Marius was not only a great general, but also a great military reformer. From his time a citizen militia was replaced by a professional soldiery, which had hitherto been little liked by the Roman people. He further made the cohort the military unit instead of the maniple, and his cavalry and light-armed troops were drawn from foreign countries, so that it may be said that Marius was the originator of the mercenary army. The Roman soldier was henceforth a man who had no trade but war. A great general could hardly fail to become the foremost man in the state. Marius, however, unlike Caesar, did not attempt to overturn the oligarchy by means of the army; he used rather such expedients as the constitution seemed to allow, though they had to be backed up by riot and violence. He failed as a political reformer because the merchants and the moneyed classes, whom the Gracchi had tried to conciliate, feared that they would themselves be swept away by a revolution of which the mob and its leaders would be the ultimate controllers. Marius had a decided tinge of fanaticism and superstition. In canvassing for the consulship he was guided by the counsels of an Etruscan soothsayer, and was accompanied in his campaigns by a Syrian prophetess. The fashionable accomplishments of the day, and the new Greek culture, were wholly alien to his taste.
For the life of Marius the original sources are numerous passages in Cicero’s works, Sallust’s Jugurtha, the epitomes of the lost books of Livy, Plutarch’s Lives of Sulla and Marius, Velleius Paterculus, Florus and Appian’s Bellum civite. See F. D. Gerlach, Marius und Sulla (Basel, 1856); I. Gilles, Campagne de Marius dans la Gaule (1870); W. Votsch, Marius als Reformator des römischen Heerwesens (with notes and references to ancient authorities, 1886); A. H. J. Greenidge, History of Rome, vol. i. (1904); also Rome: History, II. “The Republic.”
MARIVAUX, PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN DE (1688–1763),
French novelist and dramatist, was born at Paris on the
4th of February 1688. His father was a financier of Norman
extraction whose real name was Carlet, but who assumed the
surname of Chamblain, and then superadded that of Marivaux.
M. Carlet de Marivaux was a man of good reputation, and he
received the appointment of director of the mint at Riom in
Auvergne, where and at Limoges the young Pierre was brought
up. It is said that he developed literary tastes early, and
wrote his first play, the Père prudent et équitable, when he
was only eighteen; it was not, however, published till 1712,
when he was twenty-four. His chief attention in those early
days was paid to novel writing, not the drama. In the three
years from 1713 to 1715 he produced three novels—Effets
surprenants de la sympathie; La Voiture embourbée, and a book
which had three titles—Pharsamon, Les Folies romanesques, and
Le Don Quichotte moderne. All these books were in a curious
strain, not in the least resembling the pieces which long afterwards
were to make his reputation, but following partly the
Spanish romances and partly the heroic novels of the preceding
century, with a certain intermixture of the marvellous. Then
Marivaux’s literary ardour took a new phase. He fell under
the influence of Antoine Hondar[d] de La Motte, and thought
to serve the cause of that ingenious paradoxer by travestying
Homer, an ignoble task, which he followed up (perhaps, for it
is not certain) by performing the same office in regard to Fénelon.
His friendship for La Motte, however, introduced him to the
Mercure, the chief newspaper of France, where in 1717 he
produced various articles of the “Spectator” kind, which were
distinguished by much keenness of observation and not a little
literary skill. It was at this time that the peculiar style called
Marivaudage first made its appearance in him. The year 1720
and those immediately following were very important ones for
Marivaux; not only did he produce a comedy, now lost except
in small part, entitled L’Amour et la vérité, and another and far
better one entitled Arlequin poli par l’amour, but he wrote a
tragedy, Annibal (printed 1737), which was and deserved to be
unsuccessful. Meanwhile his worldly affairs underwent a sudden
revolution. His father had left him a comfortable subsistence,
but he was persuaded by friends to risk it in the Mississippi
scheme, and after vastly increasing it for a time lost all that
he had. His prosperity had enabled him to marry (perhaps
in 1721) a certain Mlle Martin, of whom much good is said,
and to whom he was deeply attached, but who died very shortly.
