Paris, 1647
1. Some years ago Marcel Detienne discussed with some irony Moses Finley’s attempt to identify historical elements in Homeric poems.1 The elimination of the mystical element when writing history, Detienne suggested, is a penchant typical of historians: it seems worthwhile to examine this idea critically from its most distant roots.2 Let us look first at an important occurrence, but from a perspective very different from Detienne’s.
2. The dialogue De la lecture des vieux romans (On Reading Old Romances), by Jean Chapelain, written sometime between the end of 1646 and early 1647, long remained unpublished; it appeared posthumously eighty years later.3 At the time Chapelain was working on La Pucelle ou la France delivrée, an ambitious poem which, after an initial success, was attacked savagely and became totally discredited.4 To us today, the rest of Chapelain’s literary activity—his critical essays and vast correspondence—seems much more significant.5 The dialogue De la lecture des vieux romans has enjoyed many editions: 1728 (the first), 1870, 1936, 1971, 1999.6 But much remains to be said about it.
The piece is dedicated to Paul de Gondi, at the time the vicar of the archbishop of Paris, later celebrated as the cardinal of Retz.7 In addition to Chapelain, two younger men of letters take part in the discussion: the scholarly Gilles Ménage and the historian and poet Jean-François Sarasin.8 Chapelain recounts that the two men took him by surprise while he was reading a medieval romance, Lancelot du Lac. (We learn from the catalogue of Chapelain’s library that he possessed two printed editions of this work).9 The two friends reacted differently. Sarasin had observed that Lancelot was “the source for all the romances that in the last four or five centuries have enjoyed great success in every European court.” Ménage, enamored of the ancients, had expressed his astonishment at seeing a person of Chapelain’s taste praising a book disdained even by partisans of the modern. Chapelain had replied by saying that he began to read Lancelot to collect materials for a book on the origins of French, an idea that Ménage himself had suggested.10 In Lancelot, Chapelain said, he had found words and expressions which showed how the French language passed from crude beginnings to the refinements of that day. Ménage had nothing to say against this projected study. But when Chapelain suggested that he had started to appreciate Lancelot, Ménage could not restrain himself: “How can you dare to praise this horrid carcass, despised even by the ignorant and by commoners? I hope you are not thinking to discover in this barbaric writer another Homer or Livy?”
Naturally, this was a rhetorical question. But to this double, paradoxical comparison, Chapelain reacted unexpectedly. From the literary point of view Homer and the author of Lancelot were wholly dissimilar: the first noble and sublime, the second vulgar and low. But the subject matter in their works was alike: both had written “invented narratives” (fables).11 Aristotle would have judged Lancelot favorably, just as he had done with the poems of Homer: the way magic was used in the former was not too different from the intervention of the gods in the latter.
All this is in accord with the writings of seventeenth-century erudites who opened the way for Mabillon and Montfaucon, laying the premises for the discovery of the Middle Ages—what Chapelain called “modern antiquity.”12 (The dialogue De la lecture des vieux romans is a precocious forerunner—in some sense an eccentric one—of the querelle between the ancients and the moderns).13 Lancelot’s author, Chapelain tells us, was “a barbarian, who was praised by barbarians . . . even if he was not wholly barbarous.” In this attempt to soften his judgment, which was accompanied by the awareness that a romance like Lancelot conformed, after all, to Aristotle’s maxims, it may be possible to recognize retrospectively the origins of a profound transformation in taste. But in the case of Chapelain the discovery of the Middle Ages was tied to history rather than to literature. The most original part of his dialogue begins here.
Ménage contemptuously asks if the author of Lancelot should be compared to Livy. Chapelain replies, “To compare Lancelot and Livy would be absurd, just as it would be absurd to compare Virgil and Livy, the false and the true. And yet I dare to declare that, even if Lancelot, since it is based on imaginary events, cannot be compared to Livy as an example of a true narrative (par la vérité de l’histoire), on another level it can, as a true reflection of manners and customs (par la vérité des mœurs et des coutumes). On this level both authors provide us with perfect accounts: each one, whether Livy or the author of the Lancelot, about the age of which he wrote.”14
Ménage is bewildered. Chapelain tries to explain his statement in general terms. A writer who invents a story, an imaginary account which has human beings as its protagonists, has to depict people based on the usages and customs of the age in which they lived; otherwise they would not be credible.15 Chapelain is alluding implicitly to the famous passage in the Poetics (1451b) in which Aristotle states that “a poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably.” But separating himself from the tradition, Chapelain identifies in poetic verisimilitude an element that is historical, not logical or psychological.16 Lancelot, he says, “since it was written in the dark days of our modern antiquity, inspired only by the book of nature, gives a faithful image, if not of that which really happened between the kings and knights of the time, at least of that which we suppose happened, on the basis of similar customs that still exist, or of documents from which it emerges that similar customs had flourished in the past.”
