It is time, however, to present the famous book in which all these investigations were noted, the cabinet where all these b.u.t.terflies and less beautiful insect-forms were exhibited. The final t.i.tle of it is "Characters; or, the Manners of this Age." It was published in January 1688, but, as is believed, had been begun nearly thirty years earlier, and slowly finished, the final revision and arrangement dating from 1686 and 1687. The book, like so many of the world"s masterpieces, is short, and a fashionable novelist of to-day could scribble in a fortnight as many words as it contains. But there is not a careless phrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in the range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the "Caracteres." It started, probably, with the jotting down of social remarks at long intervals. Then, I think, La Bruyere, always extremely fastidious, observed that the form of his writing was growing to resemble too much that of La Rochefoucauld, and so he began to diversify it with "portraits." These had been in fashion in Paris for more than a generation, but La Bruyere invented a new kind of portrait. He says, on the very first page of the "Caracteres," "you make a book as you make a clock"; he ought to have said, "I make _my_ book," for no other work is quite so clock-like in its variety of parts, its elaborate mechanism, and its air of having been constructed at different times, in polished fragments, which have needed the most workmanlike ingenuity to fit them together into an instrument that moves and, rings.
What perhaps strikes us most, when we put down the "Caracteres" after a close re-perusal of one of the most readable books in all literature, is its extraordinary sustained vitality. It hums and buzzes in our memory long after we have turned the last page. We may expand the author"s own mage, and compare it, not with a clock, but with a watchmaker"s shop; it is all alive with the tick-tick of a dozen chronometers. La Bruyere"s observations are noted in a manner that is disjointed, apparently even disordered, but it was no part of his scheme to present his maxims in a system. We shall find that he was incessantly improving his work, revising, extending and weighing it. He was one of those timid men who surprise us by their crafty intrepidity. It was dangerous to publish sarcastic "portraits" of well-known influential people, and there are few of these in the first edition, but when the success of the book was once confirmed these were made more and more prominent. It was not until the eighth edition, of 1694, that La Bruyere ventured to print the following study of one of the most influential men of letters of that day.
Fontenelle--
THE PORTRAIT OF CYDIAS
"Ascange is a sculptor, Hegion a bronze-founder; aeschine a fuller, and Cydias a wit--that is his profession. He has a signboard, a workshop, finished articles for sale, mechanics who work under him. He cannot deliver for more than a month the stanzas which he has promised you, unless he breaks his word to Dosithee, who has ordered an elegy from him. He has an idyl on the loom; it is for Crantor, who is hurrying him, and from whom he expects a handsome price. Prose, verse, which do you want? He is equally successful with either. Ask him for letters to sympathize with a bereavement or to explain an absence, and he will undertake them. If you want them ready-made, you have only to enter his shop, and to choose what you like. He has a friend whose only duty upon this earth is to promise Cydias a long time ahead to a certain set of people, and then to present him at last in their houses as a man of rare and exquisite conversation; and, there, just as a musician sings or a lute-player touches his lute before the people who have engaged him, Cydias, after having coughed, and lifted the ruffle from his wrist, stretched out his hand and opened his fingers, begins to retail his quintessential thoughts and his sophistical arguments....
He opens his mouth only to contradict. "It seems to me," he gracefully says, "that the truth is exactly the contrary of what you say," or "I cannot agree with your opinion," or even "that used to be my prepossession, as it is yours, but now----!""
The idol of the gossips, "the prettiest pedant in the world," was thus paid out for his intrigues against La Bruyere in the French Academy.[13]
[Footnote 13: The contemporary "keys," which were generally ill-informed and ill-forming, said that Cydias was Perrault. But it is almost certain that Fontenelle was meant. M.A. Cha.s.sang has brought together a formidable list of Fontenelle"s activity. He wrote for Thomas Corneille part of "Psyche" (1678) and of "Bellerophon" (1679); for Donneau le Vise the comedy of "La Comete" (1681); for Beauval the "eloge" on Perrault (1688); for Catherine Bernard part of her tragedy of "Brutus" (1691), a discourse for the prize of eloquence given by the French Academy, and signed by Brunel (1695); and part of "L"a.n.a.lyse des infiniments pet.i.ts" for the Marquis de l"Hopital (1696). This is merely part of the work turned out of Fontenelle"s factory before the death of La Bruyere. Another candidate for the type of Cydias is Fontenelle"s uncle, Thomas Corneille (1625-1709).]
