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 illustrious 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 Bruyère summed up his attacks in a preface to the
eighth edition of the "Caractères" 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 Fénelon,
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 Bruyère 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 Abbé Elliès 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 Bruyère, 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 Bruyère 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-là est riche qui reçoit plus qu'il ne consume; celui-là est
pauvre dont la dépense excède 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 (Peacock
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 noble 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 assure us, with
the pale smile which was the charm of his anæmic 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.
This inconspicuous personage, who glided almost like a ghost through
less than thirty-two years of pain and adversity, was not merely the
greatest moralist that France produced in the course of the eighteenth
century, but was of all the world's writers perhaps the one who has
lifted highest the banner of hope and joy in heroism and virtue. In La
Rochefoucauld we encountered a representative of the dominant class,
the prince-dukes. La Bruyère was a typical bourgeois. In our third
example of the moral energy of France we meet with a specimen of the
_petite noblesse_, the impoverished country gentlemen who dragged out
a provincial existence in obscurity and ignorance, supported by their
pride in a long pedigree. Luc de Clapiers, whose father was raised to
the marquisate of Vauvenargues in 1722, was born seven years earlier
than that, at Aix in Provence, where his father was mayor. It is a
pleasant touch to be told that his father was the only magistrate who
did not desert his post when Aix was swept by the plague in 1720.
There seems a foreshadowing here of his famous son's high courage. But
it seems also certain that there was no appreciation of scholarship or
literature in the household. No atmosphere less benevolent to learning
can be imagined. The future philosopher went to school at Aix for a
little while, and then his weak health was made the excuse for
cancelling what was perhaps looked upon as a needless expense. He was
thrown upon himself, and what education he secured was the result of
his own desultory reading.
Vauvenargues never acquired a knowledge of Greek or even Latin,[16] but
when he was about sixteen years of age he came across a book which
absolutely transfigured his outlook upon the world and decided the
course of his aspirations. This was none less than a translation of
the "Lives" of Plutarch, a work which has had a very remarkable moral
effect on the Frenchmen of four centuries. We know not which this
particular translation was, but it would be pleasant to think it was
that made by Amyot in 1559. The effect it had on the temperament of
Vauvenargues must be told in his own words. He says in a letter to
Mirabeau (March 22, 1740)--
[Footnote 16: Suard is definite as to this: "Il est mort
sans être en état de lire Horace et Tacite dans leur
langue."]
"I wept for joy while I read these 'Lives' [of Plutarch]. No night
went by but I had spent part of it in talking to Alcibiades, to
Agesilas, or to others. I walked in the streets of Rome that I might
argue with the Gracchi, and when stones were flung at Cato, there was
I to defend him. You remember that when Cæsar wished to pass a law
which was too much in favour of the populace, Cato tried to prevent
his doing so, and put his hand on Cæsar's mouth to prevent his
speaking? These modes of action, so unlike our fashions of to-day,
made a deep impression on me."
He attributed to the teaching of Plutarch his introduction to the
master-passions of his brief future existence, namely, his devotion to
a sense of heroic duty and his determination to live up to the measure
of his high calling. In the pages of Plutarch he says that he
discovered "la vraie grandeur de notre âme"; here was exposed before
him a scene of life illustrated by "virtue without limit, pleasure
without infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity,
and vices without baseness and without disguise." This boyish
appreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains the
future moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutshell. To our great
regret, it is the only positive record which survives of the
adolescence of this great mind, on whose development we should so
gladly dwell if it were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrases
Vauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm than
the budding virtue of a young man," In his own case those "earliest
days" are hopelessly sunken into oblivion.[17]
[Footnote 17: We know, at least, that he taught himself to
write on the "sedulous ape" system, by imitating Bossuet and
Fénelon. He must have been in several respects very much
like Robert Louis Stevenson. His modesty led him to distrust
his own taste, and it is worthy of notice that the
corrections he made to please Voltaire often reduce the
vigour of his thought in its original expression. Voltaire--
it is beyond conjecture why--cancelled the famous maxim,
"Les feux de l'aurore".]
