with Vauvenargues; it was in this case the mask worn by the intensity
of his feeling, but he confesses in an early letter, "I like sometimes
to string big words together, and to lose myself in a period; I make a
jest of it." But after this outburst of panic grief in 1743 we see no
more trace of such a tendency to eloquence. He became more and more
completely himself, that is to say, very simple intellectually, in a
pedantic age. He adopted, indeed, a certain gravity at which we may
now smile; he did not approve of fairy-tales and fables, on the ground
that anything which came between direct truth and the receptive mind
of man was a disadvantage. "The disease of our age is to want to make
jokes about everything," he complains.
To poor Vauvenargues life was not a laughing matter. His health had
been completely ruined by the disastrous campaigns in Austria, and by
the hardships of garrison life; and he was feeling more and more
sharply that pinch of genteel poverty which is the hardest of all to
bear. But if he never laughed, this martyr of the soul never ceased to
smile. His perpetual sufferings did not affect his gentle sobriety of
conversation. Those whose privilege it was to see Vauvenargues during
these last years of his brief existence are united in their report of
his magnanimity. Voltaire wrote, "I have always found him the most
unfortunate of human beings and the most tranquil." He was notable for
his "indulgent goodness," his "constant peace," his "justice of
heart," his "rectitude of soul." His conversation, so Marmontel
reports to us, had something more animated, more delicate, than even
his divine writings. The same acute observer noted that in the heart
of Vauvenargues, when he reflected upon the misery of mankind, pity
took the place of indignation and hatred. Sensitive, serene,
compassionate, affable, he tried to conceal from his friends as much
as possible his own pain, and even when it was evident that he
suffered most, no one dared to be melancholy in his presence.
In the fleeting and impoverished life of Vauvenargues his friendships
were the main adventure. We have mentioned a name which is too
frequently the object of malignity on English lips, the name of
Voltaire. No one would pretend that the multiform energy of this giant
of literature did not take some unseemly directions and several
unlovely shapes. But the qualities of Voltaire must, in the eyes of
any unbiassed observer, vastly overtop his defects. If, however, we
wish to see Voltaire at his best, we must contemplate him in relation
to our soldier-philosopher. As soon as his health had recovered a
little from the horror of the Bohemian campaign, Vauvenargues took the
step of writing to Voltaire, then a stranger, for his opinion on that
crying question, the relative greatness of Corneille and of Racine, a
question to all Frenchmen like that between predestination and
free-will to Milton's rebel angels. This was towards the end of 1743,
when Voltaire, who had reached his fiftieth year, was recognised as
the first living historian and critic in France, and had been recalled
to court through the good offices of Mme du Châtelet. It was, no doubt,
at a happy moment that Vauvenargues' random letter arrived, Voltaire
responded with ardour; Vauvenargues quickly became to him, as
Marmontel says, what Plato was to Socrates, and nothing in the long
life of Voltaire shows him in a more charming light than does his
devotion to the young friend whom he called "the sweet hope of the
remainder of my days." After the death of the philosopher, Voltaire
wrote a brief, but invaluable, account of their relations, which had
lasted, without a cloud, until the death of Vauvenargues.
He reminded Voltaire of Pascal, whose "incurable disease was consoled
by study," but the elder friend noted a striking distinction; the
eloquence of Pascal was fiery and imperious, that of Vauvenargues was
"insinuating." The powerful physical force of Voltaire was softened by
the suffering of his young companion, for whom "nature had poured out
large draughts of hemlock," and who, "while all his body sank into
dissolution, preserved in spirit that perfect tranquillity which the
pure alone enjoy." Although Vauvenargues was twenty years younger than
his friend, Voltaire succumbed to the gravity of his demeanour; like
the fellow-officers at Arras or at Metz, we smile to find him
addressing Vauvenargues as _mon père_. One of the philosopher's maxims
is, "Great thoughts proceed from the heart," and Voltaire in a note
has added, "In writing this, though he knew it not, he painted his own
portrait." He found in Vauvenargues "the simplicity of a timid child,"
and it seems that he had a difficulty in overcoming his modesty so far
as to make him write down those Reflections which are now placed for
ever among the masterpieces of French literature. It is to Voltaire
that we owe the fact that Vauvenargues found resolution enough to
become an author.