There was great danger, or so it would seem to a timid man like La Bruyere, in affronting public opinion with a book so full of sarcasm and reproof, so unflinching in its way of dealing with success, as the "Caracteres." He adopted a singular mode of self-protection. That was the day of the mighty dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns, and La Bruyere, at all events ostensibly, took the highly respectable side of the Greeks and Romans. There had lived a philosopher in the fourth century B.C., Theophrastus, the successor and elucidator of Aristotle, who left a book of "Ethical Characters" (_[Greek: HThikoi charakteres]_), which had been introduced to the Western world by Casaubon at the end of the sixteenth century. For some reason or other, the greatest impression had been made by Theophrastus in England, where there appeared a large number of successive imitations or paraphrases of his "Characters." In France, on the other hand, Theophrastus was still unknown to the vulgar, when La Bruyere took him up. It seems likely that his own collection of portraits and maxims was practically finished, when, as M. Paul Morillot has put it, he determined to hoist the Greek flag as a safeguard. He made a French translation of the sketches of Theophrastus, and he put this at the head of his book, waving it to keep off the public, as a lady unfurls her parasol at a cow whose intentions are uncertain.
The evidences of La Bruyere"s extreme caution are amusing. He hesitated long, but in 1687 he submitted his MS. to Boileau, who was highly encouraging, and to the poet-mathematician, Malizian, who said, "This will bring you plenty of readers and plenty of enemies." Finally he determined to risk the dive, and he took the book to Michallet, the publisher, saying as he did so, "If it is successful, the result shall be your daughter"s dowry," the said daughter being a little child who was then seated on La Bruyere"s knee. The ultimate success of the book being prodigious, Mlle Michallet must, by the time she was marriageable, have become a remarkable _parti_, but the story is not one which commends itself to the Incorporated Society of Authors. "Les Caracteres" was published in January 1688, and the critics, with the veteran Bussy-Rabutin at their head, welcomed it with shouts of applause. Bussy frankly said, "It must be admitted that having proved the merit of Theophrastus by his translation, he has obscured the fame of that writer by what he has done next, for he has penetrated, in his own portraits, deeper into the heart of man than Theophrastus did, and has penetrated with even greater delicacy and by means of more exquisite language." This must have been very gratifying from the survivor of the great school of Malherbe and Balzac.
At the age of forty-three, then, previously unknown in the world of letters, this shy and obscure gentleman-in-waiting to the Princes of Conde, rose into fame, and enjoyed the admiration or the envy of whatever was most prominent in Paris. The public which he addressed was one which we may pause a moment to contemplate. The authority of the Academic and n.o.ble _salons_ was practically at an end, and intellectual culture had spread to a somewhat wider circle. Those who governed taste had thrown off many affectations of a previous generation, and in particular the curious disease of "preciousness."
They were healthier, soberer and slightly less amusing than their forerunners. But they formed, in the heart of Paris, the most compact body of general intelligence to be met with at that time in any part of the world. They were certain, in their little sphere, of their aesthetic and logical aims. They were the flower of an intense civilization, very limited, in a way very simple; so far as the adoption of outer impulses went, very inactive, and yet within its own range energetic, elegant and audacious. To this world the "Caracteres"
was now offered, modestly, as though it were a summing up of the moralizations of the last fifty years. The author begins by deprecating the idea that he has anything new to impart. His trick is rather subtle; he concentrates our attention on the sayings of an ancient Aristotelian philosopher, and then, as if to fill up the time, he ventures to repeat a few reflexions of his own. These he introduces with the words: "Everything has been said, and we arrive too late into a world of men who have been thinking for more than seven thousand years. In the field of morals, all that is fairest and best has been reaped already; we can but glean among the ancients and among the cleverest of the moderns." In this insinuating manner, he leads the reader on to the perusal of his own part of the book, and soon we become aware how cold and dry and pale the Greek translation seems beside the rich and palpitating world of the new French morality.
