ABSTRACT
If among the imaginative tales there are some that approach the moralistic, on the other hand there are among the moralistic tales at least three thoroughly imaginative. Two are translations of contes by Marmontel : The Watermen of Besons and Friendship put to the Test; the third is Thomas Parnell’s poem, The Hermit. Marmontel’s two tales share the characteristics of his Contes Moraux in general, “light, elegant, and graceful beyond anything to which I can compare them in English : their form is exquisite, and they are sometimes imagined with a fineness, a poetic subtlety, that is truly delicious. If the reader can fancy the humor of some of the stories in the Spectator turned wit, their grace indefinitely enhanced, their not very keen perception of the delicate and the indelicate indefinitely blunted, their characterization sharpened almost to an edge of cynicism at times, he will have something 74like an image of the Moral Tales in his mind.” 1 In fact, as Mr. Howells suggests in the same essay, “The Moral Tales of Marmontel are moral, as the Exemplary Novels of Cervantes are exemplary; the adjectives are used in an old literary sense, and do not quite promise the spiritual edification of the reader, or if they promise it, do not fulfil the promise… they are not such reading as we might now put into young people’s hands without fear of offending their modesty, but they must have seemed miracles of purity in their time, and they certainly take the side of virtue, of common sense, and of nature, whenever there is a question of these in the plot.” Marmontel himself says that he has endeavoured “de rendre la vertu aimable”; and he adds: “Enfin j’ai tâché partout de peindre ou les mœurs de la société, ou les sentiments de la nature; et c’est ce qui m’a fait donner à ce Recueil le titre de Contes Moraux.” 2