A typical instance of the mixture of courage and tact in the young
author is to be found in the attitude which he took up towards
Voltaire with regard to the Marquise de Pompadour, without in the
least offending his tempestuous friend. That remarkable young lady,
then still known as la petite Étoile, had succeeded in catching the
King's eye, and was soaring into the political heavens like a rocket,
carrying, among other incongruous objects, the genius of Voltaire in
her glittering train. Voltaire must have boasted to his young friend
that his fortune was made. Vauvenargues surprisingly expresses in his
reply the evil which must be done by great authors who flatter vice
and think to conceal its corruption by heaping flowers over a lie. The
incident is important for us, because it led Vauvenargues, thus
disappointed in Voltaire as he had been disappointed in Mirabeau, to
examine into the sources of the low moral condition of the age. He
attributed it to "le mépris de la gloire," and he set himself to
define this quality and to impress it, with all the force of
repetition, on the dulled consciences of his contemporaries.
It is extremely difficult, it is well-nigh impossible, to find an
equivalent in English for the word "gloire." It is a French
conception, and one to which our language does not readily, or
gracefully, lend itself. In the mind of Vauvenargues the idea of
"gloire" took the central place, and we may form an intelligent
conception of the meaning he stamped upon the word, by repeating some
of his axioms.
He says: "The flush of dawn is not so lovely as the earliest
experiences of _gloire_. _Gloire_ makes heroes beautiful." Again:
"Nothing is so essential as renown, and nothing so surely gives renown
as merit; these are things that reason itself has united, and why
should we distinguish true _gloire_ from merit, which is the source of
it, and of which it is the proof?" This moral union of merit, glory
and renown, in triple splendour revolving round each other, was the
main object of Vauvenargues' contemplation, and he admits that the
central passion of his life was "l'amour de la gloire." What, then, is
the exact meaning of "la Gloire," which the dictionaries superficially
translate by "glory,"--a very different thing?
Vauvenargues starts a new conception of the value of self-esteem, or
rather of the desire of being esteemed by others. The seventeenth
century had poured its vials of contempt over the _amour-propre_ of
mankind, and no doubt that had led to a corresponding decline in the
energy of the nation. Pascal had severely ridiculed the vanity which
he says is anchored in the heart of man, and he actually mocks at the
idea of a desire for renown; expressing his astonishment that even
philosophers have the fatuity to wish for fame. Vauvenargues is
probably thinking of Pascal when he says that those who dilate upon
the inevitable nothingness of human glory would feel vexation if they
had to endure the open contempt of a single individual. Men are proud
of little things--of dancing well or even of skating gracefully, or of
still meaner accomplishments, yet those very persons despise real
renown. "But us," he says in one of his noble outbursts, "but us it
excites to labour and virtue." We note, then, at once that the
_amour-propre_ of the seventeenth century, the sentiment against which
we saw the most burning arrows of La Rochefoucauld directed, was not
the source of Vauvenargues' desire of glory; that with him renown was
not a matter of egotistic satisfaction, but of altruistic stimulus,
awakening in others, by a happy rivalry, sentiments of generosity and
self-sacrifice which might redeem society and the dying world of
France. And this may perhaps at this point be observed as the centre
of his action, namely the discovery that a wholesome desire for fame
proceeds not from our self-satisfaction, but from our profound sense
of emptiness, of imperfection.
How needful the lesson was, no one who examines the social history of
the first half of the eighteenth century can doubt. Without falling
into errors of a Puritanic kind, we cannot fail to see that opinion
and action alike had become soft, irresolute, superficial; that strong
views of duty and piety and justice were half indulged in, half
sneered at, and not at all acted upon. The great theologians who
surrounded Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux, had died one by one, and had
left successors who were partly pagan, partly atheist. Art and
literature tripped after the flowered skirts of the emancipated
Duchess of Maine. Looking round the world of France in 1746,
Vauvenargues could but cry, like a preacher in the wilderness, "we
have fallen into decadence, into moral desuetude," but he cried
without anger, remembering that "still the love of _gloire_ is the
invisible soul of all those who are capable of any virtue."
