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Sylphs and Other Elemental Beings in French Literature since Le Comte de Gabalis (1670)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edward D. Seeber
Edward D. Seeber*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

Over the centuries, a varying but persistent interest in magic and the occult sciences has reached, by way of devious paths, the culture and literature of Western Europe. In France, the vigor of this natural human bent was manifest even during the Age of Reason; Swedenborgians, Rosicrucians, martinistes, and Freemasons, together with a host of educated persons with no particular philosophical alliances, became pleasurably entangled in what Diderot disdainfully termed “ce tissu indigeste et ridicule de suppositions.“ “Le culte du merveilleux,” says a historian of that period, Constantin Bila, “n'épargnait aucune classe de la société.” The heightened interest in the marvelous, the supernatural, and the fantastic throughout the Romantic Period and the later nineteenth century is, of course, familiar.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1944 , pp. 71 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1944

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References

Note 1 in page 71 Dictionnaire encyclopédique, art. “Magie.“

Note 2 in page 71 La Croyance à la magie au XVIIIe siècle en France dans les contes, romans et traités (Paris: Gamber, 1925), p. 15.

Note 3 in page 71 E.g. P.-V. Delaporte, Du Merveilleux dans la littérature française sous le règne de Louis XIV (Paris: Retaux-Bray, 1891); Mary E. Storer, Un Episode littéraire de la fin du XVIIe siècle: la mode des contes de fées (1685–1700) (Paris: H. Champion, 1928); E. d'Hauterive, Le Merveilleux au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Juven, 1900); C. Bila (cited above); H. Matthey, Essai sur le merveilleux dans la litt. fr. depuis 1800 (Paris: Payot, 1915); A. Viatte, Les Sources occultes du Romantisme. Illuminisme—Théosophie, 1770–1820 (Paris : H. Champion, 1928, 2 vols.); J.-H. Rettinger, Le Conte fantastique dans le Romantisme français (Paris: Grasset, 1909); Gérard de Nerval, Les Illuminés (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, n. d.).

Note 4 in page 72 Un Homme de lettres au XVIHe siècle. Marmonld, d'après des documents nouveaux et inédits (Paris: Hachette, 1902), p. 232.

Note 5 in page 72 Elude biographique et littéraire sur C.-M. Campion (Marseille : Olive, 1878), p. 8.

Note 6 in page 72 Paris: Barbin, 1670; Amsterdam: Jacques le jeune, 1671, reprinted 1684 (accord. to Moréri); Cologne: Marteau, n. d.; Cologne: Paul de la Tenaille, 1693; Amsterdam (Rouen) : Lejeune, 1700 (éd. cited by Anatole France); Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup, 1715; the same, 1718; Londres: Vaillant, 1742; Metz, an V. The work appeared also in the Bibliothèque de Campagne (Bruxelles, 1785), vol. ii, and in Garnier's Voyages imaginaires, vol. xxxiv (1787). The Cambridge Bibliography lists four English versions: The Count of Gabalis, or, the extravagant mysteries of the cabalists. 1680. (Translated by P[hilip] A[yres]); The Count of Gabalis, or, Conferences about secret sciences. 1680. (Trans. by A. L[ovell]); Modern Novels, 1692, vol. ii; The Count of Gabalis, being a diverting history of the Rosicrucian doctrine of spirits. 1714. The Library of Congress has The diverting history of the Count of Gabalis. . . . The second edition (London :Lintott and Curll), 1714.

Note 7 in page 73 La Suite du Comte de Gabalis, ou Nouveaux Entretiens sur les Sciences secrètes touchant la Nouvelle Philosophie. Ouvrage posthume (Cologne, 1691; Amsterdam, 1708, 1718, and another, undated) ; Les Génies assistans, et Gnomes irréconciliables, ou Suite au Comte de Gabalis, attributed to Antoine Androl (Amsterdam, 1715; La Haye, 1718); reprinted with Le Comte de G. in 1732 (accord. to Quérard).