How harshly his tastes were condemned at home may be judged by an
anecdote about his father which occurs in the "Essai sur quelques
caractères":--
"Anselme was shocked that his son should show a taste for science. He
burnt the young man's papers and books, and when he learned that he
had gone to sup with certain men of letters, he threatened to banish
him to the country if he persisted in keeping _bad company_. 'Since
you are fond of reading,' he said to him, 'why don't you read the
history of your own family? You will not find any savants there, but
you will find men of the right sort. Do you wish to be the first
pedant of your race?'"
There were but two alternatives for a lad of his class who had to make
a living, the Church and the Army. For Vauvenargues there could be no
question, he was born to be a soldier. At the age of eighteen he
entered the King's Regiment as a second-lieutenant, and he marched
into Lombardy under the orders of that illustrious marshal-general,
the Duke of Villars, now in his eighty-first year, but still the
unquestioned summit of French military genius. The idea of "following
Hannibal over the mountains" filled our young philosopher with an
enthusiasm beyond his years. He took part in the victories of Parma
and Guastalla, and he was probably with Villars at Turin when that
indomitable octogenarian died in June 1734. The War of the Polish
Succession presently sank into a mere armistice, and until 1736 we
dimly perceive Vauvenargues sharing the idle and boring life of the
officer who, too poor to retire to Paris, vegetates in some deplorable
frontier-garrison of Burgundy or Franche Comté. We know that he was
dissipated and idle, for he tells us so, but his confession is marred
by no sort of priggishness, and it is very important to insist that
this greatest of moralists never exaggerated the capacity of ordinary
human virtue. He pretended to no exceptional loftiness in his own
conduct; he demanded no excessive sacrifice on the part of others.
Suard speaks of the "sweet indulgence" which marked his relations with
those with whom he lived, and he tells us that Vauvenargues "gradually
rose above the frivolous occupations of his time of life, without ever
contracting, in the development of serious ideas, that austerity which
commonly accompanies the virtues of youth.... Vauvenargues, thrown
upon the world directly he ceased to be a child, learned to know men
before it occurred to him to judge them. He saw their weaknesses
before he had reflected on their duties; and virtue, when it entered
his heart, found there all possible dispositions to indulgence."
"Dispositions to indulgence"--we linger on this phrase, which has an
engaging beauty of its own. It distinguishes Vauvenargues at once from
all the great French moralists who preceded him, from La Rochefoucauld
with his savage cynicism, from Pascal with his contempt of the natural
man. Vauvenargues rejected the idea which had so tormented the great
spirits of the seventeenth century, that the noblest life was a life
of mortification, and he made no demand on the soul to divorce itself
from all human interests as being things naturally vile and
ignominious. He was to come down to us waving an olive-branch, the
most amiable of all idealists, an apostle of tolerance. He says that
he "hated scorn of human things." To this we must presently return,
but we may pause to note it here, as a faint light thrown over the
obscurity of his adolescence.
The Marquis of Mirabeau was the cousin of Vauvenargues and almost
exactly his coeval. The discovery of a packet of letters which passed
between the young men from the summer of 1737 to that of 1740 has
dissipated in some measure the otherwise total darkness which had
gathered around the youth of our philosopher. Mirabeau (who was to be
the father of the famous orator) was a man of talent, but violent,
chimerical and lawless, "farouche," as he himself put it. Later he was
the author of the redoubtable "Ami des Hommes." This prodigal uncle of
the Revolution, this dangerous and violent "physiocrate" as he called
himself, would seem divided, as pole from pole, from the
gently-reasoning, the benevolently-meditative Vauvenargues.