It was a critical moment in the history of France. After the long and
painful wars of Louis XIV. the army had become unpopular; it was the
fashion to sneer at it. The common soldiers were considered, and often
were, the offscourings of the community. The officers, who had left
their homes too soon, in most cases, to acquire the rudiments of
education, were bored with garrison life, and regretted Paris, which
they made every excuse to regain. They affected to have no curiosity
about military science, and to talk "army shop" was the worst of bad
form. Those who were poor lived and grumbled in their squalor; those
who were rich gave themselves up to sinful extravagance. There was no
instinctive patriotism in any section of the troops. What pleasure can
a man have in being a soldier if he possesses neither talent for war,
nor the esteem of his men, nor a taste for glory? It is Vauvenargues
himself, who had seen all classes of officers, who asks that question.
From his "Réflexions" of 1746 a chapter on "Our Armies at the Present
Moment" was omitted, and not published in its proper sequence until
long after his death. No doubt its searching exposure of the rot in
the military state of France was the cause of this suppression.
"Courage," he says in this deleted chapter of his book, "courage,
which our ancestors admired as the first of virtues, is now generally
regarded as a popular error." Those few officers who still desire to
see their country glorious, are forced to retire into civil life
because they cannot endure a condition in which there is no reward but
shame for a man of courage and ambition.
These were prominent among the considerations which filled the mind of
Vauvenargues when, at the age of twenty-nine, he saw himself driven
out of military life by the rapid aggravation of ill-health. His
thoughts turned to diplomacy. He greatly admired the writings of Sir
William Temple, on whom he may have partly modelled his own style as
an essayist; he dreamed of becoming an ambassador of the same class,
known, as Temple was, "by their writings no less than by their
immortal actions." But his inexorable bad luck followed him in this
design. A pathetic letter to the King remained unanswered, and so did
another to Amelot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
After waiting a long time he wrote again to Amelot, and this second
letter is highly characteristic of the temper and condition of
Vauvenargues--
"MONSEIGNEUR.
"I am painfully distressed that the letter which I had the honour of
writing to you, as well as that which I took the liberty of asking you
to forward to the King, have not been able to arrest your attention.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that a minister so fully occupied as
you are should not find time to examine such letters; but,
Monseigneur, will you permit me to point out to you that it is
precisely this moral impossibility for a gentleman, who has no claim
but zeal, to reach his master, which leads to that discouragement that
is noticeable in all the country nobility, and which extinguishes all
emulation?
"I have passed, Monseigneur, my youth far from all worldly
distractions, in order to prepare myself for the species of employment
for which it was my belief that my temperament designed me; and I was
bold enough to think that so concentrated an effort would place me at
least on a level with those who depend for all their fortune upon
their intrigues and upon their pleasures. It overwhelms me,
Monseigneur, to discover that the confidence which I had based mainly
on the love of my duty, should be so disappointed. My health no longer
permitting me to continue my services in the war, I have written to M.
the Duke de Biron to beg him to appoint my successor. I could not, in
a situation so piteous, refrain from informing you of my despair.
Pardon me, Monseigneur, if it has led me into any extravagance of
expression.
"I am, etc."
To this last appeal the Minister for Foreign Affairs did respond in a
brief and perfunctory note, promising to find an occasion of bringing
the talents of Vauvenargues to the notice of the King, but nothing
resulted. Vauvenargues had been living in a dream of military glory,
and had been thirsting to serve his country in the loftiest and most
responsible capacities. His very physical appearance now completed the
bankruptcy of his wishes, for he was attacked with the smallpox, which
disfigured him so badly that, to use his own expression, "it prevented
his soul from appearing in his features." Thus without fortune, or
profession, without hope for the future, half-blind, with gangrened
limbs that tottered under his feeble body, Vauvenargues started on the
steadily downward path which was to lead in less than four years to
his grave. History presents to us no more dolorous figure of physical
and social failure, nor a more radiant example of moral success.