Chapelain then concluded: Lancelot provides us with “a veritable representation [une représentation naïve] as well as, in a certain sense [pour ainsi dire], a sure and exact history of the customs that prevailed in the courts of the day [une histoire certaine et exacte des mœurs qui régnaient dans les cours d’alors].”17
3. The idea that one could draw historical facts from literary writings was not new. Similar attempts can be found even among classical historians. Thucydides, for example, tried to reconstruct the dimensions of ancient Greek vessels from Homer’s ship catalogue in the Iliad. But when Chapelain proposed reading Lancelot more as a historical document than a literary monument, he was undoubtedly thinking of the work of antiquarians.18 Etienne Pasquier, in his Recherches de la France, first published in 1560 and then revised and reprinted many times, included a section on the medieval origins of French poetry. In a similar vein, Claude Fauchet had compiled a Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie françoise, ryme et romans, in which he recorded the names and the writings of 127 French poets who lived before 1300.19 Even more obvious is the connection to another of Fauchet’s works, Origine des dignitez et magistrats de la France, in which passages from the Roman de la Rose or from romances of Chrétien de Troyes were used to clarify such official positions as maire du Palais, sénéschal, and the grand maistre.20
At the end of the dialogue Chapelain mentioned a still-unpublished treatise by Chantereau Le Fèvre in which the “great antiquarian” had repeatedly cited Lancelot as an authority on medieval usages and customs. Actually, in the Traité des fiefs et de leur origine, published seventeen years later by Chantereau Le Fèvre’s son, a single, but significant, reference to Lancelot appears. To clarify the precise meaning of meffaire (the severing of the feudal pact between vassal and lord, on the part of the latter), Chantereau Le Fèvre used a passage from Lancelot, explaining that its author (undoubtedly a monk) had tried to describe, by means of an invented plot and imaginary names, “the customs and way of life [les mœurs et la manière de vivre] of the knights of the time.”21 In an unpublished writing which mirrors Chapelain’s dialogue, Sarasin compared reading Lancelot to antiquarianism: “The old tapestries, paintings and sculptures that have been passed down to us by our ancestors resemble those old romances which (as Chapelain said) give us a faithful image of the usages and customs of those times.”22
In his own dialogue Chapelain had developed the same analogy but in another direction. From fictional narratives we can extract more fleeting, but more precious, evidence, precisely because they are fictional narratives: “Physicians diagnose the corrupt humors of their patients on the basis of their dreams; similarly, we can analyze the usages and customs of the past through the fantasies portrayed in these writings.”
To isolate history from poetry, truth from imagination, reality from mere possibility means reformulating implicitly the distinctions traced by Aristotle in his Poetics. But to dub the anonymous author of Lancelot “the historian of the customs of his day,” asked Ménage, recalling Chapelain’s judgment—is that not perchance the highest praise possible? Especially because, he continued, you claim that his work “constitutes a completion of existing chronicles. They tell us merely that a prince was born or that a prince died; they record the most important events of their reigns, and it all ends there. Through a book like Lancelot, instead, we become the intimate friends of these people, even to the point of grasping the very essence of their souls.”23
4. Chapelain had begun his defense of Lancelot by comparing it provocatively, as far as its veracity was concerned, to the most famous medieval chronicles: those of Saxo Grammaticus, Jean Froissart, and Enguerrand de Monstrelet. But then he had raised the bar, arguing for the superiority of the history of manners, histoire des mœurs, over the superficiality of the chronicles, although he prudently acknowledged that each complemented the other. Today these assertions seem highly original,24 but they appeared that way even to contemporaries. To propose a more profound sort of history on the basis of a romance like Lancelot, Ménage observed, was the height of paradox: it signified “presenting as worthy of trust a writer whose narratives were, by your own admission, wholly invented [fabuleuses].’’25 To comprehend the meaning of these words we must make a digression, or perhaps only an apparent one.