Nevertheless, they are seen in warm relation of friendship to each
other, and the letters exhibit their characteristics. Mirabeau
shamelessly pours out the catalogue of his shifting and venal loves,
in confidences which Vauvenargues invariably receives with discretion,
unupbraiding, but not volunteering any like confidence in his turn. A
single example must be quoted: Mirabeau, wishing to get rid of a
mistress of whom he is tired, but who is still devoted to him, writes
her a letter of the most studied insolence, cleverly turned, and sends
a copy of it, with infinite fatuity, to his friend. Vauvenargues
replies that he has read out this letter at dinner to his
fellow-officers, who have been greatly diverted by its wit. "But,"
said Vauvenargues, "we are sorry" (that is to say, of course,
Vauvenargues is sorry) "for the poor girl, who shows intelligence, and
who loves you." Could anything be a more indulgent, or at the same
time a more definite reproof? The germ of the _Réflexions_ is found in
this passing phrase, so unexpected in a soldier of that time and place.
An anecdote, preserved like a spark of light in the darkness of those
early garrison years, takes us a step further. The sentiment of
compassion was scarcely known to the early eighteenth century in
France; it was certainly never extended to those unfortunate women
who, as Vauvenargues puts it, "watch for young men as evening begins
to darken." He was himself accosted on one occasion by a girl, whom he
allowed to walk by his side while he gently questioned her. She easily
told him of the wretched poverty which had driven her to vice, and
Vauvenargues, after trying to revive in her some sentiment of modesty,
left her with the gift of a little money. His fellow-officers of the
regiment greeted the incident with shouts of mirth: such behaviour was
unheard of. Vauvenargues replied: "My friends, you laugh too easily. I
am sorry for these poor creatures, obliged to ply such a profession to
earn their bread. The world is full of sorrows which wring my heart;
if we are to be kind only to those who deserve it, we may never be
called upon at all. We must be indulgent to the weak who have more
need of support than the virtuous; and we must remember that the
errors of the unfortunate are always caused by the harshness of the
rich." M. Paléologue, in a very interesting passage, has remarked that
we have to wait a hundred years before there is a repetition in French
literature of this peculiar mansuétude.
Bearing in mind this capacity for indulgence, for pity, and
remembering how little it was conceived in the age he lived in, we may
look forward a moment to recognize that in his whole teaching
Vauvenargues differs from other moralists, but particularly from his
great predecessors in France, in that he has a constructive object. He
wishes exceedingly to help the unfortunate to live happily, easily and
profitably, and he regards almost the whole human race as more or less
unhappy. His desire, therefore, is not, as that of the
seventeenth-century moralists had been, to put human egotism in the
pillory and to pelt it with rotten eggs, but so far as possible to
encourage and affirm a decent, self-respecting egotism. Vauvenargues
finds the lock of life to be rusty; he touches it with the oiled
feather of his advice, so that the key may turn without resistance,
and without noise. He does not profess to strive after perfection in
conduct, but after improvement, and he is most careful never to
recommend violent means or an excessive austerity; nor does he condemn
or scold, even when his own humanity is most affronted, but he tries to
induce every one to make the best of his relations with other men
during the fugitive and frail duration of their common existence. If
he hated anything--in his universal benignity--Vauvenargues hated a
rigid puritanism. In one place he says, "We believe no longer in
witches, and yet there are people who still believe in Calvin!"
Vauvenargues was twenty-six years of age when the war of the Austrian
Succession broke out, and swept him into military action. He was
vegetating in garrison at Metz when the armies of Marshal de
Belle-Isle, the gallant and thrice-unfortunate, streamed eastward into
Germany and carried our philosopher with them. The Regiment of the
King, of which Vauvenargues was an officer, reached Bohemia in July
1741. In a night attack of extraordinary rapidity and audacity Prague
was captured, and Vauvenargues took a personal part in this adventure,
which must have cast fuel on the fire of his rising military ambition.
But the conduct of war is all composed of startling ups and downs, and
at the height of the successes of the French, their luck abandoned
them. Relieved by no reinforcements and pressed hard by famine, the
army of Belle-Isle could no longer hold Prague, and on the night of
December 16-17, 1742, began the retreat from Bohemia which is one of
the most noted disasters of the eighteenth century. Nine days later,
what remained of the French army arrived at Egra, but after a march
through thick fog over frozen ground, without food, without shelter,
in a chaotic frenzy of despair.
