THREE FRENCH MORALISTS AND THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE

 BY

 EDMUND GOSSE, C. B. 

 OFFICIER DE LA LÉGION D'HONNEUR

 LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN

TO

LORD RIBBLESDALE

_This little book, long the subject of my meditation, suddenly beganto take shape one Sunday morning when I was your guest at Gisburne. Wewere actually starting for church, and the car was at the door, when Iannounced to you that the spirit moved me to stay behind. "Very well, then, " you said, with your habitual good-nature, "we leave you to yourfolios. " My "folios" were the three volumes of one of the smallest ofbooks, the 18mo edition of Vauvenargues published by Plon in 1874. Inthe midst of a violent thunderstorm, which was like a declaration ofwar upon your golden Yorkshire summer, I wrote my first pages, and youwere so sceptical, when you came back, as to my having done anythingbut watch the lightning, that I told you you would have to endure theresponsibility of being sponsor to a work thus suddenly begun in allthe agitation of the elements. So, such as time has proved it, here itis. _

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THREE FRENCH MORALISTS--

 LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

 LA BRUYÈRE

 VAUVENARGUES

THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

 INTRODUCTION

The object of these essays is to trace back to its source, or to someof its sources--for the soul of France is far too complex to bemeasured by one system--the spirit of gallantry which inspired theyoung French officers at the beginning of the war. We cannot examinetoo minutely, or with too reverent an enthusiasm, the effort of ourgreat ally, and in this theme for our admiration there are manystrains, some of which present themselves in apparent opposition toone another. The war has now lasted so long, and has so completelyaltered its character, that what was true of the temper of thesoldiers of France in November 1914 is no longer true in April 1918. Confidence and determination are still there, there is no diminutionin domestic intensity or in patriotic fervour, but the longcontinuance of the struggle has modified the temper of the Frenchofficer, and it will probably never be again what it was in the stressand tempest of sacrifice three years and a half ago, when the youngFrench soldiers, flushed with the idealisms which they had imbibed atSt. Cyr, rushed to battle like paladins, "with a pure heart, " in therapture of chivalry and duty. 

All that has long been wearied out, and might even be forgotten, ifthe letters and journals of a great cloud of witnesses were notfortunately extant. The record kept by the friends of Paul Lintier andthose others whom I am presently to mention, and by innumerablepersons to whose memory justice cannot here be done, will keep freshin the history of France the idealism of a splendid generation. Now wesee, and for a long time past have seen, a different attitude on thefields of Champagne and Picardy. There is no feather worn now in thecap, no white gloves grasp the sword; the Saint Cyrian elegance isover and done with. There is no longer any declamation, any emphasis, any attaching of importance to "form" or rhetoric. The fervour and theemotion are there still, but they are kept in reserve, they are belowthe surface, "at the bottom of the heart, " as La Rochefoucauld putsit. 

Heroism is now restrained by a sense of the prodigious length andbreadth of the contest, by the fact, at last patent to the mostunthinking, that the war is an octopus which has wound its tentaclesabout every limb and every organ of the vitality of France. Arevelation of the overwhelming violence of enormous masses of men hasbroken down the tradition of chivalry. War is now accepted with a sortof indifference, as a part of the day's work; "pas de grands mots, pasde grands gestes, pas de drame!" The imperturbable French officer of1918 attaches no particular importance to his individual gesture. Heconcentrates his energy in another kind of action. 

But the French race is by nature bellicose and amorous of adventure, and more than all other nations has a tendency to clothe itspatrimonial ardour of defence in beautiful terms and gallantattitudes. This is one of the points on which the British race, withits scrupulous reserve, often almost its affectation ofself-depreciating shyness, differs most widely from the French, and ismost in need of sympathetic imagination in dealing with a noble allywhose methods are not necessarily the same as ours. It is difficult tofancy a young English lieutenant quoting with rapturous approval, asPierre de Rozières and Henri Lagrange did in August 1914, the counselswhich were given more than a hundred years ago by the Prince de Ligne:"Let your brain swim with enthusiasm! Let honour electrify your heart!Let the holy flame of victory shine in your eyes! as you hoist theglorious ensigns of renown let your souls be in like measureuplifted!" A perpetual delirium or intoxication is the state of mindwhich is recommended by this "heart of fire, " as the only one becomingin a French officer who has taken up arms to defend his country. 

For the young men who consciously adopted the maxims of the Prince deLigne as their guide at the opening of this war, M. Maurice Barrès hasfound the name of "Traditionalists. " They are those who followed thetradition of the soldierly spirit of France in its three main lines, in its individualism, in its intelligence, in its enthusiasm. Theyendeavoured, in those first months of agony and hope, to model theirconduct on the formulas which their ancestors, the great moralists ofthe past, had laid down for them. Henri Lagrange, who fell atMontereau in October 1915, at the age of twenty, was a type ofhundreds of others. This is how his temper of mind, as a soldier, isdescribed by his friend Maxime Brienne:--

"The confidence of Lagrange was no less extraordinary than was hisspirit of sacrifice. He possessed the superhuman severity which comesfrom being wholly consecrated to duty. .. . With a magnificentcombination of logic and of violence, with a resolution to which hisunusually lucid intelligence added a sort of methodical vehemence, heexpressed his conviction that resolute sacrifice was necessary if theresult was to be a definite success. .. . He declared that a soldierwho, by force of mind and a sentiment of honour and patriotism, wasable to conquer the instinct of fear, should not merely "fulfil" hismilitary duty with firmness, but should hurl himself on death, becauseit was only at that price that success could be obtained over anumerical majority. "

This is a revelation of that individualism which is characteristic ofthe trained French character, a quality which, though partly obscuredby the turn the great struggle has taken, will undoubtedly survive andultimately reappear. It is derived from the admonitions of a series ofmoral teachers, and in the wonderful letters which M. Maurice Barrèshas brought together with no less tact than passion in his series ofvolumes issued under the general title of "L'Ame Française et laGuerre, " we have an opportunity of studying it in a great variety ofsituations. This is but a portion, and it may be but a small portion, of the multiform energy of France, and it is capable, of course, ofbeing subjected to criticism. That, in fact, it has had to endure, butit is no part of my business here, nor, if I may venture to say so, isit the business of any Englishman to criticise at any time, except inpathetic admiration, an attitude so beautiful, and marked in itsself-sacrifice by so delicate an effusion of scrupulous good taste. Weare in presence of a field of those fluttering tricolor flags whichfill the eyes of a wanderer over the battle-centres of the Marne witha passion of tears. We are in presence of the memorials of a chivalrythat did not count the price, but died "joyfully" for France. [1]

 [Footnote 1: The poet Léon Guillot, in dying, bid his comrades describe him to his father and mother as "tombé au champ d'honneur et mort _joyeusement_ pour son pays. "--"Les Diverses Familles Spirituelles de la France, " pp. 178, 179. ]

There is not much advantage in searching for the germs of all thisexalted sentiment earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century. The malady of the Fronde was serious precisely because it revealed thecomplete absence, in the nobles, in the clergy, in the common people, of patriotic conviction of any kind. Cardinal's men andanti-cardinalists, Mazarin and Monsieur, Condé and Plessis-Praslin, --wefollow the bewildering turns of their fortune and the senselessevolution of their mercenaries, without being able to trace any moralline of conduct, any ethical aim on the part of the one or the other. It was anarchy for the sheer fun of anarchy's sake, a struggle whichpervaded the nation without ever contriving to be national, a riot offorces directed by no intellectual or ethical purpose whatever. Thedelirium of it all reached a culminating point in 1652 when thearistocratic bolshevists of Condé's army routed the victorious kingand cardinal at the Faubourg St. Antoine. This was the consummation oftragical absurdity; what might pass muster for political reason hadturned inside out; and when Mazarin fled to Sedan he left behind him aFrance which was morally, religiously, intellectually, a suckedorange. 

Out of the empty welter of the Fronde there grew with surprisingrapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France whichhas gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageousrevolutionary earthquakes, persisting ever since. We find LaRochefoucauld, as a moral teacher, with his sardonic smile, actuallyescaping out of the senseless conflict, and starting, with thestigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theorythat the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour isthe first of the moral virtues. We see him, the cynic and sensualbrawler of 1640, turned within a few years into a model of regularity, the anarchist changed into a serious citizen with a logical scheme ofconduct, the atheistical swashbuckler become the companion of saintsand pitching his tent under the shadow of Port Royal. More than do thepurely religious teachers, he marks the rapid crystallization ofsociety in Paris, and the opening of a new age of reflection, ofpolish and of philosophical experiment. Moral psychology, a science inwhich Frenchmen have ever since delighted, seems to begin with thestern analysis of _amour-propre_ in the "Maximes. "

It is obvious that my choice of three moral maxim-writers to exemplifythe sources of modern French sentiment must be in some measure anarbitrary one. The moralists of the end of the seventeenth century inFrance are legion, and I would not have it supposed that I am notaware of the relative importance of some of them. But although LaRochefoucauld and La Bruyère were not the inventors of theirrespective methods of writing, nor positively isolated in theirtreatment of social themes, I do not think it is claiming too much forthem to say that in the crowd of smaller figures they stand out large, and with each generation larger, in any survey of their century. Intheir own day, Cureau de la Chambre, Coëffeteau and Senault wereconsidered the first of moral philosophers, but there must be few whoturn over the pages of the "Usages des Passions" now, whereas the"Caractères" enjoys a perpetual popularity. 

The writers whom I have just named are dead, at least I presume so, for I must not profess to have done more than touch theirwinding-sheets in the course of my private reading. But there are twomoralists of the period who remain alive, and one of whom burns withan incomparable vivacity of life. If I am asked why Pascal and Nicolehave not been chosen among my types, I can only answer that Pascal, unlike my select three, has been studied so abundantly in England thatby nothing short of an exhaustive monograph can an English critic nowhope to add much to public apprehension of his qualities. The case ofNicole is different. Excessively read in France, particularly duringthe eighteenth century, and active always in influencing the nationalconscience--since the actual circulation of the "Essais de Morale" issaid to have far exceeded that of the "Pensées" of Pascal--Nicole hasnever, in the accepted phrase, "contrived to cross the Channel, " andhe is scarcely known in England. Books and their writers have thesefates. Mme de Sévigné was so much in love with the works of Nicole, that she expressed a wish to make "a soup of them and swallow it"; butI leave her to the enjoyment of the dainty dish. As theologians, too, both Pascal and Nicole stand somewhat outside my circle. 