5. The rediscovery of ancient skepticism, which Pierre Bayle equated with the birth of modern philosophy, went through various phases which, in large part, were tied to the publication of the works of Sextus Empiricus. The first Latin translation of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, edited by Henri Estienne (1562), was followed by a reprinting that included the treatise Adversus mathematicos in the Latin version by Gentian Hervet (1569). In 1621 these two Latin translations were republished in four European cities, in a large in-folio volume, together with the original Greek text.26
The writings of Sextus Empiricus, our principal source for ancient skepticism, sparked a discussion on “historic Pyrrhonism,”—In other words, on historical knowledge and its limits—that persisted for a century and a half. This was a formula, both polemical and generic, that caused the texts from which the discussion had initiated to be forgotten.27 Among these were the pages that at mid–sixteenth century had attracted Francesco Robortello’s attention: Adversus mathematicos (1:248–269).28 Here Sextus Empiricus was arguing with a number of grammarians—Tauriscus, Asclepiades of Myrleia, Dyonisius (Thrax)—who had broken up grammar into various components, including a historical segment.29 Asclepiades, for example, maintained that the historical component of grammar should be subdivided into three categories: “History can be either true or false or ‘as-if-it-was-true’: true history is that which has as its subject things that really happened; false history is that which deals with fiction and myth ‘as-if-it-was-true,’ the kind we meet in plays and in which has as its subject things that really happened; false history is that which deals with fiction and myth ‘as- if- it- was- true,’ the kind we meet in plays and in pantomimes.”30
Sextus objected: true history is the sum of numberless facts large and small and thus (unlike medicine or music) lacks method and is not a techné (in Latin, ars). False history—namely, myth and history as-if-it-was-true, such as plays and pantomimes—deals in facts that have not taken place: impossible in the first instance, possible (but purely hypothetical) in the second. But “since . . . there is no art that has as its subject false and nonexistent things, and since those myths and fictions are false on which the historical component of grammar dwells especially, we shall have to conclude that any art that concerns itself with the historical part of grammar cannot exist.”31
There were some who objected, however, that even if the subject matter of history is without method, the judgment formulated on that matter is not, because it is based on a criterion which permits the distinction to be made between what is true and what is false. Sextus responded sharply to this objection: first of all, grammarians do not provide a criterion to distinguish the true from the false; second, no facts adduced by them are true, as the various myths about the death of Ulysses demonstrate.
6. True history, false history, history as-if-it-was-true: a threefold target, one more complex than what we usually associate with the seventeenth-century rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus. Today the expression “historic Pyrrhonism” promptly recalls for us the Du peu de certitude qu’ily a dans l’histoire (1668), by La Mothe Le Vayer—the learned skeptic to whom the education of the crown prince had been assigned.32 The kind of history about which La Mothe Le Vayer, by now in his seventies, expressed his uncertainty was naturally that history claiming to be true. But this was just one stage in a much more complex intellectual journey, as is testified by Jugement sur les anciens et principaux historiens grecs et latins, dont il nous reste quelques ouvrages, which La Mothe Le Vayer had published twenty years earlier (1646).33 Bayle’s opinion that it was a mere compilation, although competently done, has weighed heavily over this work.34 The negative judgment is undeserved.