Whether he perceived it or not--and I for one am convinced that he did perceive it--La Bruyere introduced a new thing into French literature; he opened out, we may almost say, a new world. The cla.s.sical att.i.tude of the great age had produced splendid manifestations of thought and form. However revolutionary it pleases us of 1918 to be, we cannot get away from the perfection of the age of Bossuet and Racine and La Fontaine and Fenelon. We come back to these solid and pa.s.sionate writers after each one of our romantic excursions, not entirely satisfied with them, as our forefathers were, but with a sense of their solid glory, with a confidence in their permanent value in stimulating and supporting human effort. They may not give us all that they were once presumed to give, but they offer us a firm basis; they are always there for the imagination to start from. We must not forget, of course, that in 1688 in Paris these cla.s.sics of the hour represented a great deal more than that; their prestige was untarnished. They so completely outshone, in cultivated opinion, all else that had been produced since the Christian era, that the Italy of Dante, the Spain of Cervantes, and the England of Shakespeare did not so much as exist. If the intelligence was not satisfied by Descartes, well! there was nothing for it but to go back to Plato, and if Racine did not sufficiently rouse the pa.s.sions, they must be worked upon by Sophocles. In all this, the divines took a particularly prominent place because they alone presented something for which no definite parallel could be found in antiquity. It was the great theologians of the age with whom La Bruyere chiefly competed.
These theologians were themselves artists to a degree which we have now a difficulty in realizing, although in the seventeenth century the Church of England also had some great artists in her pulpits. If Jeremy Taylor had been a Frenchman, the work of La Bruyere might have been different. But the French orators lacked the splendour and oddity of the author of "The Great Exemplar," and we can feel that La Bruyere, who was instinct with the need for colour, was dissatisfied with the broad outlines and ma.s.ses of character for which the French divines were famous; indeed, even Bossuet, to an English reader fresh from Fuller and Taylor, seems with all his magnificence too abstract and too rhetorical. La Bruyere determined to be less exacting and yet more exact; he would sink to describing emotions less tremendous and to designing figures of more trifling value, but he would paint them with a vivid detail hitherto unsolicited. The consequence was that the public instantly responded to his appeal, and we have continued to contemplate with reverence Bossuet"s huge historical outlines, but to turn for sheer pleasure to La Bruyere"s finished etchings of the tulipomaniac and the collector of engravings.
Everyone who approaches an a.n.a.lysis of the "Caracteres" is obliged to pause to commend the style of La Bruyere. It is indeed exquisite. At the time his book was published our own John Locke was putting together his famous "Thoughts on Education," and he remarked on the "policy" of the French, who were not thinking it "beneath the public care to promote and reward the improvement of their own language.
Polishing and enriching their tongue," so Locke proceeds, "is no small business amongst them." It is perhaps not extravagant to believe that in writing these words the English philosopher was thinking of the new Parisian moralist. For La Bruyere was a great artist, who understood the moral value of form in a degree which would peculiarly commend itself to the lucid mind of Locke. He says, early in his book, "Among all the different expressions which can render a single one of our thoughts, there is only one which is right. We do not always. .h.i.t upon it in speaking or composing; nevertheless it is a fact that somewhere it exists, and everything else is feeble and does not satisfy a man of intelligence who desires to be understood." This search for the one and only perfect expression was an unfailing pa.s.sion with La Bruyere.
In another place he says: "The author who only considers the taste of his own age is thinking more of himself than of his writings. We ought always to be striving after perfection, and then posterity will render us that justice which is sometimes refused to us by our contemporaries." This is an ideal to which Locke, anxious to make disciples by his regular and sometimes racy use of language, never attained. La Bruyere, who did not address the pa.s.sing age, so polished his periods that all successive generations have hailed him as one of the greatest masters of prose.
Voltaire"s definition of the style of La Bruyere is well known, but cannot too often be repeated. He calls it "a rapid, concise, nervous style, with picturesque expressions, a wholly novel use of the French language, yet with no infringement of its rules." Fortunately, with all his admiration of others--and his great chapter "Des Ouvrages de l"Esprit" is one of the most generous and catholic examples of current criticism which we possess in all literature--with his modest and glowing appreciation of his famous predecessors, he did not attempt to imitate them in the grand manner. We are able to perceive that Bossuet, who was nearly twenty years his senior, to whom he owed his advancement in life, whose majestic genius and princely prestige were so well adapted to dazzle La Bruyere, remained his indefatigable patron and probably his closest friend. But we do not find in La Bruyere a trace of imitation of the great preacher whom he loved and honoured. If we think what the authority of Bossuet had come to be at the time when the "Caracteres" was published, how hardly its evangelical science pressed upon the convictions of all Frenchmen, and particularly upon those of men who accepted it as unquestionably as did the author of that book, that there should be no trace of Bossuet on his style is a great tribute to the originality of La Bruyere.