Vauvenargues was one of those who never recovered from the agony of
the retreat from Prague. Both his legs were frost-bitten, so that for
the remainder of his life he was lame; his eyesight was permanently
impaired; and he appears to have sown the seeds of the pulmonary
disease which was to carry him off five years later. But his tender
heart endured what were still severer pangs from the sufferings and
death of those of his companions for whom he had the greatest regard.
Among these the first place was held by Hippolyte de Seyres, whose
figure pervades the earliest developments of the genius of
Vauvenargues. De Seyres was a lieutenant in the philosopher's
regiment. He was only eighteen years of age, and Vauvenargues felt for
him the interest of an elder brother and the affection of a devoted
friend. We can trace the progress of the sentiment, in which are fully
revealed for the first time the peculiar qualities of our author's
mind. He does not conceal from himself the weaknesses of the character
of De Seyres, he blames him for his lack of suppleness, of simplicity
of manner, of self-confidence. He found in him a proud and delicate
spirit which exaggerated its own frailties and shrank morbidly from
their consequences. He was anxious that the spirit of the young man
should not be debased by low associations; he did not think the
slightly older officers who surrounded De Seyres to be wholesome
companions for him. The lad displayed a lack of moral force; he hoped
to succeed less by his own exertions than by the favour of others; he
was in despair over his own faults without having the energy to
correct them. It is in writing about De Seyres that Vauvenargues first
defines his central axiom, that the only sources of success are
virtue, genius and patience. He observed the lack of them all in De
Seyres, and his incapacity for expansion made his case the more
difficult to handle. "Son coeur est toujours serré," Vauvenargues
exclaims. But he nourished a deep and ever-deepening affection for
this sensitive lad, and became desirous, almost passionately desirous,
to lead him up to better things from out of the mediocrity of his
present associations.
It appears certain to me that it was the study expended on the
character of Hippolyte de Seyres and the shock received by his
dreadful death which gave the earliest expansion to the genius of
Vauvenargues and left their definite mark on his writings. I do not
know why this all-important episode seems to have attracted so little
of the attention of those who have written about him. The "Conseils à
un Jeune Homme," which was evidently finished in 1743, is the earliest
complete work of Vauvenargues which we possess; it contains in embryo
the whole of his teaching as a moralist, and it was written for the
guidance of young De Seyres. On the other hand, I think that Gilbert
and other editors are mistaken in attributing the "Discours sur la
Gloire" to the same date and occasion; it seems to me much later in
style, and addressed to a very different person. The note of the
address to De Seyres is accurately given in the exquisite essay
entitled "Love of the Noble Passions." But it appears that the edifice
built up by the tender affection of Vauvenargues was rased to the
ground in December 1742. The young friend so passionately guarded, so
anxiously watched, died under his eyes in the course of the terrible
retreat over the icy passes of Bohemia, a victim to the united agony
of famine, cold and fatigue. Vauvenargues wrote an "Éloge" on his
young friend, which betrays something of the hysterical agitation of
his own soul. Here is a fragment of this strange document--
"Open, ye formidable sepulchres! Solitary phantoms, speak, speak! What
unconquerable silence! O sad abandonment! O terror! What hand is it
which holds all nature paralyzed beneath its pressure? O thou hidden
and eternal Being, deign to dissipate the alarm in which my feeble
soul is plunged. The secret of Thy judgments turns my timid heart to
ice. Veiled in the recesses of Thy being, Thou dost forge fate and
time, and life and death, and fear and joy, and deceitful and
credulous hope. Thou dost reign over the elements and over hell in
revolt. The smitten air shudders at Thy voice. Redoubtable judge of
the dead, take pity upon my despair."
This is a voice we hear, so far as I remember, nowhere else in the
French literature of the eighteenth century. There is a certain accent
of Bossuet in it; it is still more like the note which a group of
English poets were striking. It may really seem to us an extraordinary
coincidence that the "Éloge" on Hippolyte de Seyres should belong to
the very same year, 1743, which saw the publication of Blair's "Grave"
and Young's "Night Thoughts."