The three whom I have chosen stand out among the other moralists ofFrance by their adoption of the maxim as their mode of instruction. When La Bruyère, distracted with misgivings about his "Caractères, "had made up his mind to get an introduction to Boileau, and to ask theadvice of that mighty censor, Boileau wrote to Racine (May 19, 1687), "Maximilian has been out to Auteuil to see me and has read me parts ofhis Theophrastus. " Nicknames were the order of the day, and the criticcalled his new friend "Maximilian, " although his real name was Jean, because he wrote "Maximes. " There is no other country than Francewhere the maker of maxims has stamped a deep and permanent impressionupon the conscience and the moral habits of the nation. But this hasbeen done by La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues, whom, did itnot sound frivolous, we might style the three great Maximilians. 

The three portraits were first exhibited as a course of lectures atthe Royal Institution in February of this year. They have been revisedand considerably enlarged. For the English of the passages translatedor paraphrased I am in every case responsible. The chapter on "TheGallantry of France" appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_, and I thankthe editor and publisher of that periodical for their courteouspermission to include it here. 

_April 1918_. 

 LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

One of the most gifted of the young officers who gave their lives forFrance at the beginning of the war, Quartermaster Paul Lintier, in theadmirable notes which he wrote on his knee at intervals during thebattle of the Meuse in August 1914, said--

"The imperative instinct for making the best you can of life, thesentiment of duty, and anxiety for the good opinion of others, in aword _honour_--these are the main educators of the soldier under fire. This is not a discovery, it is simply a personal statement. "

Taken almost at random from the records of the war, this utterance mayserve us as well as any other to distinguish the attitude of theFrenchman in the face of violent and critical action from the equallybrave and effective attitude of other races. He has the habit, notcommon elsewhere, of analyzing conduct and of stripping off from thecontemplation of it those voluntary illusions which drop a curtainbetween it and truth. 

The result of this habit of ruthless criticism is to concentrate theFrenchman's attention, even to excess, on the motives of conduct, andto bring him more and more inevitably to regard self-love, self-preservation, personal vanity in its various forms, as the sourceof all our apparent virtues. Even when we appear to be mostdisinterested, even when we are most clearly actuated by unselfishdevotion, by _honour_, we are really the prey, as Lintier saw it, ofthe wish to save our lives and to preserve the good opinion of others. Underneath the transports of patriotism, underneath the sincerity ofreligious fervour, the Frenchman digs down and finds _amour-propre_ atthe root of everything. 

This attitude or habit of mind is particularly shocking to all thosewho live in a state of illusion, and there is probably no aspect ofFrench character which is more difficult for the average Englishman toappreciate than this tendency towards sceptical dissection of themotives of conduct. Yet it is quite certain that it is widelydisseminated among those of our neighbours who are most prompt andeffective in action, and whose vigour is in no degree paralysed by theclairvoyance with which they seek for exact truth even in the mostromantic and illusive spiritual circumstances. To throw light on thisaspect of French character, I propose to call attention to a littlebook, which is probably well-known to my readers already, but whichmay be regarded from a point of view, as I venture to think, moreinstructive than that which is usually chosen. 

In the year 1665 there appeared anonymously in Paris, in all thecircumstances of well-advertised secrecy, a thin volume of "Maximes, "which were understood to have exercised for years past the bestthoughts of a certain illustrious nobleman. Mme de Sablé, who was notforeign to the facts, immediately wrote a review, intended for the_Journal des Scavants_, in the course of which she said that the newbook was "a treatise on movements of the human heart which may be saidto have remained until now unrecognized. " The book, as every oneknows, was the work of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, and the subjectof it was an unmasking of "the veritable condition of man. "

It would be idle not to admit that La Rochefoucauld has been almostexclusively regarded as the chief exponent of egotism among the greatwriters of Europe. He has become--he became during his own lifetime--the bye-word for bitterness. He is represented as believing thategotism is the _primum mobile_ of all human action, and that man iswholly the victim of his passions, which lead him whither they will. He denies all spirituality and sees a physical cause for everything wedo. His own words are quoted against him. It is true that he says, "All the passions are nothing but divers degrees of heat or cold inthe blood. " It is true that he says, "All men naturally hate oneanother, " and again, "Our virtues are mostly vices in disguise. " Yetagain, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms whichseem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterestedinstincts of the human soul, for he says "_Amour-propre_ is the loveof one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men intotheir own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the opportunity, makesthem the tyrants of others. .. . It exists in all states of life and inall conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything; itlives on nothing. " He does not admit that Christianity itself isimmune from the ravages of this essential cankerworm, which adopts alldisguises and slips from one Protean shape into another. "Therefinements of self-love surpass those of chemistry, " and the purposeof La Rochefoucauld is to resolve all our virtues in a crucible and toshow that nothing remains but a poisonous deposit of egotism. 

No wonder that La Rochefoucauld has been generally regarded as ascourge of the human race, a sterile critic of mankind withoutsympathy or pity. It is true that his obstinate insistence on theuniversality of egotism produces a depressing and sometimes afatiguing impression on the reader, who is apt to think of him asShakespeare's Apemantus, "that few things loves better than to abhorhimself. " But when the First Lord goes on to add "He's opposite tohumanity, " we feel that no phrase could less apply to LaRochefoucauld. We have, therefore, immediately to revise our opinionof this severe dissector of the human heart, and to endeavour to findout what lay underneath the bitterness of his "Maximes. " It is acomplete mistake to look upon La Rochefoucauld as a monster, or evenas a Timon. Without insisting, at all events for the moment, on theplain effect of his career on his intellect, but yet accepting theevidence that much of his bitterness was the result of bad health, sense of failure, shyness, foiled ambition, we have to ask ourselveswhat he gave to French thought in exchange for the illusions which heso rudely tore away. In dealing with any savage moralist, we areobliged to turn from the abstract question: Why did he say thesethings? to the realistic one. What did he hope to effect by what hesaid? Perhaps we can start no better on this inquiry than to quote theDuchess of Schomberg's exclamation when she turned over the pages ofthe first edition--namely that "this book contains a vast number oftruths which I should have remained ignorant of all my life if it hadnot taught me to perceive them. " This may be applied to French energy, and we may begin to see what has been the active value of LaRochefoucauld's apparently negative and repugnant aphorisms. 

The La Rochefoucauld whom we know belongs to a polite and modern age. He is instinct with the spirit of society, "la bonne compagnie, " as itwas called in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a crowd ofrefined and well-trained pens competed to make of the delicatelanguage of France a vehicle which could transfer from brain to brainthe subtlest ingenuities of psychology. He is a typical specimen of theFrenchman of letters at the moment when literature had become the allyof political power and the instrument of social influence. Into thisnew world, before it had completely developed, the future author ofthe "Maximes" was introduced at a very early age. He was presented tothe wits and _précieuses_ of the Hôtel Rambouillet at the age ofeighteen. It is amusing to think that he may have seen Voiture, in theBlue Room, seize his lute and sing a Spanish song, or have volunteeredas a paladin in the train of Hector, King of Georgia. But thepedantries and affectations of this wonderful society seem to havemade no immediate impression upon La Rochefoucauld, whose early yearswere those of the young nobleman devoid of all apparent intellectualcuriosity. It is true that he says of himself that directly he cameback from Italy (this was in 1629, when he was only sixteen), "I beganto notice with some attention whatever I saw, " but this was, no doubt, external; he does not exhibit in his writings, and in all probabilitydid not feel, the slightest interest in the pedantic literature of theend of Louis XIII. 's reign. He represented, through his youth, thepurely military and aristocratic element in the society of that age. If he had died when he was thirty, or at the close of the career ofRichelieu, nothing would have distinguished him from the mob ofviolent noblemen who made the streets of Paris a pandemonium. 

To understand the influence of La Rochefoucauld it is even moreneedful than in most similar cases to form a clear idea of hischaracter, and this can only be obtained by an outline of hisremarkable career. François VI. Duke of La Rochefoucauld, as a typicalParisian, was born in the ducal palace in the rue des Petits-Champs, on September 15, 1613. The family was one of the most noble not merelyin France but in Europe, and we do not begin to understand the authoruntil we realize his excessive pride of birth. In a letter he wrote toCardinal Mazarin in 1648 he says, "I am in a position to prove thatfor three hundred years the monarchs [of France] have not disdained totreat us as members of their family. " This arrogance of race inspiredthe early part of his life to the exclusion, so far as we canperceive, of any other stimulus to action. He was content to be theviolent and fantastic swashbuckler of the half-rebellious court ofLouis XIII. In late life, he crystallized his past into a maxim, "Youth is a protracted intoxication; it is the fever of the soul. "Fighting and love-making, petty politics and scuffle uponcounter-scuffle--such was the life of the young French nobleman of whomLa Rochefoucauld reveals himself and is revealed by others as the typeand specimen. 

La Rochefoucauld is the author, not merely of the "Maximes, " but of asecond book which is much less often read. This is his "Mémoires, " avery intelligent and rather solemn contribution to the fragmentaryhistory of France in the seventeenth century. It is hardly necessaryto point out that not one of the numerous memoirs of this period mustbe taken as covering the whole field of which they treat. Each book islike a piece of a dissected map, or of a series of such maps cut to adifferent scale. All are incomplete and most of them overlap, but theymake up, when carefully collated, an invaluable picture of the times. No other country of Europe produced anything to compare with theseauthentic fragments of the social and political history of Franceunder Richelieu and Mazarin. These Memoirs had a very remarkableinfluence on the general literature of France. They turned out offavour the chronicles of "illustrious lives, " the pompous and falsetravesties of history, which the sixteenth century had delighted in, and in this way they served to prepare for the purification of Frenchtaste. The note of the best of them was a happy sincerity even inegotism, a simplicity even in describing the most monstrous andgrotesque events. Among this group of writers, Cardinal de Retz seemsto me to be beyond question the greatest, but La Rochefoucauld is notto be despised in his capacity as the arranger of personalrecollections. 

We must not expect from these seventeenth-century autobiographers thesort of details which we demand from memoir-writers to-day. LaRochefoucauld, although he begins in the first person, has nothingwhich he chooses to tell us about his own childhood and education. Hewas married, at the age of fifteen, to a high-born lady, Andrée deVivonne, but her he scarcely mentions. By the side of those glitteringamatory escapades of his on the grand scale, with which Europe rang, he seems to have pursued a sober married existence, withoutupbraidings from his own conscience, or curtain-lectures from his meekduchess, who bore him eight children. La Rochefoucauld's "Mémoires"open abruptly with these words:--"I spent the last years of theCardinal's administration in indolence, " and then he begins todiscourse on the audacities of the Duke of Buckingham (pleasinglyspelled Bouquinquant) and his attacks on the heart of the Queen ofFrance. We gather that although the English envoy can have had nopersonal influence on the future moralist--since Buckingham wasmurdered at Portsmouth in 1628, while La Rochefoucauld did not come tocourt till 1630--yet the young Frenchman so immensely admired what heheard of the Englishman, and so deliberately set himself to take himas a model, that our own knowledge of Buckingham may be of help to usin reproducing an impression of La Rochefoucauld, or rather of thePrince de Marcillac, as he was styled until his father died. 