"There is no pleasure without variety," this same mighty Bossuet had written in 1670, and his young friend had taken the axiom to heart. We find him pursuing almost beyond the bounds of good taste the search for variety of manner. He has strange sudden turns of thought, startling addresses, inversions which we should blame as violent, if they were not so eminently successful that we adopt them at once, as we do Shakespeare"s. La Bruyere pa.s.ses from mysterious ironies to bold and coa.r.s.e invective, from ornate and sublime reflections to phrases of a roguish simplicity. He suddenly drops his voice to a shuddering whisper, and the next moment is fluting like a blackbird. The gaiety with which he mocks the ambitions of the rich is suddenly relieved by the dreadful calm with which he reveals the horror of their disappointments. He is never in the same mood, or adopting the same tone, for two pages running. It is difficult in a translation to give an idea of the surprising element in his style, but something of its oddity may be preserved in such an attempt as this--
"There are creatures of G.o.d whom we call men, who have a soul which is intelligence, and whose whole life is spent and whose whole attention is centred in the sawing of marble. This is a very simple, a very little thing. There are others who are amazed at this, but who themselves are utterly useless, and who spend their days in doing nothing at all. This is a still smaller thing than sawing marble."
English prose, which a century earlier had limped so far behind French in clearness and conciseness, was rapidly catching its rival up, and in the next generation was to run abreast with it. But if we wish to see how far behind the best French writers our own best still were, we need but compare the exquisite speed and elasticity of the "Caracteres" with the comparative heaviness and slowness of a famous Theophrastian essay published in the same year, 1688, namely the "Character of a Trimmer." In the characteristics of a lively prose artist, we shall have to confess La Bruyere nearer to Robert Louis Stevenson than to his own immediate contemporary, Lord Halifax.
The surface of La Bruyere"s writing is crisp and parched, but it is easy by careful reading to crack it, and to discover the coolness, the softness, the salutary humidity which lie beneath the satirical crust of his irony. He is primarily a satirist, dealing as he says with the vices of the human mind and the subterfuges of human self-deception.
He lays bare "the sentiments and the movements of men, exposing the principles which actuate their malice and their frailty"; he aims at showing that such is the native evil implanted in their souls that "no one should any longer be surprised at the thousands of vicious or frivolous actions with which their lives are crowded." We note him at first as entirely devoted to these painful investigations, and we are apt to confound his att.i.tude with that of La Rochefoucauld, the weary t.i.tan, who sighs contemptuously as he holds up to censure the globe of human _amour-propre_. But we do not begin to understand the att.i.tude of La Bruyere until we notice that there always is, in the popular phrase, "more in him than meets the eye." He is indeed a satirist, but not of the profound order of the Timons of the mind; his satire is superficial, and under it there flows a lenient curiosity mingled with a sympathy that fears to be detected.
There is a note of sadness, a mysterious melancholy, which frequently recurs in the "Caracteres," and this produces a constant variety in its appeal to the feelings. We find the author amusing himself by detailing the weaknesses of his fellow-beings, but the entertainment they offer him soon leaves him dissatisfied and sad. He is overheard to sigh, he is seen to shake his head, as he turns his clear eyes away from the self-humiliation of men. There is nothing of this in the hard superiority of La Rochefoucauld, and one of the most important things which we have to note is the advance in feeling which the later moralist makes, in spite of his extremely unpretentious att.i.tude. La Bruyere attains to a reasoned tolerance which neither his immediate predecessor nor Pascal nor Bossuet reached or had the least wish to reach. In him we meet, not commonly nor prominently presented, but quite plainly enough, the modern virtue of indulgence, of tolerance.
Here is a pa.s.sage which could scarcely have been written by any other moralist of the seventeenth century:--
"It is useless to fly into a pa.s.sion with human beings because of their harshness, their injustice, their pride, their self-love and their forgetfulness of others. They are made so, it is their nature, and to be angry about it is to be angry with the stone for falling or with the flame for rising."
