who knows that what he says of you is worth having, even if it be
flattery. La Bruyère had his reasons for flattering _Arténice_: it is
agreed that he was very fond of her. So were many others: she had her
adventures, though he did not share them. Evidently he knew that she
was not for him; for there is no tarnish of jealousy upon his praise.
He was one whom there were few to love, and he found very few to
praise. But he praised and loved Madame de Boislandry.
Although he became a person of consequence from the day his book was
out, he was not chosen to the Academy until 1693, and then not without
several postponements, considerable effort on the side of his friends
and strenuous opposition from Fontenelle and his partisans, whom he had
fustigated as Les Théobaldes in his _Caractères_. When he was in fact
chosen it was a very near thing. A M. de la Loubère, who blocked his
road, retired in his favour and transferred to him the suffrages of his
own supporters. For that generous act La Bruyère paid him a handsome
and a happy compliment in his address of reception:
“A father,” he said, “takes his son to the theatre: a great crowd, the
door besieged. But he is a tall man and a stout. He breaks a way to
the turnstile, and as he is on the point of passing in, puts the lad
before him, who, without that foresight, would either have come in late
or not come in at all.”
A pretty turn to give his gratitude! Apart from that he was
unnecessarily provocative. He went out of his way to praise Racine at
the expense of Corneille, which, seeing that Thomas Corneille was a
brother, and Fontenelle a nephew of the great man, and that both were
present was asking for trouble. Trouble there was--efforts to refuse
him inscription in the archives, a foaming attack in the _Mercure
Galant_, a plot to print and publish separately the address of his
co-nominee, and so on. But the Abbé Bignon stood by him; both addresses
were published together, La Bruyère’s with a fighting preface, and
inscription in the records followed.
In his preface he girds at his critics for not having seen what he
was driving at in _Les Caractères_. They had taken it, he says, for a
collection of aphorisms and sentences loosely assorted under headings,
with portraits here and there of distinguished persons, scandalous or
malicious as might be. They took it, in short, for a nosegay of flowers
of speech, selected more for their pungency than their fragrance,
relieved by foliage luxuriant enough, but beset with thorns. That was
not at all his own idea of it.
“Have they not observed,” he asks, “that of the sixteen chapters
comprised in it, there are fifteen which, applied to the discovery
of what is false and absurd in the objects of the passions and
attachments of mankind, aim only at breaking down the growths which
first enfeeble and presently extinguish the knowledge of God in
men--nothing therefore but preliminary to the sixteenth and last, in
which atheism is attacked, and possibly routed.”
I confess that if the critics had not detected all that in the plan
or content of Sections I-XV, there is much excuse for them. I am in
the same condemnation. It is true that those sections may be said to
attack false gods in general: folly, ostentation, vainglory, evil
concupiscence and such like. It is true that La Bruyère is a _censor
morum_, like many a man before him and since. But it is not at all
obvious that he is clearing a way by his analytic philosophy for a
synthetic which will seat the true God firmly on his throne in the
heart. Nor is the effort to do that conspicuous. “I feel that there
is a God,” he says in his sixteenth section, “and I do not feel that
there is no God. That is enough for me; all the reasoning in the world
is beyond the purpose: I conclude that God is.” Very good; but then,
why all the reasoning in the book? Pascal said the same thing, rather
better. “It is the heart that feels God, not the reason. That is faith:
God sensible to the heart, not to the reason.” It is probably as near
as one can go. But how does La Bruyère make it more pointed by what
has gone before? If you prove to demonstration that the goods of this
world are but vanity, does that of itself imply, first that there is
another world, whose goods (secondly) are not vain? Not at all. My
impression is that La Bruyère had no such large intention when he
began, and that if he had had it, he would have declared it in his
opening observations. He was moralist and satirist both; but as much of
one as the other. Character rather than characteristics attracted him,
as I think, and the sharp sentences he aimed at were more literary than
ethical. As for maxim-drawing, although he drew plenty, he expressly
disavowed it. “I ought to say that I have had no desire to write
maxims. Maxims are the laws of morality, and I own that I have neither
the authority nor the genius which would fit me to legislate.... Those,
in a word, who make maxims desire to be believed. I, on the other hand,
am willing that anyone should say of me that I have not always well
observed, provided that he himself observe better.”
