RACONTEURS.⁠[8]

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.

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.

To relate well, requires a minute and clear perception of particulars; which being strongly impressed on the mind, will be returned with all the truth, force, and illuminated effect, necessary to impress the auditor. Facts often appear too highly coloured, when they are but given in the same deep tone in which they were witnessed. Some minds receive their impressions of scenery, character, and incident, as an iron target receives the point of an arrow, which scarcely leaves a trace behind it; while others of more penetrable stuff, take the form of their objects with a depth and sharpness, fully proportionate to the force that stamps it. Between these two classes of intellects there is little sympathy; and the possessor of the first will consider as exaggerations of truth and nature, the narrative, which reflects the ideas of the latter in the full vigour of their original conception.

Denon often told me that the best raconteur he ever knew, except Voltaire, was Voltaire’s disciple, the Marquis de Vilette, the husband of Belle et Bonne. Ferney was a good school. Every one knows the anecdote of D’Alembert, Huber, and others, telling stories of robbers, à qui mieux mieux, and Voltaire, when called upon, beginning, in the tone of a gossiping old woman—“Messieurs, il y avait une fois un fermier-général—Ma foi j’ai oublié le reste!”⁠[12] Denon told me his last visit to Voltaire was in 1776. He had been detained late at Geneva, and it was near midnight when he arrived at Ferney. He found the venerable patriarch sitting up to receive him, in that salon now so familiar to every English traveller. He was in high health and spirits; and after supper the two delightful raconteurs began to narrate—mutually excited, and mutually charmed. It was in vain that Madame Denis frequently came from her bed-room, in night-cap and slippers, to endeavour to get her uncle to bed. Voltaire, with the querulousness of a spoiled school-boy, resisting the similar attempt on the part of his nurse, pushed her away, with—“Mais allez donc—qu’est-ce que ça fait, si je m’amuse?”⁠[13]⁠

The influence which Denon himself obtained over time, and even sometimes over nature, (for “he could murder sleep,” by the exercise of this amusing gift,) was often exemplified upon ourselves, during our various residences at Paris. Denon kept intolerably late hours—we intolerably early ones. After a month of bals-parés—soirées—réunions—and opéras, we were obliged to give in, and to stay one night at home; and so issued orders accordingly, and sent the servants to bed.—When, lo! as the last lamp was put out, the last ember fading, and we were yawning our way to our bed-room, across the gloomy antechamber of our old hotel in the Fauxbourg St. Germain, a loud ring was heard, the great gate invisibly opening, creaked slowly on its hinges, and the wheels of a cabriolet came rattling over the paved court. Back we ran—lest our chamber lights should shine forth from the windows, and bring up the unseasonable intruder—while Pierre the frotteur, putting in his melo-drama head, asked, interrogatively, “Madame n’y est pas—n’est-ce pas?” and then flew to forbid the nocturnal visitor. But it was in vain: he was already in the anti-room—and we heard the voice of Denon, saying “Go to bed, my good fellow—there, that will do;”—and in he came on the very tip-toe of excitation, humming “On revient toujours,” with applicable emphasis. He was all star, ribbon, and the legion of honour; in full dress, both in spirits and person. He had dined with one of the ministers; and had not yet got rid of the fervour of an agreeable party, where he had justified the partiality of Buonaparte, by charming even the ultras themselves.

He came to bestow all his brilliancy upon us, as he was wont to do on similar occasions; and we were as much bored at the delightful visit, as if it had been all the tediousness of those who know so well how to be tedious: so there we stood, yawning and smiling, with a sort of galvanic contortion, at once to show our courtesy and drowsiness, with each a chamber candlestick in hand, and reiterating “But we were going to bed, my dear Denon.”—“I see it,” said Denon, and gently taking my candle, he lighted the bougies on the table—drew a chair for me near the fire—threw a log on the hearth, and, with a petitioning air, solicited “encore un petit moment.” “Our husband and ourself” exchanged looks of mutual annoyance, and yawned ostentatiously our unwilling assent; wondering at the influence of the miserable physique, or that any state of exhaustion could reduce us to so low an ebb, as not to relish the society of one we loved so well and admired so much.