Here is the voice of the man who had lived and who was still living in the house of that Prince de Conde of whom Saint Simon said that, "A pernicious neighbour, he made everybody miserable with whom he had to do." I like to imagine La Bruyere escaping from some dreadful scene where Henry Jules had injured his dependants and insulted his familiars, or had drawn out in public the worst qualities of his son, "incapable of affection and only too capable of hatred." I imagine him escaping from the violence and meanness of those intolerable tyrants up into the asylum of his own hushed apartment at Versailles; there flinging himself down for a moment in the alcove, on the painted bedstead, then presently rising, with a smile on his lips and the fright and anger gone out of his eyes, and advancing to the great oaken bureau which displayed his faience and his guitar. He would glance, for encouragement, at the framed portrait of Bossuet which was the princ.i.p.al ornament of the wall above it, and then, listening a moment to be sure that he was safe from disturbance, he would unlock one of the three drawers, and take out the little portfolio in which for years and years he had been storing up his observations upon society and his consolations in affliction. Presently, with infinite deliberation and most fastidious choice of the faultless phrase and single available word, he would paint the Holbein portrait of one of the prodigious creatures whom he had just seen in action, some erratic, brilliant and hateful "ornament of society" such as the Duke de Lauzun, and the picture of Straton would be added to his gallery:--
"Straton was born under two stars; unlucky, lucky in the same degree.
His life is a romance: no, for it lacks probability. He has had beautiful dreams, he has bad ones: what am I saying? people don"t dream as he has lived. No one has ever extracted out of a destiny more than he has. The preposterous and the commonplace are equally familiar to him. He has shone, he has suffered, he has dragged along a humdrum existence: nothing has escaped him.... He is an enigma, a riddle that can probably be never solved."
La Bruyere aimed at the improvement of human nature. La Rochefoucauld had said, "Don"t be ridiculous--a blatant love of self is the only spring of your being." Pascal, less haughty but more overwhelming, had said, "Insect that you are, doomed to d.a.m.nation, cease to strive against your own miserable impotence." La Bruyere"s teaching was not so definite, partly because his intellect was not so systematic as theirs, but partly because he was more human than either, human with more than a touch of the modern democratic humanity. His att.i.tude was the easier one implied in the sense that "there is so much that"s good in the worst of us, and so much that"s bad in the best of us" that there is room, even among moralists, for an infinite indulgence. His was, on the whole, and accounting for some fluttering of the nerves, a very tranquil spirit. He is much less formal and mechanical than La Rochefoucauld, and he seems to study men with less dependence on a theory. His own statement should not be overlooked; he says, very plainly, that he desired above all things to make men live better lives.
Boileau said that the style of La Bruyere was "prophetic," and I do not know that any one has attempted to explain this rather curious phrase. But we may adopt it in the light of more than two centuries which were unknown to Boileau. More than any other writer of the end of the seventeenth century La Bruyere prophesied of a good time coming. He did not speak out very plainly, but it is the privilege of prophets to be obscure, and their predictions are commonly not comprehensible until after the event. But we may claim for La Bruyere the praise of being a great civilizer of French thought; more than that, he widened human social intelligence throughout Europe. He is the direct ancestor of the Frenchman of to-day who observes closely and clearly, who has the power to define what he sees, and who retains the colour and movement of it. To this day, as may be amply seen in the records and episodes of the war, in the correspondence of officers at the front, in the general intellectual conduct of the contest, Frenchmen rarely experience a difficulty in finding the exact word they want. These men who arrest for our pleasure an impression, who rebuild before us the fabric of their experience, descend in direct line from La Bruyere. It was he who taught their nation to seize the att.i.tude and to photograph the gesture.
La Bruyere"s express aim is to clarify our minds, to make us think lucidly and in consequence speak with precision. We have already seen what value he sets on the right word in the right place. He is the enemy of all those who shamble along in the supposition that an inaccurate phrase will "do well enough," and that any slipshod definition is excused by our saying, "Oh, you know what I mean!" His own style is finished up to the highest point, and it is brightened and varied with such skill that the author never ceases to hold the attention of the reader. He reaches the very ideal of that elegant wandering art of writing which the Latins called _sermo pedestris_.
Indeed, he gives so much attention to the perfect mode of saying things that some critics have brought it as a charge against him that he overdoes it, that in fact his style is more weighty than his subject. This, I think, is a very hasty judgment, founded a little, no doubt, upon a certain dread on La Bruyere"s part of being commonplace.
He was dealing, as every moralist is bound to deal, with ideas of a more or less primitive character, to which sparkle and force must be given by ill.u.s.trative examples. These examples gave him his great chance, and he built them up, those exemplary "portraits" of his, with infinite labour, acc.u.mulating details to make a type, and sometimes, it is possible, acc.u.mulating too many. The result is that the "Caracteres" are sometimes a little laboured; I do not know any other fault that can be laid to their charge.
