pause to commend the style of La Bruyère. 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 Bruyère 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 hit 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 passion with La Bruyère.
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 Bruyère, who did not address the passing 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère, remained his indefatigable
patron and probably his closest friend. But we do not find in La
Bruyère 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 "Caractères" 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 Bruyère.
"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 Bruyère passes from mysterious ironies to bold
and coarse 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 God 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
"Caractères" 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 Bruyère nearer to Robert Louis
Stevenson than to his own immediate contemporary, Lord Halifax.
The surface of La Bruyère'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 attitude with that of La Rochefoucauld, the weary
Titan, who sighs contemptuously as he holds up to censure the globe of
human _amour-propre_. But we do not begin to understand the attitude
of La Bruyère 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 "Caractères," 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 attitude. La
Bruyère 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 passage which could scarcely have been written by any other
moralist of the seventeenth century:--
"It is useless to fly into a passion 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 Condé of whom Saint Simon said that, "A
pernicious neighbour, he made everybody miserable with whom he had to
do." I like to imagine La Bruyère 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 principal 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 Bruyère 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 damnation, cease to strive
against your own miserable impotence." La Bruyère'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 attitude 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère
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 Bruyère. It was he who taught their nation to seize the
attitude and to photograph the gesture.
La Bruyère'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 Bruyère'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 illustrative examples. These examples gave him his great
chance, and he built them up, those exemplary "portraits" of his, with
infinite labour, accumulating details to make a type, and sometimes,
it is possible, accumulating too many. The result is that the
"Caractères" 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 Bruyère 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 régime_, 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
passage 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 Bruyère 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'était, il avait toute sa vie été touché de la misère du
peuple et de toutes les vexations qu'il souffrait." This
would be particularly the case when Vauban was writing the
"Projet d'une dixième royale," finished in 1698.]
La Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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 "Caractères" they met with a
lay-preacher who was one of themselves, and who did not disdain to
encourage moral effort.
[Footnote 15: The wonderful passage in which La Bruyère
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 Bruyère, 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 Bruyère was direct, we find the most obvious to be an
Englishman, and our own enchanting "Mr. Spectator." Addison was born
when La Bruyère was twenty-seven; when the "Caractères" 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 Bruyère 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 Abbé Phélippeaux, member of that family of friends
who had so efficiently supported La Bruyère'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 Phélippeaux must have described La Bruyère to Addison?
Another contributor to the _Spectator_, Eustace Budgell, translated
Theophrastus and knew La Bruyère'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 Bruyère 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 "Caractères." 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère, 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère died, Steele was already an author,
and what is more, a moralist. It is impossible not to believe that he
had been reading the "Caractères" 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 Bruyère, 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 Condé, 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.