders. Cultivation, business, and education, are “the very beadles to an humorous sigh.”

The idlest nations are ever the most gallant; and Doctors’ Commons would have little to do, if the désœuvrés of fashion were reduced to assume the moral and physical activity of the tiers-état. The semi-civilized great are idle and intemperate: idle, by their institutions, which, being those of despotism, exclude the mass from a participation in national concerns; and intemperate, because wealthy idleness gives the desire and the means of excess. What scenes of wassailing and riot passed among the courtiers of Henry the VIIIth and Francis the Ist; and amongst those of Charles the IId, and the early part of the reign of Louis the XIVth. In the highest state of savagery, men are governed by appetite; in the highest degree of civilization they are guided by convenance. The Esquimaux, always in the field, and the Englishman always before the public, and occupied with commerce, politics, science, and the arts, have neither of them leisure to love, after the fashion of the Petrarchs and the Rousseaus.

Even now, however, we may have what the French of our days call “un sentiment,” which is a very pretty amusing thing, leaving no scar behind—heart, conscience, and character, all intact, “pourvu qu’on est sage,” (as a Frenchwoman said to me the other day): an item in the code of conduct, by the by, never looked for in the days of old French gallantry.

RACONTEURS.[8]

I am not aware of any word in the English language that precisely answers to the French “raconteur;” and, therefore, I suspect that the gift which it indicates is not in the catalogue of English accomplishments.

The English declaim better than they converse, and argue better than they declaim. Free institutions have favoured their successful cultivation of oratory; habits of public business have made them good logicians: but I doubt that any moral or political combination would have made them good raconteurs. The talent is too much an affair of temperament; which institutes and education may direct, but cannot change. It is this that constitutes national character, that renders the modern Frenchman in so many respects what Cæsar found the Gaul; and preserves in the English yeoman of the nineteenth century, much of the moral physiognomy of the rude conquerors at Agincourt, and of the sturdy companions of Wat Tyler. One cannot well conceive a Greenlander being nursed into a Horace, or a negro into a Newton: one might as reasonably speculate on a potatoe being cultivated into a pine-apple, or a mulberry being grafted to the size and flavour of a melon.

The English temperament is too bilious, reflective, and abstracted, to lend itself to the art of light and pleasant narration; its affections are too deeply seated, its gaiety too fitful, its humour too cumbrous; but with a Frenchman, it is a natural endowment; and every epoch of the literary history of France can furnish its contingent of good raconteurs. In the earlier ages, the gift was turned to a profession; and its most eminent professors, under the denomination of Conteurs, went from province to province, and from château to château, sure of a brilliant reception, and a liberal recompense, in return for the story they ingeniously invented, or the anecdote they pleasantly detailed.

“Fableaus sont or moult en course, Mainte deniers en ont en bourse Cil qui les content.”

Fab. MSS. du Roi.

In modern France this talent, which always obtained a vogue, occasionally made a fortune. Every salon was thrown open to the raconteur; and the reputation commenced at the petits soupers and boudoirs of private individuals, received its seal from the admiration of the court and the favour of the monarch. The love of anecdote is a propensity, perhaps a weakness, inherent in royalty: and a Buonaparte and a Bourbon were alike indebted for some of their most agreeable moments to the most charming raconteur that perhaps even France has produced. Both, with royal impatience, were wont to cut a proser short in his tedious tale; and, the same habit of command dictating to either despot precisely the same phrase, both would exclaim, “Allons, Denon, contez-nous cela!”

The talent which, by its animation, renders French society so agreeable, has found its way into French literature. The “j’ai oui dire” of Brantome is always the prelude to some quaint and curious detail; and the delightful Montaigne owes his deathless reputation less to the learning of which he was so proud, than to the art, which he himself contemned as bavardage. Of the exquisite narrations of Madame de Sévigné it is almost superfluous to speak. Her details are all pictures; and her commonest incidents derive an intense interest from her happy manner of narrating them. What a difference between the love adventures of Madame de Montpensier and the Duc de Lauzun, as told in the ponderous autobiography of the dull and dogged princess, and as sketched in the pages of Madame de Sévigné! The modern dramatist, who has produced the story of Pomenars on the French stage, has added nothing to the dramatic effect of her exquisite narration.