The alternative now presented itself of a wretched solitude in the
castle of his Provençal ancestors, or a garret, perhaps even more
wretched, but certainly far less solitary, in Paris. In either case it
would be necessary to relinquish all the luxuries, all the comforts of
life. He chose to finish his suffering years in Paris, and in humble
furnished rooms in the street of the Peacock, where he was consoled by
the visits of Voltaire and Marmontel. We find him settled there in May
1745, and seven months later there crept into circulation an anonymous
volume of moral essays, which was absolutely ignored by the literary
world of France. We do not appreciate to the full the Calvary which
Vauvenargues so meekly mounted, unless we realize that to all his
other failures was added a complete disregard of his ideas by the
literary public of his own day. He died unknown, save by two or three
friends, having never experienced anything but languor, disappointment
and obscurity. Under the pseudonym of Clazomène, just before his
death, he drew a picture of his own fortune and character which proves
that he had no illusion about himself, and which yet contains not a
murmur against the injustice of fate nor a breath of petulance or
resentment. "Let no one imagine," this portrait closes, "that
Clazomène would exchange his wretchedness for the prosperity of weak
men; fortune may sport with the wisdom of brave souls, but it has no
power to subdue their courage."
It is time, however, to examine the actual compositions of our
author.[18] Until his friendship with Voltaire began, Vauvenargues had
not given much attention to verse, but he now began a series of
critical essays on the poets. He says, in the course of these
"Réflexions," that what little he knew of poetry he owed to M. de
Voltaire. His remarks on this subject, however, are more independent
than he would give us to suppose, and they are always worthy of
attention because they illustrate the moral attitude of Vauvenargues
himself. He was not embarrassed by tradition in advancing along his
road through the masterpieces of literature. He was always an amateur,
never a man in bondage to the "authorities;" he seems, indeed, to have
avowed a dislike for general reading: "Pascal avait peu lu, ainsi que
Malebranche," was his excuse. In the case of Pascal, we may question
the fact, but it is recorded that when at last Malebranche was
persuaded to read Descartes' "Traité de l'homme," it excited him so
violently as to bring on palpitation of the heart. Such are the
dangers of a retarded study of the classics. Vauvenargues was no less
inflammable. He met with the tragedies of Racine at a moment when the
reputation of that poet had sunk to its lowest point, and, totally
indifferent to the censure of the academical sanhedrim, he extolled
him as a master-anatomist of the human heart.
[Footnote 18: The writings of Vauvenargues exist in a
confusion which is not likely to be ever remedied, for the
bulk of his MSS. were burned during the Commune in May 1871.
But much gratitude is owing to Suard (1806) and Gilbert
(1857) for their pious labours. A variorum edition might
even yet be attempted, and although not complete, might at
least be final.]
In considering the observations of Vauvenargues with regard to poets,
we must bear in mind that he and his contemporaries did not seek from
poetry what we require in the twentieth century. The critics of the
early eighteenth century in France talked about Homer and Virgil, but
what they really admired were Ariosto and Pope. Voltaire, the greatest
of them, considered the "épopée héroï-comique" the top-stone of modern
practical effort; we know what astonishing feats he was himself guilty
of in that species of architecture. But his whole teaching and
practice tended towards an identity of speech between prose and verse,
the prosodical pattern or ornament being the sole feature which
distinguished the latter from the former. His own poetry, when it was
not fugitive or satiric, was mainly philosophical, that is to say, it
did not stray beyond the confines of logic and wit. At the same time,
Voltaire was an energetic protagonist for verse, and he did very much
to prevent the abandonment of this instrument at a time when prose, in
such hands as those of Montesquieu and Buffon, was manifestly in the
ascendant. He earnestly recommended the cultivation of a form in which
precision of thought and elegance of language were indispensable, and
he employed it in tragedies which we find it impossible to read, but
which enchanted the ear and fancy of Vauvenargues.