The letter of dedication to Cardinal Mazarin turns on the relationship between history and poetry. One might think, La Mothe Le Vayer writes, that such poems as those of Lucan and Silius Italicus, if judged by their content, could be defined as histories. But poetry “cannot do without fiction [fable],” while history “is worthy of note only for the truth it expresses [vérité], and considers falsehood a mortal enemy.” It would be absurd to confuse things that are so different. But a survey of ancient historians, La Mothe Le Vayer concludes, will meet with scant success among “the infinite number of persons who prefer imaginary accounts [contes fabuleux] to true narratives [narrations véritables], and the history of romances to the entire history of the Romans [et l’histoire des Romans à toute celle des Romains].”35
Reading these pages, it is impossible not to think of Chapelain’s dialogue, De la lecture des vieux romans. It undoubtedly was prompted by La Mothe Le Vayer’s just-published Jugement, but it took the form of a discussion, not a polemical reaction.36 In the course of the Jugement the contrast between fable and histoire expressed by La Mothe Le Vayer in his dedication to Cardinal Mazarin reappears in guises that bit by bit assume more complex and nuanced forms, beginning with the first chapter, on Herodotus. From antiquity the work of Herodotus as a historian had been treated as fabula, as falsehood—an accusation rejected by Henri Estienne (Stephanus), the first editor of Sextus Empiricus, who in his Apologia pro Herodoto had championed the veracity of Herodotus on the basis of the accounts provided by travelers to the New World.37 La Mothe Le Vayer’s defense, instead, turned on an argument in Herodotus: “We cannot say either that he mixed up indifferently truth and falsehood without distinguishing between them, or that he was a liar, although he often reiterated the lies of others, something which is admitted by even the most rigorous historical norms. It is precisely these norms, in fact, which oblige us to include the rumors that abound and the various opinions of men, as Herodotus observes most opportunely in his Polimnia apropos the Argives in a forewarning that serves for the entire work.”38 In effect, Herodotus had asserted in no uncertain terms his own distance from the subject matter under discussion: “For myself, though it be my business to set down that which is told me, to believe it is none at all of my business; let that saying hold good for the whole of my history” (7:152).39
La Mothe Le Vayer extends this claim to historiography in general. No one demonstrates this better than Polybius, who has been reproached unfairly for being more philosopher than historian.40 A strong affinity exists between history and philosophy: history can be defined as “philosophy full of examples.”41 Polybius observes, at the close of book 6 of his Histories, continues La Mothe Le Vayer:
that the superstition condemned by all peoples was considered a virtue by the Romans. Even if it was possible to establish a state composed only of wise and virtuous men, we have to recognize that these imaginary opinions [opinions fabuleuses] about the gods and the underworld would be totally useless. But since there are no states in which the people are different than those we can observe, inclined toward all sorts of unlawful and malicious acts, we must make use, to keep them in check, of the imaginary fears provoked by our religion and of the terrors of the other world, so opportunely introduced by the ancients, and which today only fearless persons who have lost use of their reason could contradict.42
Taking his cue from a famous page in the Histories of Polybius (6: 6, 6–15), La Mothe Le Vayer was restating the thesis so dear to learned libertines of the origin and political function of religion.43 Feeling protected by the fact that he was quoting another writer, La Mothe Le Vayer could speak tranquilly of the “imaginary fears stirred up by our religion [craintes imaginaires qu’imprime nostre religion].” The objective reader [deniaisé] immediately understood that here it was not just the religion of the Romans that was being discussed. Today, as then, the populace had to be controlled through the terror of a nonexistent hell. Today, as then, this truth was understood only by the privileged few. Polybius was one of them. It is impossible to present him as a man “devoted to the religion of his day”; Isaac Casaubon’s attempt to defend him at all costs was in vain, La Mothe Le Vayer comments with irony.44
The historian-philosopher who writes about the beliefs of the people without sharing them takes on the semblance of the learned libertine. Conversely, the erudite libertine who looks upon the beliefs of the populace from afar, without accepting them, recognizes himself in the historian: in Herodotus, and, even more, in Polybius. Thereby La Mothe Le Vayer was in fact rejecting the accusation which Sextus Empiricus had directed at history: that it was not an art. History is indeed an art which, contrary to what Sextus Empiricus sustained, can very well have “as its subject false and non existent things”—in other words, myths and the fictional. For La Mothe Le Vayer one of the assignments of history is to expose that which is false.45
7. And yet, the most fiery pages of the Jugement are reserved not for Thucydides or Polybius but for an entirely different type of historian: Diodorus Siculus. There were those who criticized his History as vacuous and inconsistent, but La Mothe Le Vayer wholeheartedly disagreed: “I would be disposed to journey to the tip of the world, so to speak,” he wrote forcibly, “if I thought I could find there such a great treasure,” the lost books of Diodorus:46