Ninon de l’Enclos possessed the happy talent de bien raconter, in such perfection, that when Molière read to her the first draft of his Tartuffe, and she related to him an adventure, of which she had been herself the Elmire, he declared, that if his piece had not been already written, he would not have undertaken it: so much was her Tartuffe superior to his own. (“Tant il se seroit cru incapable de rien mettre sur le théâtre d’aussi parfait, que le Tartuffe de Mademoiselle de l’Enclos.”)

The immediate successor to these gifted women was Mademoiselle de Launay (Madame de Staël). Her narrative of her first interview with her patroness, the Duchesse de Ferté, is a brilliant illustration of the peculiarity of the art: and her well known, “Allons, Mademoiselle, parlez un peu religion; vous direz en suite autre chose;”[9] has passed into a proverb. This fascinating talent is always notable for the naïve simplicity of manner that accompanies it—for that spirited frankness, which affectation (the quality of the false and the feeble) cannot, in all its assumption, accomplish. The gift is rarely and somewhat capriciously dispersed in society. It is sometimes possessed by persons, not otherwise distinguished; and genius, even of the highest order, is often wholly divested of it. I may be wrong; but I doubt if any circumstance could have bestowed it on the late celebrated Madame de Staël. The whole character and bent of her mind seems to have led another way. Her temperament, and the structure of her intellect were too German, too alembicated: while the school of Thomas and of Madame de Necker, in which she was brought up, was too précieuse not to have stifled any predisposition she might have possessed, to the natural graces, indispensable to a graphic narrator.

Mounted on the pedestal of her reputation, and twisting between her finger and thumb the laurel branch, which she always wielded (a tic or an emblem), Madame de Staël stood, like her own Corinne, in the centre of her circle, as if waiting at once for her audience and her inspiration: and when she was satisfied of the adequate proportion of both, she gave out her metaphysical and political oracles in measured phrases; exhibiting an eloquence, which, whether she explained the doctrines of Kant, or opened the views of Necker, was more calculated to command admiration, than to excite delight. This was all very fine,—very intellectual; but it was not the thing desired in a good raconteur. It is impossible to imagine such a Pythoness stepping down from her tripod, huddling herself into her shawl and easy chair, putting her feet on the fender, and carelessly and gaily giving herself up to “raisonner pantoufle;” to arrest and charm the attention by that “sweet and voluble discourse,” which pauses not to choose a theme, nor studies the art, by which it unconsciously fascinates the hearer.

It was the want, perhaps, of this happy simplicity, that lost Madame de Staël the suffrage of one, whose conquest was the sum of all her ambition. Willing to be won, Buonaparte refused to be lectured: and flying from the eloquent dictations of the daughter, as he had cut short the tedious dissertations of the father, he denominated the one a phraseuse,[10] and pronounced the other “au-dessous de sa célébrité.”[11]

If was, I believe, much about the time when he thus fled from the disserting financier, whose lengthiness, like his politics, were ill adapted to the rapid “en avant” of modern military and legislative manœuvres, that Buonaparte gave a willing audience to a pleasant raconteur, whom chance threw in his way, in the person of an humble minister of the Genevese church. Napoleon, with his unerring tact, soon detected the talent which was latent beneath the unpretending simplicity of his chance companion. The conversation turned upon Kant and his philosophy. “Can you understand it?” asked the Emperor, in his brusque way. “Not a word, Sire,” replied the Curé. “Nor I neither,” rejoined Napoleon; “but Madame de Staël understands it all; (Ni moi non plus; cependant Madame de Staël entend tout cela);” and he laughed, and shewed his handsome teeth, delighted to find one clever man, at least, as dull as himself upon that vague and unsatisfactory doctrine.