One of the most important qualities of La Bruyere was that he prepared the popular mind for liberty. He is democratic in many ways, in his language, where he often borrows words from the _patois_ of the common people; in his exposure of the errors of the _ancien regime_, its tyranny, its selfishness, its want of humanity and imagination; in his hatred of wealth, the scandalous triumph of which had already reached a pitch which the next generation was to see outdone. In all this, as cannot be too often insisted upon, it was essential for a reformer to be prudent. The People had no voice, and that their interests should be defended was inconceivable.[14] In the next century, after the reign of Louis XV. was over and speech had, in a great measure, become free, it was not understood how difficult it was under Louis XIV. to express any criticism of the feudal order. For instance, there is a long pa.s.sage at the end of the chapter "De la Ville," which scandalized the political reformers of the eighteenth century. It is that which begins, "The emperors never triumphed in Rome so softly, so conveniently, or even so successfully, against wind and rain, dust and sunshine, as the citizen of Paris knows how to do as he crosses the city to-day in every direction. How far have we advanced beyond the mule of our ancestors!" La Bruyere was charged, and even by Voltaire, with attacking the progress of civilization, and with preferring the rude subterfuges of Carlovingian times to the comforts of 1688. But he was really making an appeal for thrift and modesty of expenditure on the part of those bourgeois who had suddenly become rich, as a satirist of our own day might denounce the pomp of a too successful shopkeeper, without being accused of denying the convenience of motor-cars or desiring to stop the progress of scientific invention.
[Footnote 14: Perhaps the earliest Frenchman to have his full attention called to the miseries of the poor, was Vauban, whose benevolence was an object of amazement to his own contemporaries. Saint-Simon notes that "Patriote comme il l"etait, il avait toute sa vie ete touche de la misere du peuple et de toutes les vexations qu"il souffrait." This would be particularly the case when Vauban was writing the "Projet d"une dixieme royale," finished in 1698.]
La Bruyere was the first effective moralist who realized what a monstrous disproportion existed between the fortune of the rich and of the poor.[15] If we read the chapter "Des Biens de Fortune" we may be astonished at his courage, and we may see in him a direct precursor of the revolution which took a little more than a hundred years to gather before it broke on France. He describes the great of the earth with a savage serenity, and then he adds, "Such people are neither relatives, nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even men. They have money." There are many such maxims in the chapter "De l"homme"
which must have set people"s thoughts running in channels which had before been wholly dry. La Bruyere was not a political reformer, and we must not exaggerate the influence of his charming book in this particular direction. But, as a popular imaginative writer, he took a long step in the democratic direction. Frenchmen were already touched in their consciences and beginning to examine the state of their souls with anxiety; but the teachers of the ascetic revival had been too uncompromising. Ordinary mortals could not hope to reach the ascetic ideal of Port Royal, they could only be discouraged by the savage attacks on _amour-propre_, while in the "Caracteres" they met with a lay-preacher who was one of themselves, and who did not disdain to encourage moral effort.
[Footnote 15: The wonderful pa.s.sage in which La Bruyere dwells on the condition of the French peasant of his day marks a crisis in the conscience of Europe. It occurs in the chapter "De l"Homme": "We see certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid and scorched by the sun, fastened to the soil which they delve and stir with an invincible obstinacy; they have a sort of articulate speech, and when they stand up upon their feet, they show a countenance that is human: and in short they are human beings. They creep back at nightfall into dens, where they live on black bread, water and roots. They spare the rest of mankind the trouble of sowing, ploughing and reaping what is required for food, and accordingly they seem to deserve that they should themselves not lack the bread which they have sown." And in "Des Biens de Fortune" he says: "There are sorrows in the world that grip the heart, there are men and women who have nothing, not even bread, who shudder at the approach of winter, who have learned the significance of life, while others eat fruit forced out of due season, and compel the soil and the seasons to indulge their fastidiousness."]
It was a great advantage to La Bruyere, and a sign of his genius, that he was able to descend from the pulpit, and walk about among his readers with a smile, recognizing them as reasonable beings. He is persuasive; his forerunners had been denunciatory. He may be harsh and sometimes unjust, but he is never contemptuous to human nature. He feels that he is addressing a wide public of intelligent men and women, whom he would fortify against the moral tyranny of the violent and the rich. For this purpose, though he would tell them their faults, he would not shut the gates of mercy in their faces. But how admirably he himself puts it in his chapter "Des Jugements":--
"A man of talent and reputation, if he allows himself to be peevish and censorious, scares young people, makes them think evil of virtue, and frightens them with the idea of an excessive reform and a tiresome strictness of conduct. If, on the other hand, he proves easy to get on with, he sets a practical lesson before them, since he proves to them that a man can live gaily and yet laboriously, and can hold serious views without renouncing honest pleasures; so he becomes an example which they find it possible to follow."