The taste of the age of Louis XV. affected to admire Corneille to the
disadvantage of all other rivals, and Voltaire was not far from
blaming Vauvenargues for his "extreme predilection" for Racine. But
Vauvenargues, with unexpected vivacity, took up the cudgels, and
accused the divine Corneille of "painting only the austere, stern,
inflexible virtues," and of falling into the affectation of mistaking
bravado for nobility, and declamation for eloquence. He is extremely
severe on the faults of the favourite tragedian, and he blames
Corneille for preferring the gigantic to the human, and for ignoring
the tender and touching simplicity of the Greeks. It is from the point
of view of the moralist that these strictures are now important; they
show us that Vauvenargues in his reiterated recommendation of virtue
and military glory did not regard those qualities from the Cornelian
point of view, which he looked upon as fostering a pompous and falsely
"fastueux" conception of life. He blamed Corneille's theatrical
ferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the passage "a
detestable piece of criticism" and ran his blue pencil through it. No
doubt the fact is that Vauvenargues saw in the rhetoric of Corneille a
parody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade.
The publications of Vauvenargues during his lifetime come under two
categories. His "Introduction à la Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain" is
a short book, and it is also a fragment. The author had begun to
collect notes for it during his Bohemian campaign, in 1741; but "those
passions which are inseparable from youth, and ceaseless physical
infirmity, brought on by the war, interrupted my studies," he says.
Voltaire has expressed his amazement that under such piteous
conditions, Vauvenargues had the fortitude to pursue them at all.
There seems to be a change apparent in the object he put before him;
he set out, like Locke, to write an essay on the Human Understanding,
but he ended by putting together a chain of maxims. He quoted Pascal,
who had said, "All good maxims are in the world; we have only got to
apply them," but though Vauvenargues takes this dictum as his text he
refutes it. He says that maxims originally "good," in Pascal's sense,
may have grown sleepy in popular use, and may have ceased to act, so
that we ought to rid ourselves of conventional prejudice and go to the
fountain-head, to try all spirits, in fact, and find out what spirits
really are of God. When Vauvenargues began to reflect, he was
astonished at the inexactitude and even self-contradiction of the
philosophical language of his day. He was not, and probably never
would have become, what we understand now as a philosopher. He was a
moralist, pure and simple, and had no more relation with men like
Descartes or Berkeley than a rousing revivalist preacher has with a
regius professor of Theology.
The only thing which really interested Vauvenargues was the social
duty of man, and to discover what that is he attempted to define
morals, politics and religion. He had an intense desire for clear
guidance, and he waited for the heavenly spark to fall. He said to
himself, before he made it plain to others, that if we are not guided
by _truth_, we fall into the pit. There was a certain childishness in
his attitude in this matter, for he was inclined to regard abstract
truth as the only one worthy of pursuit. That he was advancing in
breadth of view is shown by the fact that he cancelled in the second
edition of his book a whimsical passage in which he urged people who
were studying conchology, to throw away their shells, asking them to
consider "whether glory is but a name, virtue all a mistake, and law
nothing else than a phantom." The "Introduction" is all written in
this spirit; it is a passionate appeal to the French nation to leave
mean and trivial pursuits, and to live for pure and passionate ideals,
for glory gained by merit, and as the reward of solid and strenuous
effort.
Vauvenargues' attitude to the English moralists has not been
sufficiently examined. So far as is known he never visited this
country, although he desired to do so. In one of his letters he speaks
of intending to consult a famous oculist in London, but this project
was not carried out; his poverty doubtless prevented it. Whether he
knew English is not certain, but he appears to have read Temple and
Locke, possibly in the original, and a reference to a remarkable
English contemporary appears to have hitherto escaped observation. In
the "Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain," he speaks of
a writer who has argued that private vices are public benefits, and he
attempts to show that this is a fallacy. He returns, less definitely,
to the same line of thought in the "Discours sur la gloire," where he
denies that vice has any part in stimulating social action. It is
strange that no one, so far as I know, has observed this proof that
Vauvenargues was acquainted with the celebrated paradox of Bernard
Mandeville, whose "Fable of the Bees" was in 1747 continuing to cause
so scandalous a sensation, and was still so completely misunderstood.
There seems, occasionally, a trace of the idealism of Shaftesbury in
the colour of Vauvenargues' phrase, but on this it would be dangerous
to insist.