After describing the court as the youth of seventeen had found it, heskips five years to tell us how the Queen asked him to run away withher to Brussels in 1637. History has not known quite what to make ofthis amazing story, of which La Rochefoucauld had the complacency towrite more than twenty years afterwards--

"However difficult and perilous this adventure might seem to me, I maysay that never in all my life have I enjoyed anything so much. I wasat an age (24) at which one loves to do extravagant and startlingthings, and I felt that nothing could be more startling or moreextravagant than to snatch at the same time the Queen from the Kingher husband, and from the Cardinal de Richelieu who was jealous, andMlle d'Hautefort from the King who was in love with her. "

He tells the story with inimitable gusto. But he tells it just as anepisode, and he hurries on to the death of Richelieu in 1642, asthough he were conscious that up to his thirtieth year his own lifehad not been of much consequence. 

Even in that age of turbulent extravagance, the Prince of Marcillacwas known, where he was known at all, merely as a hare-brained youthwho carried the intolerance and insolence of amatory youth past theconfines of absurdity, and it is amusing to find Balzac, who wastwenty years his senior, and who was buried in the country, describinghim--surely by repute--as the type of--

"These gentlemen who chatter so much about the empire and about thesovereignty of ladies, and have their heads so stuffed with tales andstrange adventures, that they grow to believe that they can do allthat was done under the reign of Amadis, and that the least of theirduties is to reply to a supplicating lady, I, who am only a man, howshould I resist the prayer of her to whom the Gods themselves canrefuse nothing?"

We seem far from the sombre and mordant author of the "Maximes, " buta complete apprehension of the character of La Rochefoucauld requiresthe story of his adventures to be at least briefly indicated. A chasmdivides his early from his late history, and this chasm is bridgedover in a very shadowy way by such records as we possess of hisretirement after the Fronde. 

Between the death of Richelieu and this retirement there lies a periodof ten years, during which the future author of the "Maximes" isswallowed up in the hurly-burly of the worst moment in the wholehistory of France. It is difficult from any point of view to form whatit would be mere waste of time for us to attempt in this connection, aclear conception of the chaos into which that country was plunged bythe weakness of Anne of Austria and the criminality of Mazarin. Thesenseless intrigues of the Fronde affect the bewildered student ofthose times as though

 _this frame Of Heav'n were falling and these elements In mutiny had from her axle torn The steadfast earth. _

At first La Rochefoucauld seems to have meant to support the cause ofthe court, expecting to be rewarded for what he had done, or beenprepared to do for the Queen. He says in his "Mémoires" that after thedeath of Louis XIII. The Queen-Mother "gave me many marks offriendship and confidence; she assured me several times that herhonour was involved in my being pleased with her, and that nothing inthe kingdom was large enough to reward me for what I had done in herservice. " That sounds very well, but what it really illustrates is theextraordinary violence of aristocratic frivolity, the fierce levityand insatiable frenzied vanity of the noble families. The aims of LaRochefoucauld, in support of which he was ready to sacrifice hiscountry, were of a class that must seem to us now petty in theextreme. He wanted the _tabouret_, the footstool, for his duchess, inother words the right to be seated in presence of the members of theroyal family. He wanted the privilege of driving into the courtyard ofthe Louvre without having to descend from his coach outside and walkin. He demanded these honours because they were already possessed bythe families of Rohan and of Bouillon. It is extraordinary to considerwhat powerful effects such trumpery causes could have, but it is afact that the desolating and cruel wars of the Fronde largely dependedupon jealousies of the _carrosse_ and the _tabouret_. LaRochefoucauld's support of the rebellion frankly and openly was basedupon it. 

La Rochefoucauld brings the first part of his "Mémoires" down to 1649. In the second part he begins again with 1642, being very anxious toshow, to his own advantage of course, what the conditions were atcourt after the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII. , and in particularto define the position of Mme de Chevreuse, the great intriguer andseductress of the French politics of the age. The charm of this lady, who was no longer young, faded before that of the Duchess ofLongueville, one of the most ambitious and most unscrupulous women whoever lived. She was the sister of the Prince de Conti, and from thetime when her celebrated relations with La Rochefoucauld began, herinfluence engaged him in all the unplumbed chaos which led to civilwar. When this finally broke out, however, in 1648, the Duke is foundonce more on the side of the young king and his government, that is tosay, of Cardinal Mazarin. 

Through the "universal hubbub wide of stunning sounds and noises allconfused, " we can catch with difficulty the accents of literature, atfirst indeed vocal in the midst of the riot, and even stimulated byit, as birds are by a heavy shower of rain, but soon stunned andsilenced by horrors incompatible with the labour of the Muses. Thewars of the Fronde made a sharp cut between the heroic age ofimaginative literature and the classical age which presently succeededit, and offer in this respect a tolerable parallel to the civil warsraging in England about the same time. It is specious, but convenient, to discover a date at which a change of this kind may be said tooccur. In England we have such a date marked large for us in 1660;French letters less obviously but more certainly can be said to startafresh in 1652. It is tolerably certain that in that year Pascal, Retzand the subject of our inquiry simultaneously and independently beganto write. Up to that time there is no reason to believe that LaRochefoucauld had given himself at all to study, and we possess noevidence that up to the age of forty he was more interested in theexistence of the literature of his country than was the idlest of thecut-throat nobility who swaggered in and out of the courtyard of theLouvre. 

His "Mémoires" end with an account of the war in Guienne in 1651 whichis more solemn and more detached than all the rest. No one wouldsuspect that the historian, who affects the gravity of a Tacitus, wasacting all through the events he describes with the levity of afull-blooded and unscrupulous schoolboy. The most amazing instance ofthis is his grotesque attempt to have Cardinal de Retz murdered at thePalais de Justice. In the course of a sort of romping fray he caughtRetz's head between the flaps of a folding door, and shouted toColigny to come and stab him from behind. But he himself was shovedaway, and the Cardinal released. La Rochefoucauld admits the escapade, without any sign of embarrassment, merely observing that Retz wouldhave done as much by him if he had only had the chance. But now comesthe incident which, better than anything else could, illustrates thefeverish and incongruous atmosphere of the Fronde, and the difficultyof following the caprices of its leading figures. The very next dayafter this attempt to assassinate Retz in a peculiarly disgracefulway, La Rochefoucauld met the Cardinal driving through the streets ofParis in his coach. Kneeling in the street, he demanded and receivedthe episcopal benediction of the man whom he had tried to murder in anundignified scuffle a few hours before. No animosity seems to havepersisted between these two princes of the realm of France, and thismay be the moment to introduce the picture which Cardinal de Retz, whose head was held in the folding door, painted very soon after ofthe volatile duke who had held him there to be stabbed from behind. Both writers began their memoirs in 1652, and no one has ever decidedwhich is the more elegant of the two unique conpositions. Theconjunction between two of the greatest prose-writers of France ispiquant, and we cannot trace in Retz's sketch of his antagonist thesmallest sign of resentment. It was not published until 1717, but ithas all the appearance of having been written sixty years earlier, atleast, when Mademoiselle was seized with the fortunate inspiration ofhaving "portraits" written of, and often by, the celebrated personagesof the day. This, then, is how Retz saw La Rochefoucauld--

"There has always been a certain _je ne sais quoi_ in M. De LaRochefoucauld. He has always ever since his childhood wanted to betaking part in some plot, and that at a time when he was indifferentto small interests, which have never been his weakness, and when hehad no experience of great ones, which, in another sense, have neverbeen his strong point. He has never had any skill in conductingbusiness, and I don't know why; for he possessed qualities which inany other man would have made up for those which he lacked. He was notlongsighted enough, and he did not see as a whole even what was withinhis range of vision. But his good sense--which in the field ofspeculation was very good--joined to his gentleness, his insinuatingcharm, and his admirable ease of manner, ought to have compensated, more than they have done, for his defect of penetration. He has alwayssuffered from an habitual irresoluteness; but I do not know to whatthis irresoluteness should be attributed. He has never been a warrior, though very much a soldier. He has never, through his own effort, succeeded in being a good courtier, though he has always intended tobe one. That air of bashfulness and of shyness which you observe inhim in social life has given him in matters of business an apologeticair. He has always fancied that he needed to apologize; and this--inconjunction with his 'Maximes, ' which do not err on the side of toomuch faith in virtue, and with his practice, which has always been towind up business as impatiently as he started it--makes me concludethat he would have done much better to know himself, and to be contentto pass, as he might well have passed, for the most polished courtierand the finest gentleman, in private life, which this age hasproduced. "

We are now beginning to see the real author of the "Maximes, " when, atthe age of forty, he begins to peep forth from the travesty of hisaristocratic violence and idleness. Whether the transformation wouldhave been gradual instead of sudden is what can never be decided, butwe date it from July 2, 1652, when he was dangerously wounded in ariot in the Faubourg St. Antoine, at the Picpus barricade, where hewas shot in the forehead and, as it at first appeared, blinded forlife. According to the faithful Gourville, when La Rochefoucauldthought he would lose his eyesight, he had a picture of Madame deLongueville engraved with two lines under it from a fashionabletragedy, the "Alcyonée" of Duryer--

 _That I might hold her heart and please her lovely eyes I made my war on kings and would have fought the skies. _

With this piece of rodomontade the old Rochefoucauld ceases and makesplace for the author of the "Maximes. " When he recovered from hiswound, his spirit of adventure was broken. He submitted to thecardinal, he withdrew from Condé, and in 1653, still his head boundwith bandages and wearing black spectacles to hide those clear andseductive eyes which Petitot had painted, he crept, a broken man, tohis country house at Verteuil, in the neighbourhood of Ruffec, now inthe Charente. This chateau, built just two hundred years before thatdate, still exists, a noble relic of feudal France, and a place ofpilgrimage for lovers of the author of the "Maximes. "

No one was ever more suddenly and more completely cured of a wholesystem of existence than was La Rochefoucauld by the wound which wasso nearly fatal. He said, "It is impossible for any man who hasescaped from civil war to plunge into it again. " For him, at allevents, it was impossible. His only wish in 1653 was to bury himselfand his slow convalescence among his woods at Verteuil. In thisenforced seclusion, at the age of forty, he turned for solace toliterature, which he would seem to have neglected hitherto. We knownothing of his education, which had probably been as primitive as thatof any pleasure-seeking and imperious young nobleman of the time. Hewent to the wars when he was thirteen. In an undated letter he saysthat he sends some Latin verses composed by a friend for the judgmentof his unnamed correspondent, but he adds, "I do not know enough Latinto dare to give an opinion. " M. Henri Regnier, in his invaluable"Lexique de la langue de La Rochefoucauld" (1883) points out that theDuke's evident lack of classical knowledge is a positive advantage tohim, as it throws him entirely on the resources of pure French. Inlike manner we may rejoice that Shakespeare had "little Latin and lessGreek. "

It is tantalizing for us that we know almost nothing of the years, from 1653 to 1656, which La Rochefoucauld spent in severe retirementat Verteuil. What was happening to France was happening, no doubt, inits degree to him; he was chewing the cud of remorse for the folliesand crimes of the Fronde. "Only great men should have great failings, "the exile wrote, and we may be sure that he had by this timediscovered, like the rest of the world, that as a swashbuckler andintriguer he was noisy and petulant, but on the whole anything butgreat. The Fronde left behind it a sense of littleness, ofpoverty-stricken humanity, and this particular frondeur had seen themask drop from the features of his fellow-men. Now, in the quiet of thecountry, in disgrace with fortune and his own conscience, he grasped anew and this time a dignified and suitable ambition. He began to studyreality and learned to distinguish truth from pretence. This study wasto make him one of the most eminent of French authors and a great powerin the purification of French intelligence. He began, doubtless, hiscareer as an author by composing the "Mémoires, " in which he embodiedhis exasperations and his recriminations in language of studieddignity. There is little here which betrays the future moralist, exceptthe simplicity and almost colourless transparency of the style. 