Denon had that day made me a present of his superb work on Egypt (the large edition), and the enormous volume lay upon the ponderous marble table, in the centre of the room, which seemed by its strength to have been built on purpose to receive it. We had been looking over the plates, and Denon took out his pencil and wrote the names of some of the eminent persons whose portraits they contain. Then drawing close to the fire, he put on his raconteur’s face, and gave us such curious and animated details of his sojourn in Egypt with Buonaparte—of his intimacy with Dessaix, and with others of the notables of the expedition, together with the various scenes and circumstances incidental to the enterprise,—that insensibly we became as animated in our questions as he was in his narration.

From Egypt we got to the funeral of Dessaix on Mount St. Bernard, (a picture worthy of Poussin,) and thence to the German campaigns. He described the entrance into Potsdam, etched to the life, like a proof copy of one of his own engravings from Rembrandt or Paul Potter; not a light, not a shade was wanting! and the tones and gestures of the conqueror were given, as if he lived and moved before us. Their visit to Sans Souci, and the flattering interest with which Buonaparte inspected the apartments, where nothing had been changed since their occupation by Frederick the Great, were not left to mere narrative; they were acted to the life: and the plunder of the armoires and secrétaires, were represented in a most robber-like manner. The emperor had the sword of Frederick for his share of the spoils; Denon’s booty was equally characteristic—a MS. brouillon of the king’s poetry, in his royal autograph, with Voltaire’s corrections. Under some of the stanzas was written “digne des meilleurs poëtes Français;”⁠[14] and under others the simple corrective criticism of “fie donc!” This was what Voltaire called “washing the king’s linen.”

The sympathy of Napoleon for his wounded soldiers, and his personal attention to them, have been often recorded. His anxious visits to the field of battle after the contest was decided—his feeling the pulse and wiping the wounds—his administering cordials with his own hands—are facts well known, which won him the love of his army, no less than his prowess. Denon had been with him in one of these pious visitations, and he was so affected by the dreadful spectacle, that it became the nightmare of his dream. He arose with the dawn and returned to the field, in the hope of rescuing some still living beings from the heaps of dead that strewed it. In the features of an officer, he thought he recognized a friend, and on examining more minutely, he perceived some tokens of lingering vitality. He endeavoured to extricate the body from the dead horse under which it lay; but his strength failed him. There was not a moment to be lost—looking round him for assistance, he observed two men taking their station on an overthrown piece of artillery, coolly surveying the scene, and writing in their tablets. They were easily recognised as the German commissaries of interment. He flew to solicit their assistance; but both replied in unison, “Monsir, nous sommes ici pour enterrer les morts.” “Bon,” said Denon, “but you will surely assist me in saving the living.” Without pausing in their melancholy task, they again replied, “Nous sommes ici uniquement pour enterrer les morts.” Denon in vain had recourse to persuasion, to bribes, to threats; nothing moved the phlegm of the Germans: they heard him out patiently, and repeated for the third time; “Fous êtes ein bon Monsir, mais nous sommes ici pour enterrer les morts.”⁠[15] This writes flatly; but when told most dramatically, with the impassibility of the German physiognomy, and the guttural German accentuation, it was irresistible; and thus our delightful raconteur went on “from grave to gay,” with equal pathos and humour, making us laugh and cry, and winding us up and down at pleasure.

In the midst of a most interesting adventure—the scene Venice, the time a moonlight evening, the place a balcony in the palace Benzoni, and the heroine, the beautiful and well known “Biondina in Gondoletta,”—he paused abruptly, with a hushing movement of his finger, marking emphatically the deep swing of the clock in the Tuileries striking three. He arose all confusion and apologies, for having led us into such unseasonable vigils, and was hurrying off, when I detained him with, “but finish your story.” “Trois heures bien sonnés,”⁠[16] replied Denon, already at the door; while I answered in the words of Voltaire, “Mais qu’est-ce que ça fait, si je m’amuse?” “A la bonne heure,” said Denon, triumphantly, “I saw on entering that I was a bore;⁠[17] that you had taken your determination, and I took mine; so good morning—I’ll finish my story another time:” and with this trick of the tale-teller of the Arabian Nights, he tripped off as leste at seventy, as at seventeen—sprang into his cabriolet, and rattled out, as he had rattled in, his horse and driver as much on the alert as himself. The whole thing was French, exclusively French—the raconteur, horse, driver, and cabriolet, included.

