coming back to Paris, practised as a lawyer for eight or nine years.
He was concerned in no famous case, it is supposed, since his name is
never mentioned in the gossip of the time. He inherited a competence
from his father, and probably lived an idle life, diversified by a
little legal business of a very mediocre nature. As his biographer
says, he grew more and more "inclined by his temperament to a
meditative existence." When he was in his thirtieth year, a crisis
came. By some means or other, he secured a lucrative sinecure, that of
treasurer of finances at Caen in Normandy. He hated the country and
went down to Caen on the rarest occasions possible. La Bruyère, a
Parisian to the marrow of his bones, says, "Provincials and fools are
always ready to lose their temper and believe that one is laughing at
them or despising them. You must never venture on a joke, even the
mildest, except with well-bred, witty people." Perhaps he had been
trying Godefroi de La Bruyère off on the stolid inhabitants of Caen.
He received a salary, however, which was far from being all paid away
to a substitute, and he rose, in the curious social scale of those
days, from Mister (_roturier_) into Esquire (_écuyer_). The court in
Normandy was extremely angry with him at periodical intervals, but
apparently could do nothing to assert itself. When it raged, La
Bruyère was like the East in Matthew Arnold's poem, he "bow'd low
before the blast in patient, deep disdain."
He lived through these quiet years in one apartment after another in
the heart of Paris. Vigneul de Marville saw him "nearer heaven than
earth" in a room which a light curtain divided into two. "The wind,
always at the service of philosophers, running ahead of visitors,
would lift this curtain adroitly, and reveal the philosopher, smiling
with pleasure at the opportunity of distilling the elixir of his
meditations into the brain and the heart of a listener." He was always
at work, but his work was confined to meditation, talk and study.
Sometimes he left his garret, and studied "the court and the town"
from the benches of the public gardens, the Luxembourg and the
Tuileries. There has been an enormous amount of speculation and
conjecture about the central period of the life of La Bruyère, but we
really have only one positive document to go upon. During the illness
of his own footman, he borrowed the services of his brother's man, who
robbed him of money and clothes. La Bruyère put the case in the hands
of the police, who failed to catch the thief. This is the only
definite fact which has rewarded the patience of the investigators,
and we must build round it what we can. We build round it his own
glimpse of self-portraiture (in "Des Biens de Fortune") and find the
philosopher bending over the volume where Plato discusses the
spirituality of the soul, or measuring, with a rapt expression, the
infinite distance between Saturn and Jupiter.[12]
[Footnote 12: "Vigneul de Marville," to whom we owe some
picturesque impressions of La Bruyère at this time of social
obscurity, was one of the pseudonyms of Bonaventure
d'Argonne, whose real name appears to have been Noël
Argonne. He was a Carthusian who dabbled in literature, and
who towards the close of his career compiled a volume of
"Mélanges," containing anecdotes which are often spiteful,
but sometimes useful to the historian of literature. He
seems to have visited La Bruyère in the days of his
comparative poverty, when his mother kept home for the whole
family, first in the Rue Chapon, and later in the Rue des
Grands Augustins.]
When he is on the point of entering his fortieth year, La Bruyère
suddenly breaks out of the cloud which encompasses him, and is
revealed as professor of history to the Duke of Bourbon, and resident
in the household of the great Prince de Condé. There is no evidence to
show how Bossuet, then Bishop of Meaux, and the most influential man
of intellect in France, became acquainted with the discreet and
obscure treasurer of finances; but it is evident that he was struck by
the vast learning and intelligence of this silent, smiling anchorite.
Fontenelle tells us that Bossuet, who had been tutor to the Dauphin,
"made a practice of supplying to the princes such persons, meritorious
in letters, as they had need of." In 1684, then, we know not why nor
how, Bossuet recommended La Bruyère as tutor to the House of Condé. It
is a matter of ceaseless wonderment, however, that the philosopher
accepted and retained the post. He possessed a sufficient though a
modest competence already, and he exchanged a life of complete
independence for a most painful and trying servitude, hung up between
the insolence of those above and the impertinence of those below him.
The situation of La Bruyère in the Maison de Condé was like that of
Fanny Burney at the court of George III., only worse. Commentators
have expended endless ingenuity in conjecturing what were the reasons
which induced him to enslave himself.
A careful study of his great book must add to our amazement. No one
ever locked himself up in prison with an exacter appreciation of the
discomforts of captivity. La Bruyère has some remarks about freedom,
which plunge us in bewilderment. "Liberty," he says, "is not laziness:
it is a free use of one's time; it is having the choice of one's own
work and exercise. To be free, in a word, is not to do nothing, but to
be sole judge of what one shall do or not do. In this sense, what a
boon is liberty!" This practical freedom he possessed to the full,
when in August 1684 he accepted bondage to a spiteful monkey of a boy,
a dwarf with a huge head and a dreadful face, to whom he was to
impart, with tears of disappointment and humiliation, the rudiments of
national history. He was immediately responsible to the father of this
infant phenomenon, to Henry Jules, Duke d'Enghien, of whose "useless
talents, wasted genius, imagination which was a torment to himself and
others," Saint-Simon gives so copious an account. We have to think of
our delicate and timid La Bruyère now for years the powerless
plaything of this "unnatural son, cruel father, terrible husband,
detestable master, pernicious neighbour, without affection, without
friends."