As containing nearly the sole certain evidence of La Rochefoucauld'sstate of mind at the time of transition, it is well, perhaps, to speakat this moment of his letters, which were first brought together in1881. They extend from 1637 to 1677, and the biographer pores overthem in the hope of extracting from them some crumbs of information. But to the general reader they cannot be recommended. They are seldomconfidential, the writer never lets himself go. Even to his laterfriends, such as Mme de Sablé, La Rochefoucauld is rarely familiar, and the impression of himself in these graceful and sometimes vigorousepistles is illusive; the writer seems for ever on his guard. Thegreat mass of this correspondence, in which politics takes no partafter 1653, is singularly literary; it is mainly occupied with theinterests, and almost with the jargon, of the professional author. Weare told that his affectation in society was to appear cold andunmoved, and this he certainly contrived to do in those of his letterswhich have been preserved. 

La Rochefoucauld told Mme de Sablé that he depended on her for hisknowledge of the inmost windings of the human heart. When he returnedto Paris, this lady was approaching the age of sixty. Her _salon_competed with that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and that of Mlle deMontpensier at the Luxembourg. The Marquise de Sablé had been gay inher youth, but when her young lover, Armentières, was killed in aduel, she turned devout. She also turned hypochondriacal and literary. According to Tallemont des Réaux, who has left a portrait of her whichis equally ill-natured and entertaining, she built herself a houseadjoining the choir of the church of Port Royal, in the Faubourg St. Jacques. Her friend, the Abbé d'Ailly, who edited her works after herdeath in 1678, admits that she was "one of the greatest visionaries inthe world on the chapter of death. " She herself expressed herhypochondria otherwise: "I fear death more than other people do, because no one has ever formed so clear a conception of nothingness asI have. " Ludicrous stories were told of her excessive fear of illness, and in her fits of alarm she found comfort from the ministrations ofAntoine Singlin, who was the director of Pascal's conscience. [2] Shebecame intimate with Arnauld d'Andilly, and with the rest of thoseJansenist authors of whom Racine said that their works were "theadmiration of scholars and the consolation of all pious persons. " Butshe seems to have had the cleverness to observe that in one respectthe literature of Port Royal, as it expressed itself before "LesProvinciales, " had the fault of being verbose and redundant. Mme. DeSablé deserves more merit than seems to have been given to her for herfervent cultivation of precise language. 

 [Footnote 2: It was of Singlin that Pascal wrote in 1654, "Soumission total à J. C. Et à mon directeur. "]

As La Rochefoucauld's correspondence throws little light on thecharacter and person of its author at the time of his intellectual andmoral conversion, we turn with satisfaction to a document which owesits existence to a social amusement, almost to a "parlour game. " Wehave seen that La Grande Mademoiselle, anxious to amuse the friendswhom she gathered round her in her _salon_ at the Luxembourg, hit uponthe notion of inducing her guests to produce written portraits ofthemselves. You might say all the good of yourself you liked, on theunderstanding that you put in the shades as well. The collection ofthese self-portraits was actually printed in 1659, and is a work ofgreat value and interest to biographer and historian. It marks a newmovement of French intelligence, a critical excursion into psychologynot hitherto attempted in France, and some of the portraits aremarvellously delicate in their conscientious precision. Here, however, we are not concerned with more than one of them, that which is signedwith the initials of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. It is his onlyimportant composition produced between the "Mémoires" and the"Maximes, " and it is charmingly written, a portrait drawn in tones ofrose-colour and dove-grey, like the pastel-portraits of a centurylater. 

He begins by describing his physical appearance, but passes soon tothe moral and social qualities. It would be interesting to quote thewhole of this portrait, but we must confine ourselves to some briefquotations. How far we seem from the beasts of prey which ranged theforests of the Fronde, or tore one another to pieces in the streets ofParis, when we follow this refined attempt to present the character ofa modern and a complicated man:--

"There is something, " says La Rochefoucauld, "at once peevish andproud in my appearance. This makes most people think that I amcontemptuous, but I am not so at all. So far as my humour goes, I ammelancholy, and I am so to such an extent that, in the last three orfour years, I have scarcely been seen to laugh three or four times. Itseems to me nevertheless that my melancholy would be supportable andmild enough if it depended solely on my temperament, but it comes somuch from outside causes, and what so comes fills my imagination tosuch a degree, and occupies my thoughts so exclusively, that most ofthe time I move as in a dream, and scarce listen to what I myself amsaying. "

Here we have the disappointed courtier still brooding over hisdisgrace, but we pass to an account of the relief which the new-bornman of letters find in the cultivation of the intellect alone--

"I am fond of general reading, but that in which I find something tofashion the mind and to fortify the soul is what I like best. Aboveall it gives me an extreme satisfaction to read in company with anintelligent person, for in this way one is kept constantly reflectingon what one reads, and the reflections thus exchanged form a speciesof conversation than which no other in the world is so agreeable or souseful. I give a sound opinion about works in verse and prose whichare submitted to me, but perhaps I allow myself too much freedom inexpressing that opinion. Another fault of mine is that I am sometimestoo scrupulously delicate and too severely critical. I do not disliketo listen to argument, and sometimes I am glad to take my share in thediscussion, but I usually support my opinion with too much heat, andwhen any one pleads an unjust cause in my presence, sometimes, in myzeal for logic, I myself become exceedingly illogical. My sentimentsare virtuous, my inclinations are honest, and I am so intenselyanxious to act in all things as a gentleman should, that my friendscannot do me a greater favour than to warn me sincerely of my faults. Those who know me rather intimately, and who have been so kind as togive me their counsels in this direction, are aware that I have everreceived them with all imaginable joy and with all the submission ofmind which they could possibly desire. "

All this, and what remains, show that in the character of LaRochefoucauld action had abruptly receded in favour of analysis, andthe brutality of civil war in the woods had given place to therefinement of endless conversation by the fireside corner. The oldswashbuckler turned from the illusions of the camp to the mostexquisite of peaceful associations, and he regarded women from atotally new point of view. It was the age of the _salons_, and LaRochefoucauld tells us why it was that he became their sedulousassociate. He says, "When women are intelligent, I like theirconversation better than that of men. There is a certain suavity intheir talk which is lacking in that of our sex, and it seems, inaddition, that they explain themselves with more precision, and give amore agreeable turn to what they say. " In other words, LaRochefoucauld had, by 1658, become a complete, and indeed the mostcompetent and highly finished example of the new social intelligencewhich was to be found in France. We must dwell for one rapid moment onwhat that new spirit was. 

The seventeenth century in France, liberated from the weight ofinternecine wars and political tyrannies, had now thrown itself withardour into the civilized arts, and had, in particular, developed alove of moral disquisition. All the talk which presently becamefashionable about virtue and the higher life was a reaction againstthe horrors of the Fronde. The advance of social refinement was veryrapid, and, especially in Paris, there was a determined andintelligent movement in the direction of the amelioration of mannersand a studied elegance of life. M. Rébelliau has pointed out that itwas precisely at this moment that a great number of new words, andamong them _délicate, distinguer, moraliste, ménagements, finesse_ andmany others, were accepted as part of the French language. Theseserved immediately to enrich the vocabulary of the men and women whowere anxious to push further and deeper their investigations intopsychological analysis. With this social tendency to dissect the humanheart and to seize its most secret movements, was combined thereligious and, as we may put it, protestant fashion of the hour, inthe spirit of Port Royal. To be a moralist was almost in itself to bea Jansenist, and we see the author of the "Maximes" presently claimingto be, after a fashion, evangelical. 

There is so little said about theology, in the direct sense, in thewritings of La Rochefoucauld, that his various French critics havegiven perhaps too little thought to his religious tendencies. Theyhave treated him as though he were the enemy of a pious life. But ifwe examine that contention from the standpoint provided for us by ourown Puritan habit of thought, we must recognize that there wassomething positively pious about the bitter philosopher of the"Maximes. " He was trying, let us never forget, to discover ascientific form of morals, and hardly enough attention has been givento the prominence which he gave to a searching analysis of conscience. He found little to help him in the court religion of the age, but hewas immensely impressed with the Jansenist conception of the frailtyand worthlessness of the natural man. Hence, his persistency incultivating almost exclusively the society of those men and women ofPort Royal with whom we might suppose that he had very little incommon. But, quite recently, a discovery has been made, which is notonly of special interest to us as Englishmen, but which throws afurther light on the evangelical or puritan tendency of the author ofthe "Maximes. "

A careful scholar, M. Ernest Jouy, was led by a passage in aseventeenth-century MS. To make investigations which seem to haveproved that La Rochefoucauld was acquainted with an English book ofedification and even that he deigned to make use of it in thefashioning of his famous "Maximes. " This was "The Mystery ofSelf-Deceiving, " published in 1615 by a semi-nonconformist Puritandivine, Daniel Dyke, minister of Coggeshall in Essex, and translatedobscurely into French by a certain Vernulius. Of the original workFuller wrote, "It is a book which will be owned for a truth while menhave any badness in them, and will be owned as a treasure whilst theyhave any goodness in them. " It is, certainly, an amazing thing to findthat this clumsy old treatise of English divinity was apparentlypossessed as a treasure by the most elegant and the most sceptical ofFrenchmen. 