The Italians have never been celebrated as raconteurs; the organization, which gives them their improvisatori, is perhaps in precise opposition to the necessary qualifications of a raconteur. The sure, rapid, deep, but careless touching-off, which gives colloquial narration its charm and spirit, the imitative humour, inevitable mimicry, appropriate gesticulations, changeful accent, and vivid conception, of the fact or scene related, require quite another sort of physique from that which forms the slow, solemn declaimer, and oracular improvisatore—who looks all in the clouds, warming his fancy with unearthly fires, and arranging his ready-made phrases and conventional rhymes, with eyes up-raised, and glance of fanciful abstraction—apart, and beyond all the graphic realities of life. Even in conversation, the Italians are more impressive than agreeable—more passionate than witty;—they talk in sentences à longue haleine, and forget that the world was made in six days—the first and greatest lesson given by Providence on the value of time, even within view of eternity!

The Italians complain of the disproportionate number of seccatori (Anglice, bores) which creep into their circles; without accounting for the circumstance. But men who by their religion and institutions, are forbidden to think freely, or to discuss those great questions which concern the main facts of life, must be tied down to matters of minor importance. They are impelled to substitute words for deeds, and are rendered feeble, in their intellectual intercourse, because they are false in their political position. Still “their stars are more in fault than they.” Boccaccio was no bad raconteur; Ariosto knew how to relate; and from the novellisti of the free states of Italy in her glorious middle ages, Chaucer and Shakspeare borrowed their most humorous details. Strong and stirring combinations will always produce striking and graphic delineations.

But of all the raconteurs in the world, (the French excepted)—they, whose own story is so lamentable to relate, and so piteous to hear,—the poor Irish are the most humorous and amusing. So many causes, physical and political, have conspired to form and finish this talent in the Irish, that it would be irrelevant to the lightness of the present theme to enter on them. It is a curious fact, that Ireland, like France, had her conteurs, from the earliest periods; who, by the significant name of Dres-beartagh⁠[18] (story-tellers), made a part of the establishment of great families down to the latter end of the 16th century. “The great men of their septs,” says Sir W. Temple, “among the many offices of their establishment, which continued always in the same family, had not only a physician and a poet, but a tale-teller. A very gallant gentleman of the north has told me, of his own experience, that in his wolf-huntings there, when he used to be in the mountains three or four days together, and lay very ill at nights, so that he could not well sleep, they would bring him one of these story-tellers, who, when he lay down, would begin a tale of a king, or a giant, or a dwarf and a damsel, and such rambling stuff; and continue it, all night long, in such an even tone, that one heard it going on whenever one awaked.”

This is not precisely the effect that a modern raconteur would like to produce. But the talent, the gift, was there; and the whole scene connected with it, the wolf-hunter, the mountains, and the story-teller, are all curious and picturesque, and not a little illustrative of the wild and primitive state of Ireland, even down to the times of Sir William Temple, the patron and master of Swift.

One of the last Irish conteurs by profession was still living about thirty years ago, in the county of Galway, and the fame of Cormac Common the Fin-sgealaighthe or Dres-beartagh, the “man of talk,” has not yet passed away in that province, which is still the repertory of all that is most national in Ireland. Blind, poor, but gifted, Cormac early adopted a profession consonant to his position and his endowments. The tale he narrated, and the genealogical illustrations which he picked up in his wanderings, and which he eloquently adorned, were his passports alike to the mansions of the great, and to the cabin of the lonely—his letter of credit on the festivities of the wake, and his billet on the hospitality of the fair. He was a poet also, no less than a story-teller; and we owe to him the oft-told and beautiful tale of Ellen na Roon, which he threw into verse, and adapted to an air of his own composition. More than one Italian Syren has owed the enthusiastic raptures she has inspired in an Irish audience, to the notes of poor Cormac.