Note 8 in page 74 Voltaire (Siècle de Louis XIV. Œuvres, Moland ed., xiv, 108) conjectured that the Comte de G. was a part of ancient Persian mythology; Collin de Plancy (Dictionnaire infernal . . . [Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1863], p. 305 n.) stated in 1818 that the concept of gnomes came out of Lapland; others believe that the notion of the four classes of esprits was received from the Orient at the time of the crusades.

Note 9 in page 74 In this connection the name of Pico della Mirandola is sometimes cited. Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, marquis d'Argens, writing of Le Comte de G. in his Lettres cabalistiques (1741) says: “Voilà les mystères les plus cachés de la Cabale.” Erika Treske associates Villars' novel with the Cabala in her dissertation Der Rosenkreuzerroman ‘Le Comte de Gabalis‘ (Berlin : Ehering, 1933), p. 34, as do Ferdinand Denis (Tableau historique . . . des sciences occultes . . . [Paris: Mairet et Fournier, 1842], p. 85), Horace Binney Wallace (Literary Criticisms and other Papers [Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan, 1856], p. 173), and the Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1858), art. “Sylphe.“

Note 10 in page 74 Anna M. Stoddart, in her biography of Paracelsus, describes his categories of elemental beings, which she calls “his inheritance from the teutonic realms of faerie.” (The Life of Paracelsus [London: Rider, 1915], p. 271.) Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's tale Undine (1810 or 1811) may owe as much to P. as to Villars; this story is the basis of Jean Girau-doux's play Ondine, already mentioned. Like Fouqué, Villars cites P. in the commentary on the second entretien of his book. The introduction to the Paris edition of 1921, the NED, art. “Sylph,” and Ferdinand Denis (cf. note 9, above) refer also to Paracelsus.

Note 11 in page 74 Stoddart, however, maintains that the first Rosicrucian Brotherhood was founded in Nüremberg by Simon Studion, fifty-seven years after Paracelsus' death (op. cit., p. 250).

Note 12 in page 74 E.g. in various editions of Villars' novel, including the English translation of 1714; in Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique, art. “Borri“; in Sir William Temple's Miscellanea (cited in Wallace, op. cit.); in Pope's preface to the Rape of the Lock; in Lenglet-Dufresnoy's Histoire de la philosophie hermétique (Paris, 1742); in the Chevalier de Béthune's Relation du monde de Mercure (1750), wherein a Rosicrucian delivers a discourse on salamanders.

Note 13 in page 74 In H. Spencer Lewis' Rosicrucian Questions and Answers (San Jose, Cal., 2d ed., 1932) belief in elemental spirits is termed a “fantastic theory.” But a publication by the Rosicrucian Fellowship, Max Heindel's Mysteries of the Great Operas (London: Fowler, 1921), assures us (p. 130) that “there are spirits in the air, in the water, and in the fire; and under certain conditions they are contacted by man.“

Note 14 in page 75 This idea is accepted by Lenglet-Dufresnoy (op. cit.), the editor of Le Comte de G. in Garnier's Voyages imaginaires, F. Jacotot in L'Intermédiaire des chercheurs et curieux (20 mai 1914), Viatte (op. cit.), and Treske (op. cit.).

Note 15 in page 75 “Un Abbé libre penseur et un critique inconnu de Pascal au XVIIe siècle,” Revue contemporaine, lxxiv (1870), 597–599.

Note 16 in page 76 Indecision is to be noted in Vigneul-Marville's Mélanges d'histoire et de littérature (1725 ed., i, 336) : “On n'a point sû si l'auteur ne vouloit que badiner ou s'il parloit tout de bon.” Wallace (op. cit.) cites the same author, referring to him by his real name, N.-B. d'Argonne. F. Denis, in his Tableau des sciences occultes (1842 ed., p. 261), writes: “[Villars] est un des auteurs qui ont le plus écrit sur la Kabbale, mais de telle sorte que l'on ne peut savoir s'il y croyait ou si c'était un simple jeu d'esprit.” Again, Collin de Plancy (Dictionnaire infernal, art. “Rose-Croix“) says: “[Villars] a beaucoup écrit sur la cabale, et de manière qu'on ne sait pas très bien découvrir s'il y croyait ou s'il s'en moquait.”