La Rochefoucauld may be conceived as saying to the practical divinesof Port Royal, "Your work is confused and thwarted by the vastprevalence of rubbish under which morals are concealed. I will helpyou to force the people who talk so glibly of humanity and pity, ofrectitude and amiability, to dissect the real bodies of egotism towhich they give those names. I put Man in the pillory ofself-judgment; it is for you to deal evangelically with what remainsof his temperament when he comes down out of the ordeal. "

To do this, La Rochefoucauld prepared, with infinite patience and withthe conscientiousness of a great literary artist, his sheaf ofMaxim-arrows, ready to shoot them, one by one, into the gross heart of_amour-propre_. What, then, were the reflexions which, now settled inParis, and secure from the rough world in the recesses of Mme deSablé's _salon_, the Duke began to fashion and to polish? A maxim is aformula, which comprehends the whole truth on a particular subject. Coleridge says, in his "Table Talk, " that a maxim is a conclusion uponobservation of matters of fact; we may add that it is final, it goesas far as it can possibly go, and contains the maximum of truth in theminimum of verbiage. If we take some of the most cynical and savagemaxims of La Rochefoucauld we may see that conciseness could proceedno further: for instance, "Virtue is a rouge that women add to theirbeauty"; or "Pride knows no law and self-love no debt"; or "Thepleasure of love is loving. " The ingenuity of man has not devised amode of saying those particular things as exactly in fewer words. Theyreach the maximum of conciseness, and are therefore called maxims. 

It is very unusual in the history of literature to be able to point toa man of genius as the positive founder of a class of work. When welook closely into the matter, we are sure to find that there was anobscure predecessor, a torch-bearer who lighted up the path. EvenShakespeare has Marlowe in front of him, and in front of Marlowe areGreene and Peele. Several poets were inspired by the story of the fallof the rebel angels before Milton took up "Paradise Lost" and seizedthat province as his own by conquest. In like manner, La Rochefoucauldseems to us in a general view, and seemed indeed to his own Parisiancontemporaries, to have invented a new art in the production of his"Maximes. " But, in truth, he was not the pioneer, and he seems to havespent months, and even years, in a sort of apprenticeship to twoauthors who have not survived in French literature as he has. So faras we can make out, the real creator of the maxim in French wasJacques Esprit (1611-1678), the Abbé Esprit as he was called, althoughhe was never a priest, and had a legitimate wife and family. He was ayoung man from Béziers in Provence, who came to Paris under theprotection of Chancellor Séguier, soon became a member of the FrenchAcademy, and enjoyed a steady social and literary success. 

There seems little doubt that Esprit was known early to LaRochefoucauld, for he was familiar in the family of the Duke andDuchess of Longueville, and later the governor of their children. Heenjoyed the confidence of the _salons_ from an early date. There issome reason to suppose that Esprit had begun to write maxims before LaRochefoucauld's return from exile, and certainly before Mme de Sablé'sretreat to Port Royal in 1659. It is very noticeable in LaRochefoucauld's letters to Esprit--most of which belong to the year1660--that he treats the academician--who was of plebeian birth andnot many months older than himself--with extreme deference. The Dukeadopts the style of a pupil to a master, and he submits his sketchesor experiments in maxim-making to Esprit for a severe criticism, whichhe accepts, and for advice, which he adopts. The probability seems tobe that Esprit introduced the fashion for writing maxims to Mme deSablé, who was fascinated by it, recommended it to La Rochefoucauld, and then pointed Esprit out as the acknowledged master of the art, whocould give invaluable technical advice. 

There was a sort of collaboration. We find La Rochefoucauld writing toEsprit, "I shall be much obliged if you will show _our_ last sentencesto Mme de Sablé; it may perhaps induce her to write some of her own. "And to the lady he writes, "Here are all my maxims which you have notyet seen, but as nothing is done for nothing, I beg you to send me inreturn the receipt for the carrot soup which we had when Commander deSouvré dined at your house, " The three maximists consulted oneanother, polished up one another's sentences, and suggested subjectswhich were first discussed round the dinner-table or in the summerparlour and then worked up, sometimes by all three conjointly, to thehighest pitch of perfection. It was probably Esprit by whom many ofthe original suggestions were started, indeed it is he who seems tohave first laid down the formula that "the mind is the servant andeven the dupe of the instincts, " which both Pascal and LaRochefoucauld were presently to expand in such brilliant forms. But itis quite an error to presume, as some writers have done, that therewas a kind of factory for maxims, out of which sentences were turnedwhich really belonged to no one in particular. The "Maximes" of Mme deSablé and those of the Abbé Esprit--the latter contained in aJansenist volume called "The Falsity of Human Virtues"--were publishedindependently, but in the same year, 1678. Any one who has thepatience to refer to these works may satisfy himself that Mme deSablé, as an artist, is superior to Esprit, but immeasurably inferiorto La Rochefoucauld, who is the one unapproachable master of themaxim. [3]

 [Footnote 3: A good deal of the prejudice which successive critics, and (very mischievously) Brunetière in particular, have shown with regard to the character of La Rochefoucauld, is due, in my opinion, to the influence of Victor Cousin, who published, in 1854, a disjointed and diffuse, but in many ways brilliantly executed volume on Mme de Sablé. Cousin, who examined, for the first time, a vast array of MS. Sources, deliberately lowered the value of La Rochefoucauld in order to enhance the merit of the lady, of whom the learned academician wrote like a lover. Even Esprit was thrown into the scale to lighten the weight of the Duke's originality. Cousin was borne gaily on the stream of his heroine-worship, and others less profoundly acquainted with the facts have let themselves be carried with him. But it is time that we should cease to imitate them in this. ]

For six or seven years the Duke worked away at the polishing of hisincomparable epigrams, and it was not until October 27, 1665, that thelittle famous book made its anonymous appearance. The importance ofthe work was perceived immediately in the close circle of the _salons_which regulated literary opinion in Paris. For half a century pastFrenchmen had been regarding with jealous attention the causes andeffects of human passion, culminating, for the moment, in the treatisewritten by Descartes for the daughter of the Queen of Bohemia. TheJansenists and the Jesuits, the playwrights, the novelists, Hobbes andSpinoza, all pursued, along widely different paths, those illusivesecrets of the human heart which had escaped the notice of earliergenerations. But La Rochefoucauld reduced the desultory psychology ofhis predecessors to a system, so that for us the moralizing tendenciesof the seventeenth century in France seem to have found their finalexpression less in the sob of Pascal's conscience than in the resignedironic nonchalance of La Rochefoucauld, who, as Voltaire so admirablysays, "dissolves every virtue in the passions which surround it. "Perhaps what the "Maximes" most resembled was the thenrecently-published analysis of egotism in "Leviathan. " But the cooland atrocious periods of what Sir Leslie Stephen calls "the unblushingegotism" of Hobbes have really little in common with the sparklingrapier-strokes of La Rochefoucauld, except that both these moralists--who may conceivably have met and compared impressions in Paris--combined a resolute pessimism about the corruption of mankind with anepicurean pursuit of happiness. 

The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld were atoms of gold sifted through themesh of discussions at the dinner-table, around the fire in winter, under the hawthorns and lilacs which Mme de Sévigné describes, inendless talk between two or more trained and intelligent persons, along the course of which thought oscillated from extreme to extreme, until at last the company dispersed, leaving La Rochefoucauld tocapture and to fix the essential result of all that desultoryconversation. It is not impossible for us to conjecture the generalcharacter of this brilliant and illusive talk. It had one central aim, more or less clearly perceived, namely the desire to reach a Latinstandard of perfection. It sought to exchange for the romanticbarbarism which had underlain so much that was picturesque in thesixteenth century--a barbarism which had come down from the lateMiddle Ages, and which was really a dissolution of strong thingsoutworn--to exchange for this a preciousness of quality as againstmere rude bulk. It desired to introduce depth of purpose in the placeof chaotic moral disorder, originality in place of a frenzied andincoherent eccentricity, and to found a solid structure upon a basisof intellectual discipline. 

But in order to carry out this fine scheme, and especially in ordersuccessfully to check that decadence which had alarmed the best mindsin France, there was a pioneer work to be done. It was necessary tointensify and purify the light of criticism. For this purpose theconversations of the _salons_ culminated in the lapidary art of LaRochefoucauld, who was not a creator like Racine and Molière, likeBossuet and Fenelon, but who prepared the way for these slightly laterbuilders of French literature by clearing the ground of shams. Segrais, whose recollections of him are among the most precious whichhave come down to us, says that La Rochefoucauld never argued. He hadthe Socratic manner, and led others on to expose and expound theirviews. His custom was, in the course of the endless talks about moralsand the soul, "to conceal half of his own opinion, and to show tactwith an obstinate opponent, so as to spare him the annoyance of havingto yield. " There is something very like this in the "Pensées" ofPascal. La Rochefoucauld blames himself, in his self-portrait, forarguing too fiercely, and for being testy with an opponent, but thesefaults were not perceived by other people. Doubtless he was aware ofan inward impatience, and succeeded in concealing it by means of thatextreme politeness on which he prided himself. 

The "Maximes" are shocking to persons who live in a state of illusionabout themselves, and they were so from the hour of their publication. They roll up a bitter pill for human vanity. When Mme de La Fayette, destined to look deeper than any other mortal into the soul of LaRochefoucauld, read them first in 1663, in company with Mme du Plessisat the Château de Fresnes, she was terrified and shocked at what shecalled the "corruption" which they revealed. She wrote to Mme deSablé, who had lent her the manuscript--

"Ah, Madame, how corrupt he must be in mind and heart to be capable ofimagining such things! I am so frightened by it that I should say, ifthis were not a matter too serious for jest, that such maxims arelikely to do more to upset him than all the plates of soup heswallowed at your house the other day. "

As the "Maximes" pass from hand to hand, we see the spiritual Mænadsof Port Royal clustering "with a lovely frightened mien" about thesinister author, while he turns "his beauteous face haughtily anotherway, " like young Apollo in the Phrygian highlands. The word"pessimism" was, I believe, unknown until the year 1835, but this iswhat Mme de La Fayette and the rest of the Jansenist ladies meant by"corruption. " Perhaps the most celebrated of all the sayings of herterrible friend is that which declares that "In the misfortunes of ourfriends there is always something which gives us no displeasure. " Shewas about to learn that no one had a nobler practice in friendshipthan the cynic who wrote this: "There are good marriages, but nodelicious ones"; Mme de La Fayette's own marriage had been not at alldelicious and not even good. "Gratitude in the majority of men issimply a strong and secret wish to receive still greater benefits. "Terrifying this must have been to a sentimental and exalted bosom, andexclusive of all hope until the little word "majority" was observed, aloophole offered for scared humanity to creep out at. 