I remember telling Madame Catalani, when she was paying me a morning visit in Dublin, that I did not like the manner in which she had the night before jerked out the last notes in “Johnny Adair;”—that the air was not Scotch, but Irish, (of which its smooth, flowing melody, in regular progression, so characteristic of Irish music, was a proof). We went to the piano-forte; and I gave our Irish way of singing the passage. Madame Catalani tried it—liked it, but doubted that the air was Irish. To satisfy her doubts, I gave her its history, with the birth, parentage, and education of Cormac, its composer; and a sketch of the story of its subject, pretty Ellen Kavanagh, into the bargain. Her charming naïveté was instantly under arms; she would have the story in French; and when I had done it, I was quite surprised to find how well the loves and sorrows of Caroll O’Daly and Ellen O’Kavenah, with all the Irish idioms, and grating gutturals, could be translated into the precise phrases of “Messieurs les quarante.” True passion is translatable into all languages; with conventional feelings it is quite the reverse.

Cormac Common told his stories in prose. His verses he recited to a sweet, wild recitative, whose modulations are said to have been diversified by cadences of peculiar beauty.

“In rehearsing any of Oisin (or Ossian), or any composition in verse,” says one of the most accomplished of his surviving auditors, Sir William Ouseley, “he chaunts them pretty much in the same manner as our cathedral service.”

The national endowment, which once gave a rank, still exists in Ireland in an eminent degree; though no longer, as of old, bestowing an hereditary grade. It is chiefly confined, however, to the “mere Irish,” whose temperament lends itself to receive impressions with force, and to give them out with felicity. While the mixed race of Cromwellian colonists and Scotch undertakers preserves the even tenor of its way, “sober, steadfast, and demure,” and takes the route which in Ireland “leads on to fortune,”—the more sensitive descendant of the aborigines—alive to every external form, and colouring every fact with the glowing medium of his mind—led more by fancy than by interest, and satisfied with the social apotheosis produced by social endowments,—lives too often for the amusement of others, rather than for his own advancement. Who that remembers Edward Lysaght will not apply to him this assertion, so applicable to his genius and to his fate?

It is certainly amongst the most Irish members of Irish society, that the best raconteurs are still to be found; and it is among the many privations inflicted upon those English officials, who are sent to administer our proconsular government, that they have been restricted to the same dull round of office society, as had stupified their predecessors,—a society into which the wit and humour of the natives are so rarely permitted to penetrate. What yawnings might have been spared to bored vice-roys, and to listless secretaries, had they been allowed to throw open their salons to that humour and colloquial vivacity, so long proscribed by the ascendancy! However powerful at the bar, and eloquent in the senate Irish intellect may appear, it is only under the influence of social feelings that Irish spirit kindles into its brightest lights. It is in the collision of social contact that it strikes out its most sparkling emanations. In the sanctuary of private intercourse, its reckless confidence and careless gaiety suspect no treachery and know no restraint. Even penal laws are forgotten, under the sacred protection of the law of hospitality; and those, disqualified by religion for the dull routine of office, prove their claims by nature to the highest ranks in the great commonwealth of wit.

Whoever has read those delightful Irish articles, which give such éclat to the most fashionable and popular of British periodicals,—whoever has laughed or wept over those pages of mingled pathos and humour, its Irish sketches,—or has chatted with Canova and Cammucini on the arts of Rome, in the same miscellany, would find those delineations cold and feeble, could he witness the superior animation, with which I heard them given, vivâ voce, at our own round table of ten. There, the narrators added to the raciness of Irish humour, the high finish of dramatic mobility, the tone, the look, the accent, which constitute the merit of a well-told tale, but which will not print. To judge of this natural gift in all its felicity, it were well to become the auditor of one, whom it is a boast to know,⁠[19]⁠—who, whether he tells his humorous Irish story round the festive board of his own paternal mansion in Kildare, or, in his pretty hotel in the Chaussée d’Antin, relates his anecdote, in French, rivalling the purisme of Madame de Genlis, to the delight of listening academicians, and the envy of professed beaux esprits, still most happily illustrates that description of a raconteur, which he who has left no subject untouched, and was himself the best of story-tellers, has bequeathed to posterity—