His pen now became almost his sole resource. He had a connexion
with both the fashionable theatres, for his Annibal had
been played at the Comédie Française and his Arlequin poli at
the Comédie Italienne, where at the time a company who were
extremely popular, despite their imperfect command of French,
were established. He endeavoured too to turn his newspaper
practice in the Mercure to more account by starting a weekly
Spectateur Français (1722–1723), to which he was the sole
contributor. But his habits were the reverse of methodical;
the paper appeared at the most irregular intervals; and, though
it contained some excellent work, its irregularity killed it. For
nearly twenty years the theatre, and especially the Italian
theatre, was Marivaux’s chief support, for his pieces, though
they were not ill received by the actors at the Français, were
rarely successful there. The best of a very large number of
plays (Marivaux’s theatre numbers between thirty and forty
items) were the Surprise de l’amour (1722), the Triomphe de
Plutus (1728), the Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730), Les Fausses
confidences (1737), all produced at the Italian theatre, and Le
Legs (1736), produced at the French. Meanwhile he had at
intervals returned to both his other lines of composition. A
periodical publication called L’Indigent philosophe appeared in
1727, and another called Le Cabinet du philosophe in 1734, but
the same causes which had proved fatal to the Spectateur prevented
these later efforts from succeeding. In 1731 Marivaux
published the first two parts of his best and greatest work,
Marianne, a novel of a new and remarkable kind. The eleven
parts appeared in batches at intervals during a period of exactly
the same number of years, and after all it was left unfinished.
In 1735 another novel, Le Paysan parvenu, was begun, but this
also was left unfinished. He was elected a member of the Academy
in 1742. He survived for more than twenty years, and was
not idle, again contributing occasionally to the Mercure, writing
plays, “reflections” (which were seldom of much worth), and
so forth. He died on the 12th February 1763, aged seventy-five
years.
The personal character of Marivaux was curious and somewhat contradictory, though not without analogies, one of the closest of which is to be found in Goldsmith. He was, however, unlike Goldsmith, at least as brilliant in conversation as with the pen. He was extremely good-natured, but fond of saying very severe things, unhesitating in his acceptance of favours (he drew a regular annuity from Helvetius), but exceedingly touchy if he thought himself in any way slighted. He was, though a great cultivator of sensibilité, on the whole decent and moral in his writings, and was unsparing in his criticism of the rising Philosophes. This last circumstance, and perhaps jealousy as well, made him a dangerous enemy in Voltaire, who lost but few opportunities of speaking disparagingly of him. He had good friends, not merely in the rich, generous and amiable Helvetius, but in Mme de Tencin, in Fontenelle and even in Mme de Pompadour, who gave him, it is said, a considerable pension, of the source of which he was ignorant. His extreme sensitiveness is shown by many stories. He had one daughter, who took the veil, the duke of Orleans, the regent’s successor, furnishing her with her dowry.
The so-called Marivaudage is the main point of importance about Marivaux’s literary work, though the best of the comedies have great merits, and Marianne is an extremely important step in the legitimate development of the French novel—legitimate, that is, in opposition to the brilliant but episodic productions of Le Sage. Its connexion, and that of Le Paysan parvenu, with the work not only of Richardson but of Fielding is also an interesting though a difficult subject. The subject matter of Marivaux’s peculiar style has been generally and with tolerable exactness described as the metaphysic of love-making. His characters, in a happy phrase of Claude Prosper Jolyot Crébillon’s, not only tell each other and the reader everything they have thought, but everything that they would like to persuade themselves that they have thought. The style chosen for this is justly regarded as derived mainly from Fontenelle, and through him from the Précieuses, though there are traces of it even in La Bruyère. It abuses metaphor somewhat, and delights to turn off a metaphor itself in some unexpected and bizarre fashion. Now it is a familiar phrase which is used where dignified language would be expected; now the reverse. In the criticism of Crébillon’s already quoted occurs another happy description of Marivaux’s style as being “an introduction to each other of words which have never made acquaintance, and which think that they