And the last sentence in the book is this: “If these _Caractères_ of
mine are not relished I shall be surprised; and if they are I shall be
equally so.”
There is a pose in that; but it is a literary pose.
He did not live long to enjoy his academic dignity. He made but one
appearance at the table, and then supported the candidature of somebody
whose name was not before the assembly. His proposal was of Dacier
the classic, but he owned that he should prefer to see Madame Dacier
chosen. On the 10th of May 1696, just a month after Madame de Sévigné,
he died of apoplexy at Versailles. He had rooms in the Chateau opening
on to the leads--bedroom, book-closet, and dressing-room. The inventory
of his effects shows him to have been possessed of some three hundred
books. Very few of his letters exist: one to Ménage about Theophrastus,
one to Bussy, thanking him for his vote and sending him the sixth
edition of _Les Caractères_, others to Condé, of earlier date,
about the progress of his grandson. Two letters to him from Jérôme
Phélypeaux, the son of Pontchartrain, survive, which hint at a happy
relationship between the scholar and the young blade. Phélypeaux, who
was just one-and-twenty, chaffs the philosopher; calls him a “fort joli
garçon,” suspects him of being “un des plus rudes joueurs de lansquenet
qui soit au monde.” La Bruyère’s solitary letter to his young friend is
in a light-hearted vein too, chiefly about the weather.
It is so hot, he says, that yesterday he cooked a cake on his leads,
and an excellent cake. To-day it has rained a little. Then he plays the
fool very pleasantly. “Whether it will rain to-morrow, or whether it
won’t, is a thing, sir, which I could not pronounce if the health of
all Europe depended upon it. All the same, I believe, morally speaking,
that there will be a little rain; that when that rain shall have ceased
it will leave off raining, unless indeed it should begin to rain
again.” It is evidence of a sound heart that a learned man can write
so to a young friend; and as it is much better to love a man than not,
I close upon that frivolous, but happy note. La Bruyère was to live a
year more in his attic on the leads. Let us hope that he baked some
more cakes and wrote many more letters to young M. Phélypeaux.
COULEUR DE ROSE
Sainte-Beuve, in one of his early _Lundis_, tells a touching story
of Madame de Pompadour, the frail and pretty lady who was forced by
circumstances rather than native bent into becoming a Minister of
State, and one, at that, who had to measure swords with the great
Frederick of Prussia. At one stage of her career she had hopes of a
match between a daughter of her married state and a natural son of
Louis. There seemed to be the makings of a Duc du Maine in the lad,
of a Duchess consequently for her family. And that was the simple
objective of those of her faction who favoured the scheme. But her
own was simpler still. She spoke her real mind about it to Madame de
Hausset, her lady-in-waiting, from whose Mémoires Sainte-Beuve quotes
it.
“Un brevet de duc pour mon fils,” she said, “c’est bien peu; et c’est à
cause que c’est son fils que je le préfère, ma bonne, à tous les petits
ducs de la Cour. Mes petits enfants participeraient en ressemblance du
grand-père et de la grand’-mère, et ce mélange que j’ai l’espoir de
voir ferait mon bonheur un jour.”
Interesting revelation. “Les larmes lui vinrent aux yeux,” says Madame
de Hausset. She was bourgeoise, you see, this poor Pompadour, with
the homely instincts, the longing for the snug interior, the home,
the family life which characterise the plainly-born. She had been a
Mademoiselle Poisson. Poisson indeed! What had a Mademoiselle Poisson
to do with a Fils de Saint-Louis, or in a Parc aux Cerfs? Nothing
whatever in first intention, at least; rather she was all for love and
the world well lost. She had had her dreams, wherein Louis was to be
her “jo,” and they were to climb the hill together. The ideal remained
with her, for ever unrealised, always, it seemed, just realisable; and
her foreign and military adventures, the certain ruin of her country,
were so many shifts to arrive--she and Louis together, hand in hand--at
some Island of the Blest. No beautiful end will justify means so
unbeautiful, but to some extent it excuses them.