As far as that which concerns the fictions [les fables] and the excellent mythology contained in the first five books of Diodorus, not only do I not condemn them but, instead, I believe that they are the most precious that have been left to us by antiquity. Apart from the fact that what is fictional can be recounted seriously [on peut conter des fables serieusement], and that if they were wholly useless, we would also have to reject, together with Plato’s Timaeus, quite a few other famous works, we can say that they [the first books of Diodorus] introduce us to the complete theology of the idolaters. And if it was permissible to call a profane thing by a sacred name, I would dare to define the five books of which I am speaking the Bible of paganism. First of all, they introduce us to pagan beliefs about eternity and the creation of the world. Then they describe the birth of the first humans in accord with natural intelligence. . ..47
The last sentence clarifies what preceded it. It pays implicit homage to Giulio Cesare Vanini, burned by order of the Parlement at Toulouse in 1619 as a heretic, atheist, and blasphemer.48 In his De admirandis Naturae arcanis (1616) Vanini affirmed that the first men had been born from the soil warmed by the sun, just as in the account of Diodorus (1: 10), and that mice emerged from the mud of the Nile.49 The first books of Diodorus’s history can be read in a way that helps us to put the Bible into perspective: in a sense, as an anti-Bible. But La Mothe Le Vayer recognizes that Diodorus “can be censured for the great superstition he exhibits in his writings,” just as with Livy among Latin historians.50
Thus, in this case, not Diodorus but his readers, and principally La Mothe Le Vayer, are responsible for the critical distance from the subject matter treated. For the French writer, what fed into history was not just what was fictional but even fictional history, to use once more the categories of the Alexandrine grammarians revived polemically by Sextus Empiricus. The fictions (fables) reported, and shared, by Diodorus could have become the subject matter of history.51 Chapelain, who took for granted Livy’s veracity, extended the discussion in La Mothe Le Vayer’s Jugement to the fictions (fables) of Homer and of Lancelot: both could become the stuff of history.
8. What we call critical detachment often can have unforeseen consequences. But at its roots we invariably find a sense of superiority: social, intellectual, religious. (The most famous instance is that of the preeminence claimed by Christianity over Judaism, to which we owe the idea of historical perspective.)52 La Mothe Le Vayer and the erudite libertines looked down with scorn on the populace imprisoned by the fictions of religion53 —a populace which had to be kept ignorant about the attacks leveled against those fictions: if the fear of hell should vanish, the latent violence in society would explode, destroying it.54 To this sense of detached superiority we owe the comparison between pagan myths and the biblical accounts proposed by La Mothe Le Vayer in his Cinq dialogues faits à l’imitation des anciens.55 There was a strong temptation to see religions as a sequence of errors. But the demystification could open the way for attempts at understanding the error from within, from the viewpoint of those who had been its protagonists (or, if you will, its victims).56
Chapelain’s dialogue De la lecture des vieux romans illustrates this transition. He did not share the erudite impiety of the libertines: his sense of superiority when confronting “modern antiquity” was rooted in taste. In a society dominated by swift changes in fashion, the literary production of what would come to be called the Middle Ages seemed ever more remote.57 Shortly after, the culture promoted by Louis XIV and his court would widen this gulf still further. “Who is there delighting in reading Guillaume de Loris or Jean de Meun,” asked Valentin Conrart in 1665, the first secretary of the Académie, “unless he is moved by a curiosity similar to what might have been felt by the Romans who in the age of Augustus read verses by the brothers Salius which they would not have been able to understand?”58 But this antiquarian curiosity was nothing new. Fifty years before the advent of the new Augustus, the erudite Claude Fauchet had written: “Any writer, even the worst, can be useful under certain circumstances, if only as a witness of his own time [au moins pour le témoignage de son temps].”59
Even the worst, or perhaps precisely the worst: the distance from the dominant taste facilitated the reading of medieval literary texts from a documentary perspective. But Chapelain went a step further by transforming the distance into emotive proximity. Ménage understood this. Toward the conclusion of De la lecture des vieux romans he seems to be accepting the point of view of his interlocutor: “Through a book like Lancelot . . . we become the intimate friends of these people, even to the point of grasping the very essence of their souls.”60
9. This unambiguous assertion brings us back to a well-known fact: the imperceptible impulse we feel when we come to a fictional work. A famous passage comes to mind in which Coleridge, setting out from an extreme case (the description of supernatural events), attempts to define the effects of poetry in general. It is a question, he wrote, of transferring from our inner nature “a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”61
Poetic faith gives form to shadows, endows them with an appearance of truth; it causes us to suffer “and all for nothing! for Hecuba!”62 Historical faith functioned (or functions) totally differently.63 It allows us to overcome incredulity, nourished by the recurring objections of skepticism, relating to an invisible past, through a series of opportune operations—marks scratched on paper or on parchment; coins; fragments of statues corroded by time; and so forth.64 Not only this: it permits us, as Chapelain showed, to build the truth on fiction (fables) and true history on the fictitious.