The design of La Rochefoucauld was to make people ashamed of theiregotism, and so to help them to modify it. He saw France deadened by auniversal sycophancy, and tyrannized over by a court life which made alie of everything. He insisted upon the value of individual sincerity, but in a voice so harsh and bitter, and in such sardonic phrases--aswhen he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and isusually nothing but a delicate dissimulation to attract the confidenceof others"--that the more timid of his auditors shrank from him, as ifhe had been Hamlet or Lear. When he dared to suggest that none ofthese maxims were intended to refer to the reader himself, but only toall other persons, he invited the reaction which led Huet, Bishop ofAvranches, to appeal against the morality of the "Maximes, " as suitedonly to the vices of wicked persons, "improborum hominum vitiis, " andto issue a warning against the too-sweeping cynicism ofRoccapucaldius, as he called the Duke. This was, perhaps, thebeginning of the dead-set against La Rochefoucauld. It encouragedRousseau, a century later, to talk of "ce triste livre, " and todeclare, in the true romantic spirit, that "Bad maxims are worse thanbad acts. " There have always been, and always will be, people whoexperience a sort of _malaise_, an ill-defined discomfort, as thoughthey sat in an east wind, while they read La Rochefoucauld. This isparticularly true of Englishmen, who resent being told that "Ourvirtues are often only our vices in disguise, " and who also, by theway, are constitutionally impatient of the French genius for makingwhat is ugly, and even what is detestable, pleasing by the surface ofstyle. 

There is an element of unmercifulness in the candour of LaRochefoucauld which is distressing to sentimentalists. But this wascharacteristic of the age, which looked upon compassion as a frailty, as a break-down of noble personal reserve. He shall speak on thismatter for himself--

"I am little sensible of pity, and if I had my way, I would avoid italtogether. At the same time, there is nothing I would not do torelieve an afflicted person: and I believe as a matter of fact thatone ought to go so far as to express compassion for the misfortunes ofsuch a man, since the unhappy are so stupid that compassion does themmore good than anything else in the world. But I also hold that oneshould confine one's self to professions of pity and be very carefulnot to feel any. Pity is a passion which is wholly useless to awell-constituted mind; it can but weaken the heart, and it ought to beleft to people who, carrying nothing out in a logical manner, requirepassion to constrain them to do things. "

He seems to paint himself in tones of Prussian blue, but we mustreally think of him as of a man timid, and at the same timepreternaturally wide-awake, who was determined at all risks not to betaken at a disadvantage. When he was an old man, when much communingwith Mme de La Fayette had allayed his suspicion of mankind, LaRochefoucauld said to Mlle de Scudery, "I hope that clemency will comeinto fashion, and that we shall see no more men unhappy. " [4] Heprofessed to found politeness on extreme _amour-propre_, but perhapsin a still closer analysis he would have discovered its basis inkindness of heart. He resists the temptation to weaken his ownpessimism, just as in his biting sarcasms about love we may trace atender soul still bleeding from the wounds which Mme de Longueville'slevity had inflicted on it. [5]

 [Footnote 4: Mme de Sévigné told her daughter that she was sure that if one could peep at the Duke and Mme de La Fayette "when they were alone with the cat, " one would find all the restraints of society flung aside, and see them without the mask, their cynicism forgotten, mingling cries and tears over the sorrows of the world. But neither she nor any third person would ever see their social discretion thus betrayed, and she concludes, in her droll way, "C'est une vision!" In another letter to Mme de Grignan (June 6, 1672) she says of the Duke, "Il connaît quasi aussi bien que moi la tendresse maternelle. "]

 [Footnote 5: There was unquestionably a strong vein of tenderness running through the stoical character of the Duke, and if we were more intimately acquainted with his private life we should probably see many traces of it. Such traces exist as it is. We have Mme de Sévigné's account of his reception of the news of the Passage of the Rhine. It was announced to him, on the 17th of June, 1672, at the house of Mme de La Fayette, in the presence of Mme de Sévigné, that in that terrible disaster his eldest son had been dangerously wounded and his fourth son, the Chevalier, killed. The tears seemed to start out of the depth of his heart, and they brimmed his eyes, although his self-command prevented an outbreak of grief. But there was a further complication. The young Duke of Longueville was also killed at the Rhine, and he, as a select circle of intimate friends were perfectly aware, was really the love-child of La Rochefoucauld. Mme de Sévigné, having given a superficial account of the incident, characteristically goes on to say, "Alas! I am telling a lie; between ourselves, my dear, he does not feel the loss of the Chevalier so much; it is that of the young man whom all the world regrets which leaves him so inconsolable. " And again she says: "I saw the secrets of his heart revealed under this cruel blow; and no one that I have ever seen surpasses him in courage, in honour, in tenderness, in balance of mind. " This is a tribute not to be overlooked. ]

To understand the wholesome influence which La Rochefoucauld hasexercised on French character, we must keep constantly in sight hishatred of falsehood. If he is angry and sardonic, it is because hesees, or thinks he sees, falsehood everywhere masquerading as virtue. His foremost duty was to pluck the mask from the false virtues whichstrutted everywhere through the society and literature of France. Voltaire recognized nothing else in La Rochefoucauld but this sardonicmisanthropy, this determination to prove that man is guided solely byself-interest. This Voltaire thought was the _seule vérité_ containedin the "Maximes, " and in a measure he was right. The moralist saw_amour-propre_ as an Apollyon straddling right across the pathway ofmankind; he saw lies flourish everywhere, and proclaim themselves tobe the truth. The conscience of mankind was seduced or browbeaten bythe impudency of self-love. Thus--

"We have not the courage to say broadly that we ourselves have nodefects, and that our enemies have no good qualities; but as a matterof fact that is not far from being what we think. "

He believed not at all, or very faintly, in altruism. He had to sweepaway affected and therefore erroneous suppositions with regard tomorality, and particularly with regard to social motives. He had comeback to Paris, after his long and irksome exile, with a terribleclear-sightedness, and he saw that society had gone to pieces and thattruth was essential to its rebuilding. He was convinced--and this mustbe asserted in the face of his own apparent cynicism--he was convincedof the existence of pure virtue, but he thought that _amour-propre_ inthe individual, and conventionality (what was then meant by _lacoutume_) in the social order, had made it almost as rare as the dodo. He wished, by his stringent exposure of the arts of lying, to savevirtue before it was absolutely extinct. He had the instinct ofrace-preservation. [6]

 [Footnote 6: It is possible that the conversation of Mme de Sablé concentrated his thoughts on self-love. A contemporary MS. Says of that lady, "Elle flatte fort l'amour propre quand elle parle aux gens. " But egotism was a new discovery which fascinated everybody in the third quarter of the century. ]

Let us turn to the few, but profoundly beautiful reflections whichform the constructive element in La Rochefoucauld's teaching. His aimin edification is to train us to dig through the crust of social shamto the limpid truth which exists in the dark centre of our souls--

"If there is a pure love, he says, exempt from all admixture withother passions, it is that which lies hidden at the bottom of theheart, and of which we ourselves are ignorant. "

Unlike Mandeville, our own great cynic of the eighteenth century, LaRochefoucauld, while calling in question the reality of almost allbenevolent impulses, stopped short of denying the existence of virtueitself. He would not have said, as the author of the "Fable of theBees" (1714) did, that the "hunting after this _pulchrum et honestum_is not much better than a wild-goose chase. " But he had a strongcontempt for the humbugs of the world, and among them he placedunflinching optimists. One of the main forms of humbug in his day wasthe legend that everybody acted nobly for the sake of other people. This La Rochefoucauld stoutly denied, but he was not so excessive ashis commentators in his condemnation of that self-love which hedeclares to be the source of all our moral actions. He insinuates thepossibility of an innocent and even a beneficial egotism. He says, "The praise which is given us serves to fix us in the practice ofvirtue, " and if that is true, _amour-propre_ must be practicallyuseful. Helvétius, who made some very valuable comments on the"Maximes" a hundred years later, pointed out that _amour-propre_ isnot in itself an evil thing, but is a sentiment implanted in us all bynature, and that this sentiment is transformed in every human beinginto either vice or virtue, so that although we are all egoists, someare good and some are bad. 

La Rochefoucauld, therefore, while he takes a very dark view of theselfishness of the human race, softens the shades of his picture byadmitting that egotism may be, and often must be, advantageous notmerely to the individual but to the race. And here we find the key toone of the oddest passages in his works, that in which he attributeshis inspiration to two saints, St. Augustine and St. Epicurus! Hesays--

Everybody wishes to be happy; that is the aim of all the acts oflife. Spurious men of the world and spurious men of piety only seekfor the appearance of virtue, and I believe that in matters ofmorality, Seneca was a hypocrite and Epicurus was a saint. I know ofnothing in the world so beautiful as nobility of heart and loftinessof mind: from these proceeds that perfect integrity which I set aboveall other qualities, and which seems to me, at my present stage oflife, to be of more price than a royal crown. But I am not surewhether, in order to live happily and as a man of the highest sense ofhonour, it is not better to be Alcibiades and Phaedo than to beAristides and Socrates. 

It would take us too far out of our path to comment on the relation ofthis epicureanism to the religion of La Rochefoucauld's day, but a fewwords seem necessary on this subject. He says extremely little aboutreligion, although he makes the necessary and perhaps not whollyperfunctory, statement that he was orthodox. But the position of avotary of St. Epicurus had grown difficult. Since the Duke's exile, the enmity between the church and the world had become violent, soviolent that a man of prominent social and intellectual position wasbound to take one side or another. We may note that the years duringwhich the "Maximes" were being composed were precisely those duringwhich Bossuet was thundering from the pulpit his anathemas againstworldly luxury and the pride of life. The period marked at oneextremity by "L'Amour des Passions" (1660) and at the other by the"Grandeurs Humains" (1663) is precisely that in which the lapidary artof La Rochefoucauld was most assiduous. The church was advocatingasceticism and humility with all its authority, and was leading uptowards the later phase of the fanatical despotism of Louis XIV. 's oldage, with all its attendant hypocrisy. For the moment, in thestruggle, La Rochefoucauld, though no _dévot_, would seem a friend ofthe church rather than a foe, and in fact he retained the intimacy ofBossuet, in whose arms he died. We may be sure that he guarded himselfwith delicate care from the charge of being what was then called a"libertine, " that is a man openly at war with the theory and practiceof the theologians. 