Exactly on a level with that tale is one which I read somewhere lately:
also a French tale. It was about the exorbitantly-loved mistress of
some officer, who craved the rights of a wife, and worried him until
she had them--with the result that she obtained also the wrongs. She in
fact became what the man’s wife was at the moment: in her turn she was
_trompée_. And what were the rights for which she risked, and indeed
lost, everything she had? To preside at his breakfast-table, to dine
_vis-à-vis_ at home instead of at a restaurant, to sleep with her head
on his shoulder. That was all. And when she had it, her pride and joy
became his ineffable weariness. He carried his vice elsewhere. There
is the whole difference between two classes there--between Louis le
Désiré and his Poisson; between two instincts--Sentiment and Curiosity;
between two ideals--Distraction and Fulfilment. There is very nearly
all the essential difference that exists between men and women, the
active and the passive principle in human nature.
Behind the sentimental there is always a moral reality. It may not be
all the sentimentalists believe it; they may mistake appearance of the
thing for the thing itself; but there is a reality. To preside over a
man’s tea-cups is symbolic; to be his wife is more than symbolic, for
a symbol may be a sacrament--and that is a reality. The wedding-ring
is a sacrament for those who seek fulfilment of their being. To those
who seek distraction of it, it simply puts a point to their need.
To the seekers of distraction there is neither end, nor symbol, nor
sacrament. Mr. Hardy once wrote a parable upon the theme--the Pursuit
of the Well-Beloved it was called; and after his manner he gave a
mocking twist to it. In it a nympholept, a sort of Louis XV, pursued
successively a woman, her daughter and her grand-daughter, and having
caught them one after another, found that there was nothing in it. Last
of all, the man died also, but not without feeling pretty sure that if
he could have waited for the great-grand-daughter all would have been
well with him. Such shadows we are, pursuing shadows. But women are
realists. They can see detail and fulfil themselves with that, failing
the great thing. That is a strength which is also a weakness, fatal
to them in many cases. Only, even so, it is not always easy to decide
which it is. Was it strength or weakness in Romney’s wife? She nursed
him through a fever, herself then a young girl, and he married her for
her pains. He lived with her for five years, gave her a family, and
left her. He hardly saw her again for forty years, when he returned,
broken and old, to Kendal, where he had left her, to be nursed once
more out of illness. So far as we know, she had no reproaches for
him. He died in her arms. What reality she may have found to support
her constancy one can hardly say; but at least she had more than the
nympholept had ever found in his forty years in the wilderness. Enough
indeed to give her fulfilment at the last.
I have touched a thing there, or I am the more deceived, which Mr.
Lucas has entirely overlooked in a recent book of his. By so doing he
has turned what might have been a touching piece of sentiment into
something which, luckily for us, exists mainly in club arm-chairs. We
have had _Science from an Easy-Chair_, and none the worse for being
so delivered. But arm-chair ethics is another matter. In Mr. Lucas’s
_Rose and Rose_ a doctor, with a good cook (an important factor) and
an Epicurean friend, who has the knack of making cynicisms sound true,
by using a genial manner, becomes guardian of a child, who grows up
into a nice girl, and in due course falls in love. She chooses a man
whom the doctor dislikes, whom she, however, prefers to several other
candidates, against whom there are really only nods and winks from the
doctor and the Epicurean on the sofa. She marries, and isn’t happy. Her
husband, without being a prig--he had not enough colour for that--was a
precisian, careful of his money, who did his own housekeeping. He had
not such a good cook as the doctor had, and may have felt that Rose’s
education in housewifery had been neglected. Probably it had. A good
cook will coddle her clients, but not impart her mystery. I daresay
the husband was trying; but he seems to have been good-tempered and
honourable; he paid his way, and he gave Rose I a Rose II. That at
least should have been an asset on his side of the account. But not at
all. After a time, not clearly illuminated, in which nothing particular
seems to have happened--except one thing--Rose I ups and elopes with
the one thing, leaving her husband and Rose II in the lurch. She had
known her lover before marriage. He had very white teeth, and she had
nursed him through an illness. Well, when she found him again, his
teeth were still quite white, and he had another illness. So there you
were. She went off with him, I think to Singapore, and did not reappear
until the last chapter, by which time her ailing lover had cleaned his
teeth for the last time. The doctor, who still had the good cook, and
had adopted and brought up Rose II to the marriage-point, then received
back with a beating heart his Rose I.