Note 17 in page 76 C. H. Bjerregaard, writing in the theosophic journal The World (xix [1914], 116–121), says: “To a reader who cannot or will not believe that the Comte de Gabalis was a real person, but merely a fiction . . . , the advice is that he leave the question open and attend to the teachings of the book. . . . All this has meaning to those only of the Inner Life . . . the man and the book . . . leave a subtle influence upon the mind and prepare it for a flight upwards.” A prefatory essay on the esoterics of Gabalis in the French edition of 1921 (p. lix) quotes the Marquis d'Argens' opinion: “Voilà les mystères les plus cachés de la Cabale. Ils sont expliqués très clairement, quoiqu'en peu de mots, dans cet entretien tiré des écrits d'un fameux écrivain [Villars] qui eût été un des plus parfaits philosophes cabalistiques, s'il eût eu autant de discrétion que de science.” The writer then suggests that Villars may have met his mysterious death on the road to Lyon at the hands of the esprits élémentaires, whose secrets he had so audaciously betrayed. This notion developed shortly after Villars' death in 1673; Vigneul-Marville mentions it in his Mélanges as early as 1700, as does Voltaire later in his Siècle de Louis XIV (cf. above, n. 8). Finally, the foreword to the English edition of 1922, referring to a previous edition in English, says: “Sent forth into the darkness of seven years ago, this volume found readers East and West and over the seas, who recognized in it the truth of a life-time's seeking and said, ‘The Comte de Gabalis is a book of light and has brought us understanding’.“

Note 18 in page 76 Except for occasional references, no attempt will be made to describe those works treating of undines, salamanders, and gnomes. Titles of such works will, however, be found listed at the close of this article. Neither will Villars' influence in England be developed here, although such a study would be of interest. Dryden knew the novel (cf. letter to Mrs. Thomas, 1699, cited in Wallace, op. cit., p. 173); John Cunningham and Christopher Smart refer to sylphs in their respective poems The Broken China and Reason and Imagination; The Sylph, a novel attributed to the Duchess of Devonshire, had two editions in 1779, others in 1783, 1784, and 180S; Sir William Temple's Miscellanea has been mentioned in n. 12; William Brough's The Sylphide, a New and Original Extravaganza was published in London around 1867. The editor of the English edition of Le Comte de G. (New York: Masonic Supply Co., 1922) mentions that Robert Southey owned a copy of the novel (the poet invokes the Spirits of the Elements in the second of his Love Elegies), that Browning may have been influenced by Villars in The Ring and the Book, and that Lytton used Gabalis in his Zanoni. English translations of Le Comte de G. are mentioned above, n. 6.

Note 19 in page 77 Quoted from the English translation by James Andres (London, 1771).

Note 20 in page 79 Du Merveilleux dans la litt. fr. sous le règne de Louis XIV (Paris, 1891), pp. 118, 122.

Note 21 in page 79 In Villars' novel, Gabalis discloses that philosophers, in order to encourage the sylphs in their desire to gain immortality by forming alliances with mortals, have “tous résolu d'un commun accord de renoncer entièrement aux femmes. . . .“

Note 22 in page 79 Viatte, op. cit., i, 219–220.

Note 23 in page 80 Op. cit., ii, 132–133. Viatte refers to the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe (Paris, Biré ed., n. d., i, 150–153). Cf. Charles Nodier's conception of a similar woman in La Neuvaine de la Chandeleur (1839).

Note 24 in page 80 Ibid., ii, 159. Jean Larat, however, has nothing to say concerning Villars in his La Tradition et l'exotisme dans l'œuvre de Charles Nodier (Paris: Champion, 1923).