It is said that La Rochefoucauld invented[7] the word "vraie, " "true, "to describe the character of Mme de La Fayette. His intimacy with thisillustrious lady is one of the most beautiful episodes in the historyof literature, and perhaps its purest example of true friendshipbetween the sexes. The phrase we have already quoted shows that in1663 the two great writers were acquainted but not yet intimate. Mariede la Vergne, Comtesse de La Fayette, was in her thirtieth year, LaRochefoucauld had completed his fiftieth when some cause which remainsobscure drew them together with a tie which death alone, afterseventeen wonderful years of almost unbroken association, was tosever. There was no scandal about it, even in that scandal-mongeringage. The astute Mile de Scudery, writing to her gossip Bussy Rabutin(December 6, 1675), says, "Nothing could be happier for her, or moredignified for him; the fear of God on either side, and perhapsprudence as well, have clipped the wings of love. " Twelve yearsbefore, when Ménage had repeated to her some critical remarks abouther novel, "La Princesse de Montpensier, " Mme de La Fayette hadreplied, "I am greatly obliged to M. De la Rochefoucauld for hisexpressions. They are the result of our similarity of experience, 'dela belle sympathie qui est entre nous. '"

 [Footnote 7: Mme de Sévigné seems not to have known this when, in writing to her daughter (July 19, 1671), she claims to have been the first to say _vraie_ when she meant sincere, loyal. "Il y a longtemps que je dis que vous êtes _vraie_"]

The famous friends were excluded by their physical conditions from theactivities of life. Mme de La Fayette, who was perhaps something of ahypochondriac, tossed all day among the pillows of that golden bedwith the extravagance of which the austerity of Mme de Maintenonupbraided her. La Rochefoucauld, tormented by the gout, lay stretchedat her side in his long chair, and the days went by in endlessdiscussion, endless balancing of right and wrong, much gossip, muchreading of books new and old, and not a little consultation of artistwith artist. They kept their secrets well, and no curiosity ofsuccessive critics has been able to discover how much of LaRochefoucauld is hidden in the pages of "La Princesse de Clèves", theearliest of the modern novels of the world, nor how much of Mme de LaFayette in the revised and re-revised text of the "Maximes. " [8] But weknow that she was no less sagacious and no less an enemy to illusionthan he was, and those are probably not far wrong who have detected asoftening influence from her conversation on the late genius of LaRochefoucauld. 

In 1675 Mme de Thiange presented to the Duke du Maine a toy which haslong ago disappeared, and for the recovery of which I would gladlyexchange many a grand composition of painting and sculpture. It was asort of gilded doll's house, representing the interior of a _salon_. Over the door was written, "Chambre des Sublimes. " Inside were waxportrait-figures of living celebrities, the Duke du Maine in onearm-chair; in another La Rochefoucauld, who was handing him somemanuscript. By the arm-chairs were standing Bossuet, then Bishop ofCondom, and La Rochefoucauld's eldest son, M. De Marcillac. At theother end of the alcove Mme de La Fayette and Mme de Thiange werereading verses together. Outside the balustrade, Boileau with apitchfork was preventing seven or eight bad poets from entering, tothe amusement and approval of Racine, who was already inside, and ofLa Fontaine, who was invited to come forward. The likeness of theselittle waxen images is said to have been perfect, and there can hardlybe fancied a relic of that fine society which would be more valuableto us in re-establishing its social character. We know not what becameof it in the next generation. No doubt, the wax grew dusty, and thefigures lost their heads and hands, and some petulant châtelainedoomed the ruined treasure to the dustbin. 

 [Footnote 8: Bussy Rabutin writes to Mme de Sévigné that he hears that La Rochefoucauld and Mme de La Fayette are preparing "quelque chose de fort joli. " This shows that before "La Princess de Clèves" was finished the Duke's name was identified with its composition. ]

No mention of Mme de Sévigné is made in the inventory of the "Chambredes Sublimes, " and yet there is no one to whom we owe an exacterportraiture of its inmates, nor one who was more worthy to animate itsgolden recesses. For the last ten years of La Rochefoucauld's life shewas one of the closest observers of the famous sedentary friendship. Unfortunately she tells us nothing about the original publication ofthe "Maximes, " for his name does not occur in her correspondencebefore 1668, and does not abound there until 1670. Then we find herfor ever at the Duke's house, or meeting him at Mme de La Fayette'sbedside. He gratified her by warm and constant praise of Mme deGrignan, whose letters were regularly read to the friends by herinfatuated mother. It is vexing that Mme de Sévigné, who might havespared us two or three of her immortal pages, although she incessantlymentions and even quotes La Rochefoucauld, generally refrains fromdescribing him. She and Mme de La Fayette were his guests in thecountry on May 15, and the three wonderful companions walked in theharmony of "nightingales, hawthorns, lilacs, fountains and fineweather, " or played with his pet white mouse. Such touches are rare, and Paris seems best to suit what Mme de Sévigné admirably calls "thegrey-brown" thought of La Rochefoucauld. 

In 1671 he had a terrible attack of the gout, accompanied by agoniesmoral and physical which filled the ladies with alarm and pity. Betterin 1672, he was able to entertain company to hear Corneille read hisnew tragedy of "Pulchérie" in January, and Molière his new comedy, "Les Femmes Savantes, " in March. He was now, in premature old age, thevenerable figure in the group, the benevolent Nestor of the salons. Let his detractors remember that Mme de Sévigné, who knew what she wastalking about, wrote that "he is the most lovable man I have everknown, " His sufferings, his disenchantments and disappointments, onlyseemed to accentuate his beautiful patience. Just before his fatalillness (January 31, 1680) Mme de Sévigné writes again: "I have neverseen a man so obliging, nor more amiable in his wish to give pleasureby what he says. " [9] Her detailed and pathetic account of his lasthours, which closed on the night of March 16, 1680, testifies to herdeep attachment and to Mme de La Fayette's despair. 

 [Footnote 9: Two of La Fontaine's fables, "L'Homme et son Image" and "Les Lapins, " were dedicated to La Rochefoucauld in 1668. In the former we read:--

 _On voit bien où je veux venir. Je parle a tous, et cette erreur extrême Est un mal que chacun se plaît d'entretenir Notre âme, c'est cet homme amoureux de lui-même; Tant de miroirs, ce sont les sottises d'autrui, Miroirs, de nos défauts les peintres légitimes; Et quant au canal, c'est celui, Que chacun sait: le livre des Maximes. _]

When Mme de Sévigné, in 1675, received the third edition of the Duke'sbook, which contained more than seventy new maxims, she wrote, "Some ofthem are divine; some of them, I am ashamed to say, I don't understand. "Probably she would have partly agreed with some one's criticism of them, "De l'esprit, encore de l'esprit, et toujours de l'esprit--tropd'esprit!" [10] No doubt, La Rochefoucauld has done his own reputationwrong by the bluster of his scepticism and also by the fact that hesometimes wraps his thoughts up in such a blaze of epigram that we aredisconcerted to find, when we analyze them, that they are commonplaces. Contemporaries seemed to have smiled at the excessive subtlety intowhich their long conversations led Mme de La Fayette and her sublimecompanion. Mme de Sévigné describes such talks with her delicate irony, and says, "We plunged into subtleties which were beyond ourintelligence. " An example is the dispute whether "Grace is to the bodywhat good sense is to the mind, " or "Grace is to the body what delicacyis to the mind" should be the ultimate form of a maxim. They sometimesdrew the spider's thread so fine that it became invisible. [11]

 [Footnote 10: The practice of making "maxims, " _axiomata_, encouraged the enlivenment of conversation by the introduction of topsy-turvy statements, such as "Constancy is merely inconstancy arrested, " in the manner of Oscar Wilde and Mr. Chesterton. ]

 [Footnote 11: La Rochefoucauld was not without affectations. He spoke airily about his _manière négligée_ of writing, whereas no one ever took more pains. Segrais gives very interesting information on this point: he says that the Duke "sent me from time to time what he had been working on, and he wished me to keep these note-books of his for five or six weeks, so as to be able to give them my closest attention, particularly with regard to the turn of the thoughts and the arrangement of the words. Some of his maxims he altered as many as thirty times. " But when he wrote to Esprit, in 1660, La Rochefoucauld affected to regard his own writings as trifles thrown off "au coin de mon feu" The great of the earth have these amiable and amusing weaknesses. ]

But his clearness of insight was immense, and he was too profoundlyintelligent to be a merely destructive or sterile force. He buildedbetter than he knew. For instance, courage, it has been alleged, hedenies, and indeed he is so savage in his exposure of braggadocio thatit might well be believed that he refused to admit that men could bebrave. Yet what does he say?--

"Intrepidity is an extraordinary force of the soul which lifts itabove those troubles, disorders and emotions which the aspect of greatperil would otherwise excite; it is by this force that heroes maintainthemselves in a state of equanimity, preserving the free use of theirreason through the most surprising and the most terrible accidents. "

This must include the most moving of all accidents, those which callforth moral and physical courage in the face of national danger, andare rewarded by _gloire_, by public and lasting fame. And we are ledon to a consideration of the lengthy reflection on the spirit in whichthe approach of death should be faced, with which he closed the latestedition of the "Maximes, " declaring that "the splendour of dying witha firm spirit, the hope of being regretted, the desire to leave a fairreputation behind us, the assurance of being released from thedrudgery of life and of depending no more on the caprices of fortune, "are remedies which would medicine our pain in approaching the dreadedgoal of our existence. 

We must read La Rochefoucauld closely to perceive why a book sosearching, and even so cruel as his, has exercised on the genius ofFrance a salutary and a lasting influence. His savage pessimism is notuseless, it is not a mere scorn of humanity and a sneer at itsweaknesses. It tends, by stripping off all the shams of conduct anddigging to the root of action, to make people upright, candid andmagnanimous on a new basis of truth. So we come at last to see thesignificance of Voltaire's dark saying of the "Maximes": "This book isone of those which have contributed most to form the taste of theFrench nation, and to give it the spirit of accuracy and precision. "

 LA BRUYÈRE

La Bruyère was thirty-five years of age when La Rochefoucauld died, and twenty when the "Maximes" were published. We have no evidence thathe ever met the former, but he certainly read the latter, and in spiteof his eager denial that Pascal or La Rochefoucauld suggested hismethod to him--"I have followed neither of these paths, " he says--itis impossible to doubt that the example of the "Maximes" had a greatdeal to do with the form of the "Caractères. " His own disciple, Brillon, tells us of La Bruyère that, "the author of the work whichthis age has most admired was at least ten years writing it, and aboutas long hesitating whether he would write it or not. " The "Caractères"was finished in 1687; Brillon's estimate takes us back to 1667 orearlier, and the brilliant success of the "Maximes" dates from 1665. Every author imagines that he loses some dignity by being supposed tofollow the lead of another author, although the entire history ofliterature is before him to show that the lamp of genius has alwaysbeen handed on from hand to hand. La Bruyère, in particular, was notexempt from this amiable weakness, but his ghost needs feel nodispleasure if we insist on connecting him with the effort of LaRochefoucauld. 