A doctor of seventy, with a good cook and digestion, an arm-chair
and a rather good cellar of port, fortified also by the caustic wit
of an epicurean patient, is capable of much. He might think (as Mr.
Lucas’s did) that it was all right. He would be for the line of least
resistance, and that would certainly be the baby. He happened to like
them--which put him in a strong position. But his Rose I went much
further than even Jean-Jacques had gone. He took his superfluous
children to the _Enfants Trouvés_. Rose simply dropped hers. “De Charon
pas un mot!” And so far as I can find out not a word afterwards, until
she came home in the last chapter, as if nothing had happened. Then, if
you please, Rose II takes the prodigal mother to her bosom, and they
all lived happily ever after. Life is not so simple as all that. It
could not be while women were women.
The poor “unfortunate females” with whom I began this article are
against it. Mrs. Romney is against it. To the best of my belief the
middle-class, to which the Roses belong, is still against it. Many
marriages are unhappy, and many children left to shift; but not yet in
the middle-class to any dangerous extent. A doctor in an easy-chair,
with a good cook and cellar, does not count. His cook has unclassed him.
ART AND HEART
GEORGE SAND AND FLAUBERT
Flaubert is, or was, the fashion in high-art circles; George Sand was
never that, and to-day is little more than a name in any circle. Yet in
the familiar letters, lately published in translation, translated by
Aimée McKenzie, between a pair so ill-assorted in temperament, so far
apart in the pigeon-holes of memory, it is she who proves herself the
better man.
Gustave Flaubert will live for times to come less by what he did than
by his gesture in doing it. He was, before all, the explicit artist,
the art-for-art’s-sake, neck-or-nothing artist; and as such he will
stand in history when these strange creatures come up for review. He
made the enormous assumption of an aristocracy of intelligence. As,
once upon a time, Venice, and later on we British, claimed to hold the
gorgeous East in fee, so Flaubert, and the handful of poets, novelists
and playwrights whom he admitted as his equals, looked upon the world
at large with its hordes of busy people as so much stuff for the
workshop. Bourgeois all, Philistines all. They were the quarry; upon
them as they went about their affairs he would peep and botanise. He
would lay bare their hearts in action, their scheming brains, their
secret longings, dreams, agonies of remorse, desire, fear. All this as
a god might do it, a being apart, and for the diversion of a select
Olympus. It was useless to write for the rest, for they could not
even begin to understand you. More, it was an unworthy condescension.
It exposed you either to infamy, as when they prosecuted you for an
outrage against morals, or to ridicule, as when they asked you what
your novel “proved.” Write for ever, wear yourself to a thread, hunting
word or _nuance_; but write for the Olympians, not for the many. Such
was the doctrine of Flaubert, gigantic, bald, cavern-eyed, with the
moustaches of a Viking, and the voice of a bull; and so Anatole France
saw him in 1873:
“I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour
hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand
bourgeois with their throats cut. Striding to and fro, the
honest giant ground under his heels the brains of the municipal
councillors of Rouen.”
That was the sort of man who, in 1863, struck up a friendship with
George Sand.
And she, the overflowing, mannish, brown old woman, his antithesis; her
vast heart still smouldering like a sleepy volcano; she who had kicked
over all the traces, sown all the wild oats, made spillikins of the Ten
Commandments, played leapfrog with the frying-pan and the fire; written
a hundred novels, as many plays, a thousand reviews, ten thousand
love-letters; grandmother now at Nohant, with a son whom she adored,
a little Aurore whom she idolised; still enormously busy, writing a
novel with each hand, a play with each foot, and reviews (perhaps) with
her nose; she of _Elle et Lui_, of _Consuelo_ and _Valentine_ and
_François le Champi_--how on earth came she to cope with the Berserk of
Croisset, who hated every other person in the world, took four years
to write a novel, and read through a whole library for the purpose?
The answer is easy. She made herself his grandmother, took him to her
capacious bosom, and handled him as he had never been handled before.