But after two centuries of canonization of the Condés, it has now
become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The
traditional figure of the Grand Condé, Olympian and sublime, has been
exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyère's latest and most
learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the
Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he
calls him, _en souquenille_. But to dwell on all this is to forget
that the great Condé, even in his ugly old age, was haloed by the
glory of having been the first soldier of the world. It was a
privilege, even at the end, to be admitted to his intimacy, and I
believe that we pity La Bruyère more than he pitied himself. It
scandalizes the biographers that the Prince, on one occasion, made La
Bruyère dance a _pas seul_ before him, twanging a tune on the guitar.
I suppose De Quincey would have been complaisant if the Duke of
Wellington had asked him to whistle "Home, Sweet Home" to him. There
is a limit, after all, to the modern theory of the Dignity of Letters.
Valincourt says that "All the time La Bruyère lived in the House of
Condé, everybody was always making fun of him." Possibly the fear of
appearing pedantic among all these people of fashion and these
tinselled flunkeys made him lend himself to ridicule. They all teased
and mocked him, I suppose, but not, I think, so as seriously to hurt
him, and now, with his book in our hands, the laugh is on his side.
For when we examine carefully we see that his position in the House of
Condé improved as time went on. He got rid of his rivals, the other
tutors; when the Grand Condé died, La Bruyère got rid of his dreadful
pupil as well. We find him no longer "précepteur," but "gentilhomme de
M. le Duc,"--no longer, that is, a mere scholastic drudge, but a sort
of lord-in-waiting. He had probably a large increase of salary, since
in 1687 he seems to have resigned his "charge" at Caen. Instead of
being pinned to the dark apartment in the recesses of the Cité, he now
revolved in ceaseless movement between Chantilly and Fontainebleau,
Paris and Versailles. He became a sort of confidential reader to the
Duke and Duchess, an essential part of the suite. After the first
years, he had a great deal of leisure. He could retire to the security
of a handsomely furnished apartment--upholstered in green--on the
second floor of the Hôtel de Condé, opposite the Luxembourg, and he
had another set of rooms at Versailles. The bondage became, I expect,
no real bondage at all.
But why had he, so long completely his own master, consented to become
the servant even of famous Royal princes? I think that as mothers
accept irksome situations for the support of their children, so La
Bruyère became the serf of the Condés for the sake of his book. For it
is now time to reveal the fact that in this apparently listless, empty
life there was one absorbing secret interest. This was the collection
of the maxims, reflections, pictures, and what not which he had been
quietly absorbing and turning into the honey of more and more
exquisite prose ever since his early youth. I think that La Bruyère
deliberately accepted all that might prove irksome in the captivity to
the House of Condé for the sole sake of his book. He needed to see
more types, and types of a more brilliant and effective kind than he
could become familiar with in his mediocre condition. He knew all that
was to be known about the artizans and the shopkeepers of the Cité; he
wanted to examine the rulers of society, and while he watched them
like a naturalist, they might make what contortions they pleased. How
did one of his contemporaries describe him? "When Ménippe leaves his
home, it is for the purpose of studying the attitudes of the whole
human race and of painting them from the life. But he is not merely a
portrait-painter, he is an anatomist as well. Do you see that vain and
arrogant fellow in the midst of his good fortune? He is enchanted to
think Ménippe is admiring him. What a mistake! At this very moment
Ménippe is dissecting him and preparing him as a specimen for a public
lecture in the schools. Not a vein, not a fibre will escape him, and
from that man's heart he will draw the inmost springs of passion and
expose the circulation of every vice."
It is time, however, to present the famous book in which all these
investigations were noted, the cabinet where all these butterflies and
less beautiful insect-forms were exhibited. The final title 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
"Caractères." It started, probably, with the jotting down of social
remarks at long intervals. Then, I think, La Bruyère, 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 Bruyère invented a new kind of
portrait. He says, on the very first page of the "Caractères," "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 "Caractères" 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 Bruyère'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 Bruyère 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; Æschine 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 Dosithée, 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 Bruyère 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. Chassang has brought together a formidable list
of Fontenelle's activity. He wrote for Thomas Corneille part
of "Psyché" (1678) and of "Bellerophon" (1679); for Donneau
le Visé the comedy of "La Comète" (1681); for Beauval the
"Éloge" 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'Analyse des infiniments petits" for
the Marquis de l'Hôpital (1696). This is merely part of the
work turned out of Fontenelle's factory before the death of
La Bruyère. 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
Bruyère, in affronting public opinion with a book so full of sarcasm
and reproof, so unflinching in its way of dealing with success, as the
"Caractères." He adopted a singular mode of self-protection. That was
the day of the mighty dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns,
and La Bruyère, 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
charaktêres]_), 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère'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 Bruyère'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
Caractères" 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
Condé, 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 noble _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
æsthetic 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 "Caractères"
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 Bruyère introduced a new thing into French literature;
he opened out, we may almost say, a new world. The classical attitude
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 Fénelon. We come back to these solid and passionate
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 classics 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 passions, 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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
Bruyère, who was instinct with the need for colour, was dissatisfied
with the broad outlines and masses 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère's finished etchings of the
tulipomaniac and the collector of engravings.