When we look round for an author of high importance on whom the influence of La Bruyere was direct, we find the most obvious to be an Englishman, and our own enchanting "Mr. Spectator." Addison was born when La Bruyere was twenty-seven; when the "Caracteres" was published he was an undergraduate at Queen"s College, Oxford, walking in meditation under the elms beside the Cherwell. Addison was not in France until La Bruyere had been some months dead; there can have been no personal intercourse between them; but he stayed at Blois for over twelve months in 1699 and 1700, and during that time he was much in company with the Abbe Phelippeaux, member of that family of friends who had so efficiently supported La Bruyere"s candidature to the French Academy only six years before. I do not think this fact has been noted, but surely it is almost certain that in their talks about literature Phelippeaux must have described La Bruyere to Addison?
Another contributor to the _Spectator_, Eustace Budgell, translated Theophrastus and knew La Bruyere"s book. Dr. Johnson mentions that the French moralist is the source of Addison"s effort, but English critical opinion then, and since, has held that La Bruyere wrote without any of the earnestness of the moral reformer. I have indicated, I hope, the hasty error contained in such a judgment.
There is one point, however, on which it must be admitted that Addison shows himself much in advance of his French precursor, or rather perhaps we should consider it a proof of the advantage of English society under Anne over French society under Louis XIV. The delicacy and sympathy with which women are treated in the _Spectator_ has no parallel in the "Caracteres." In that volume, the chapter "Des Femmes"
is perhaps the least agreeable to a sensible reader of to-day. It is crowded with types of pretentious and abnormal womanhood, which it caricatures very effectively. Addison had manifestly studied it, for here we see the origin of his coquettes and prudes, with their "brocade petticoat which rises out of the mines of Peru, and the diamond necklace out of the bowels of Indostan." But what we miss completely in La Bruyere is that cordial recognition of women as the proper companions of men and the organizers of intelligent society which is so admirably sustained in the _Spectator_. It was Addison, and not La Bruyere, who broke down once for all, and finally, the monkish conception of women as the betrayers of the human species, which had lingered on so detestably from the Middle Ages.
The influence of La Bruyere on Steele is apparent, and may have preceded that on Addison. We may observe that Steele says, in the general preface to the _Tatler,_ "the elegance, purity and correctness which appeared in [Mr. Addison"s] writings were not so much to my purpose as... to rally all those singularities of human life, through the different professions and _characters_ in it, which obstruct anything that is truly good and great," The similarity of expression here is certainly not accidental; La Bruyere stood before Steele as a model when he wrote, for instance, in 1709, Mr. Isaac Bickerstaffs "portraits" of Chloe and Clarissa, or the "lucubration" on Deference to Public Opinion. When La Bruyere died, Steele was already an author, and what is more, a moralist. It is impossible not to believe that he had been reading the "Caracteres" when it occurred to him that he might procure himself "a most exquisite pleasure," by framing "Characters of Domestic Life."
The ladies may hold it to be an excuse for our French moralist that he was a confirmed and impenitent bachelor. He thought that marriage enchained a philosopher, and would have said, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, "He rideth the faster who rideth alone," Boileau, after a visit from La Bruyere, remarked that nature had not consented to make him so agreeable as he wished to be. It seems that he was shy and gauche, and that he strove to conceal these defects by occasional outbursts of a dreadful playfulness. There are stories about his behaviour in the House of Conde, which if they are true seem to carry eccentricity beyond the bounds of what is permitted even to a philosopher. Nevertheless, contemporaries report that, in spite of his plain features and his "look of a common soldier" (a dreadful thing to say in the seventeenth century), the ladies ran after him. I am afraid that when they did so, he repulsed them. He says about love none of the charming things which he says about friendship, such as "To be with those we are fond of, that is enough; to dream, to speak to them, to say nothing to them, to think about them, to think of indifferent things, but in their presence,--all is equally pleasant." Or this: "Pure friendship has a flavour which is beyond the taste of those who are born mediocre." Or again. "There ought to be, deep down in the heart, inexhaustible wells of sorrow in readiness for certain losses."
The tenderness of such thoughts as these may surely outweigh the dryness of the portraits of Corinne and Clarice.
The career of our moralist, after the publication of his single book, was a short one. His startling success as a writer irresistibly pointed him out as a candidate for election to the French Academy, but here he was met by the barbed wire of jealousy and exasperated vanity.