Affectionately--to him she was “cher maitre,” to her he was her “pauvre
enfant” or her “cher vieux”--but she could poke fun at him too. She
used to send him letters from imaginary bourgeois, injured by his
attacks, or stimulated by them, as might be. One was signed, “Victoire
Potelet, called Marengo Lirondelle, Veuve Dodin”:
“I have read your distinguished works, notably Madame Bavarie,
of which I think I am capable of being a model to you.... I am
well preserved for my advanced age and if you have a repugnance
for an artist in misfortune I should be content with your ideal
sentiments. You can then count on my heart not being able to
dispose of my person being married to a man of light character who
squandered my wax cabinet wherein were all figures of celebrities,
Kings, Emperors ancient and modern and celebrated crimes....”
A delicious letter to write and to receive.
With all that, in spite of her impulse to love, to admire, to fall
at his feet, she saw what was the matter with her “pauvre enfant.”
_Madame Bovary_ hurt her because it was heartless. She understood
the prosecution of that dreadful book; she saw that the passionless
analysis of passion may be exceedingly indecent. She is guarded in her
references to it, but she saw quite well that the book was condemned,
not because it was indecent (though it was indecent), but because it
was cruel. She thought _L’Education Sentimentale_ a failure; ugly
without being reasonable:
“All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing,
except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached
with ... when people do not understand us it is always our
fault.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M.
Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his
thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the
highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one
attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim
with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his
work, you neglect it, or you give it up.”
Not a doubt but she was right. You cannot with impunity leave your
heart out of your affair. I will not say that a good book cannot be
written with the intellect and the will; but I am convinced that a
great book was never yet so written. The greatest books in the world’s
history are those which the world at large knows to be good; and to the
making of such books goes the heart of a man as well as his brain.
But eighteen-seventy was at hand. Isidore, as they called him, was
diddled into war. Everything went badly. French armies blew away like
smoke, France was invaded, the Prussians were at Rouen, and there was
no time to theorise about art. Sedan; the Prussians in Paris; then the
senseless rage of the Commune. Flaubert took it all _à sa manière_:
“I shall not tell you all I have suffered since September. Why
didn’t I die from it?... And I cannot get over it! I am not
consoled! I have no hope!”
And in another letter:
“Ah! dear and good master, _if you could only hate!_ That is what
you lack--hate.... Come now. Cry out! Thunder! Take your lyre and
touch the brazen string; the monsters will flee.”
Poor wretch, with the only remedy of the arrogant! But the fine old
priestess of another heaven and earth did as he bid her; cried out,
thundered, in a noble letter, which should be engraved on gold plates
and hung up on the Quai d’Orsay:
“What then, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that
I have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible,
hateful, that it has always been and will always be so?...
You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the
priest always a hypocrite, the bourgeois a coward, the soldier
a brigand, the peasant a beast?... The people, you say? The
people is yourself and myself.... Whoever denies the people
cheapens himself, and gives the world the shameful spectacle of
apostasy....”
That is plain speaking; but she goes on to be prophetic. It would seem
as if she had foreseen a war and its aftermath infinitely more terrible
than that of 1870:
“We shall have to pity the German nation for its victories as much
as ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its
moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun.... It
will move very quickly.... _Well, the moral abasement of Germany
is not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to
return to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will
not give us back her life._”
Is not that nobly said? And then her great cry:
“Frenchmen, let us love one another ... let us love one another or
we are lost.”
She was but five years off her death-bed when she wrote that. In a
sense it was her swan-song. Had she never loved so blindly, she might
have been a better woman it may be. But she loved kindly, too, and will
be forgiven no doubt because she loved much. Love at any rate inspired
her to better purpose than Flaubert’s hate could have done. The world
is not to be advantaged by intellectual arrogance; nor does it appear
from these letters that poor Flaubert was at all advantaged either. It
served him but ill in literature and not at all in the adventure of
life. One must be a man before one can be an artist. Whether George
Sand was an artist or not, she neither knew nor cared. There is no
doubt at all, though, of her manliness.
A NOVEL AND A CLASSIC
LA PRINCESS DE CLÈVES