He had laughed at too many pretentious mandarins to hope to escape their resentment. At last, in 1693, but alas! at the expense of a vast deal of intrigue on the part of his ill.u.s.trious protectors, he stormed that reluctant fortress. In his Reception Discourse, he revenged himself on his enemies by firing volley after volley of irony into their ranks, and the august body was beside itself with rage. No pompous Academician, for instance, likes to hear, in the solemn conclave of his colleagues, that he is so Christian and so charitable that "writing well may be said to be among the least of his qualities." La Bruyere summed up his attacks in a preface to the eighth edition of the "Caracteres" in 1694. He then retired again to his independence as a crafty old bachelor, and Saint Simon gives us a pleasant snapshot of him in these latest years, "a very straightforward man, capital company, simple, with nothing of the pedant about him, and entirely disinterested."
He remained the man of one book until nearly the close of his life. It is thought that Bossuet, who had always been his great exemplar, urged him to undertake a reply to the heresies of Mme de Guyon and Fenelon, and that so he was dragged into that very painful quarrel. At all events, he started a series of "Dialogues on Quietism," in which all the extreme doctrines of Molinos and his disciples were examined and ridiculed. On May 8, 1696, La Bruyere dined with Antoine Bossuet, the bishop"s elder brother; after dinner he took out the MSS. from his pocket, and read extracts to his host. Two days afterwards, after walking in the garden at Versailles, he had a stroke, and two days after that he died. He had had no premonition of illness, and the rumour went round that the Quietists had poisoned him. His body was exhumed, but of course no trace of poison was to be found. The "Dialogues," revised and completed by the Abbe Ellies du Pin, were published the next year. Their authenticity has been obstinately contested, but, as I confess it seems to me, without excuse. Both external and internal evidence go to prove, I think, that they are substantially the work of La Bruyere, and for those who are not alarmed at theological discussions conducted in rather a profane spirit, they make very good reading.
One last word about our amiable author. His great book remains eminently alive, and wields after two centuries and a half a permanent influence. When you refer to it, you must not expect a logical development of philosophical theory. We do not look to find a system in a book of maxims and portraits. La Bruyere was a moralist, pure and simple; he awakened sensibility, he encouraged refinement, and he exposed the vicious difference which existed around him--and which no one else had seemed to notice--that the possession of more or fewer pieces of money made between human beings otherwise equal. He had a democratic philosophy which is sometimes that of Mr. Micawber, "Celui-la est riche qui recoit plus qu"il ne consume; celui-la est pauvre dont la depense excede la recette," But he is seldom so prosy as this. Let us think of him as one who wished to turn his talent as a painter of still life to the benefit of his nation, and who succeeded in a degree far beyond his own modest hopes.
VAUVENARGUES
If we had been in Paris on a summer"s day in 1744 we might have seen emerge from a modest house in the ungenteel rue du Paon (Peac.o.c.k Street) a young man of less than twenty-nine years of age. It is improbable that we should have been attracted to him without warning, for though his expression was very pleasant, he was not distinguished-looking, and though he was uncomplaining, his evident air of suffering was painful to witness. He had the gallant bearing of a soldier and a certain n.o.ble elegance, but a shade across his forehead testified to the failure of his eyesight, and he shambled along with difficulty on two lame legs. If we followed him he would probably take us slowly to the Garden of the Luxembourg, where it was very unlikely that any one would greet him.
He would presently turn out of the fashionable promenade, to contemplate the poor and the unfortunate. Sometimes he would stop those who seemed most wretched, and would try to share their sorrows, but sympathy on the part of a gentleman was strange, or else there was something in himself which failed to express his tenderness, for he complained that the unfortunate always turned away from him. If, at the moment of such a repulse, we had addressed him, and had respectfully offered him our sympathy, he would have struggled with his painful shyness, and would have told us that he felt no resentment against those who rejected his help. Nothing hardened his heart, and the lack of response merely doubled his pity. He would a.s.sure us, with the pale smile which was the charm of his anaemic countenance, that those who were vicious were so by their misfortune, not their fault, and that of the worst criminals he was persuaded that, if they could, they would "end their days in innocence." With an exquisite and simple politeness he would leave us wondering a little who this pathetic young man, with all the stigmata upon him of poverty and sickness bravely borne, might be; and there would be none to explain to us that it was the Marquis de Vauvenargues, come home a broken man from the wars in Bohemia.