It is very amusing to see how anxious La Bruyère is not to seem to oweanything to La Rochefoucauld. He speaks of his own writings as "lessdelicate" than those of the Duke, and in his own opening words hedeclares that he has had no wish to write maxims, "which are laws inmorals, " as he has no legislative authority. I suppose that indescribing the tone of La Rochefoucauld as "delicate" La Bruyèrereally meant supercilious, and deprecated any idea that he, thetypical bourgeois, should seem to lay down the law like the architypeof intellectual aristocracy. He scoffs at the Duke for making hisreflections "like oracles, " so short are they and so concise; and heis quite correct when he boasts of the extreme variety and versatilityof his own manner. He accuses La Rochefoucauld of browbeating hisreaders into subjection to his thought; while, La Bruyère says, "formy part I am quite willing that my reader should say sometimes that Ihave not observed correctly, provided that he himself will observebetter. " The reader, on the other hand, must not be taken in by allthis, which is very characteristic of La Bruyère's timidself-confidence. His reputation loses nothing by our discovering thathe owes much to Montaigne and still more to La Rochefoucauld. 

The link is clear, in spite of the foliage with which La Bruyère seeksto conceal it. It could only be from La Rochefoucauld that the authorof "Les Caractères" derived that sad disillusionment, lighted up byflashes of savage wit, with which he expresses his sense of thedefects of human character. It may often be noted that when La Bruyèrespeaks of egotism, of the prevalence of _amour-propre_, his pungentphrases have the very sound of those of his precursor. The truth isthat a strong new book is not read by a young man whose genius isprepared for its teaching, without its image being stamped upon hismind. La Bruyère's own experience had already offered to him a banquetof the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil when hemet with the "Maximes" of 1665. His conscience and his memory wereprepared, and the truth is that a great deal of La Rochefoucauld'steaching passed into his veins without his knowing it. This does notin the least undermine the reputation which justly belongs to LaBruyère as one of the most original writers of France, or even ofEurope, but it links him for our intelligence with the other greatmoralist of his century. 

The author of the "Maximes" was the head of one of the great princelyhouses of France. The author of the "Caractères" was the type of theplebeian citizen of Paris. If La Rochefoucauld offers us thequintessence of aristocracy, La Bruyère is not less a specimen of themiddle class. His reputation as an honest man long suffered from hisown joke about his ancestry. He wrote, "I warn everybody whom it mayconcern, in order that the world may be prepared and nobody besurprised, that if ever it should happen that one of the mighty of theearth should deem me worthy of his care, in other words if I shouldever come into an immense fortune, there is a Godefroi de La Bruyèrewhom all the chroniclers place in the list of the greatest nobles ofFrance who followed Godefroi de Bouillon to the conquest of the HolyLand. When that happens, I shall descend from him in the direct line. "One would think that a child could perceive this to be a satire at theprofiteers of the age, who invented ancestors, and so a child wouldto-day, but in the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century it wasnot safe to be funny. In particular, nonsense--the divine charm ofwhich we now admit--had not been acclimatized, and was looked uponwith grave displeasure. It wrings the heart that when Goldsmith, in apurple coat, pretended to think himself more attractive than theJessamy Bride, his contemporaries severely censured this as aninstance of his "vanity. "

So the fools and fops of La Bruyère's time thought or pretended tothink that he was seriously claiming to be of noble birth. Nothing wasfurther from his intention; no La Bruyère had taken part in theCrusades, any more than any member of Charles Lamb's family had beenPope of Rome. The moralist's father, Louis de La Bruyère, wasComptroller-General of Rents of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris; hismother was an attorney's daughter. The eldest of five, he was born onAugust 17, 1645, in the centre of old Paris, close to the church of St. Christopher. It is only of late years that this fact has beendiscovered, and there are still immense blanks in the life of LaBruyère during which he disappears from us altogether, engulfed in thelanes of the Cité, not because of any adventurous mystery, but simplybecause of his total lack of adventure. There has scarcely lived agreat man of letters in comparatively recent times about whose lifethere is so little to relate as about that of La Bruyère. He isbelieved to have gone to school to the Fathers of the Oratory, buteven that is not certain. His knowledge of Greek is thought to proveit, but, though the Oratorians were admirable Hellenists, surely Greekcould be learned elsewhere. 

When he was twenty, he passed his examination in law in Orleans, and, coming back to Paris, practised as a lawyer for eight or nine years. He was concerned in no famous case, it is supposed, since his name isnever mentioned in the gossip of the time. He inherited a competencefrom his father, and probably lived an idle life, diversified by alittle legal business of a very mediocre nature. As his biographersays, he grew more and more "inclined by his temperament to ameditative existence. " When he was in his thirtieth year, a crisiscame. By some means or other, he secured a lucrative sinecure, that oftreasurer of finances at Caen in Normandy. He hated the country andwent down to Caen on the rarest occasions possible. La Bruyère, aParisian to the marrow of his bones, says, "Provincials and fools arealways ready to lose their temper and believe that one is laughing atthem or despising them. You must never venture on a joke, even themildest, except with well-bred, witty people. " Perhaps he had beentrying Godefroi de La Bruyère off on the stolid inhabitants of Caen. He received a salary, however, which was far from being all paid awayto a substitute, and he rose, in the curious social scale of thosedays, from Mister (_roturier_) into Esquire (_écuyer_). The court inNormandy was extremely angry with him at periodical intervals, butapparently could do nothing to assert itself. When it raged, LaBruyère was like the East in Matthew Arnold's poem, he "bow'd lowbefore the blast in patient, deep disdain. "

He lived through these quiet years in one apartment after another inthe heart of Paris. Vigneul de Marville saw him "nearer heaven thanearth" in a room which a light curtain divided into two. "The wind, always at the service of philosophers, running ahead of visitors, would lift this curtain adroitly, and reveal the philosopher, smilingwith pleasure at the opportunity of distilling the elixir of hismeditations into the brain and the heart of a listener. " He was alwaysat work, but his work was confined to meditation, talk and study. Sometimes he left his garret, and studied "the court and the town"from the benches of the public gardens, the Luxembourg and theTuileries. There has been an enormous amount of speculation andconjecture about the central period of the life of La Bruyère, but wereally have only one positive document to go upon. During the illnessof his own footman, he borrowed the services of his brother's man, whorobbed him of money and clothes. La Bruyère put the case in the handsof the police, who failed to catch the thief. This is the onlydefinite fact which has rewarded the patience of the investigators, and we must build round it what we can. We build round it his ownglimpse of self-portraiture (in "Des Biens de Fortune") and find thephilosopher bending over the volume where Plato discusses thespirituality of the soul, or measuring, with a rapt expression, theinfinite distance between Saturn and Jupiter. [12]

 [Footnote 12: "Vigneul de Marville, " to whom we owe some picturesque impressions of La Bruyère at this time of social obscurity, was one of the pseudonyms of Bonaventure d'Argonne, whose real name appears to have been Noël Argonne. He was a Carthusian who dabbled in literature, and who towards the close of his career compiled a volume of "Mélanges, " containing anecdotes which are often spiteful, but sometimes useful to the historian of literature. He seems to have visited La Bruyère in the days of his comparative poverty, when his mother kept home for the whole family, first in the Rue Chapon, and later in the Rue des Grands Augustins. ]

When he is on the point of entering his fortieth year, La Bruyèresuddenly breaks out of the cloud which encompasses him, and isrevealed as professor of history to the Duke of Bourbon, and residentin the household of the great Prince de Condé. There is no evidence toshow how Bossuet, then Bishop of Meaux, and the most influential manof intellect in France, became acquainted with the discreet andobscure treasurer of finances; but it is evident that he was struck bythe vast learning and intelligence of this silent, smiling anchorite. Fontenelle tells us that Bossuet, who had been tutor to the Dauphin, "made a practice of supplying to the princes such persons, meritoriousin letters, as they had need of. " In 1684, then, we know not why norhow, Bossuet recommended La Bruyère as tutor to the House of Condé. Itis a matter of ceaseless wonderment, however, that the philosopheraccepted and retained the post. He possessed a sufficient though amodest competence already, and he exchanged a life of completeindependence for a most painful and trying servitude, hung up betweenthe insolence of those above and the impertinence of those below him. The situation of La Bruyère in the Maison de Condé was like that ofFanny Burney at the court of George III. , only worse. Commentatorshave expended endless ingenuity in conjecturing what were the reasonswhich induced him to enslave himself. 

A careful study of his great book must add to our amazement. No oneever locked himself up in prison with an exacter appreciation of thediscomforts of captivity. La Bruyère has some remarks about freedom, which plunge us in bewilderment. "Liberty, " he says, "is not laziness:it is a free use of one's time; it is having the choice of one's ownwork and exercise. To be free, in a word, is not to do nothing, but tobe sole judge of what one shall do or not do. In this sense, what aboon is liberty!" This practical freedom he possessed to the full, when in August 1684 he accepted bondage to a spiteful monkey of a boy, a dwarf with a huge head and a dreadful face, to whom he was toimpart, with tears of disappointment and humiliation, the rudiments ofnational history. He was immediately responsible to the father of thisinfant phenomenon, to Henry Jules, Duke d'Enghien, of whose "uselesstalents, wasted genius, imagination which was a torment to himself andothers, " Saint-Simon gives so copious an account. We have to think ofour delicate and timid La Bruyère now for years the powerlessplaything of this "unnatural son, cruel father, terrible husband, detestable master, pernicious neighbour, without affection, withoutfriends. "

But after two centuries of canonization of the Condés, it has nowbecome the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. Thetraditional figure of the Grand Condé, Olympian and sublime, has beenexposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyère's latest and mostlearned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of thePrince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, hecalls him, _en souquenille_. But to dwell on all this is to forgetthat the great Condé, even in his ugly old age, was haloed by theglory of having been the first soldier of the world. It was aprivilege, even at the end, to be admitted to his intimacy, and Ibelieve that we pity La Bruyère more than he pitied himself. Itscandalizes the biographers that the Prince, on one occasion, made LaBruyère dance a _pas seul_ before him, twanging a tune on the guitar. I suppose De Quincey would have been complaisant if the Duke ofWellington had asked him to whistle "Home, Sweet Home" to him. Thereis a limit, after all, to the modern theory of the Dignity of Letters. 

Valincourt says that "All the time La Bruyère lived in the House ofCondé, everybody was always making fun of him. " Possibly the fear ofappearing pedantic among all these people of fashion and thesetinselled flunkeys made him lend himself to ridicule. They all teasedand mocked him, I suppose, but not, I think, so as seriously to hurthim, and now, with his book in our hands, the laugh is on his side. For when we examine carefully we see that his position in the House ofCondé improved as time went on. He got rid of his rivals, the othertutors; when the Grand Condé died, La Bruyère got rid of his dreadfulpupil as well. We find him no longer "précepteur, " but "gentilhomme deM. Le Duc, "--no longer, that is, a mere scholastic drudge, but a sortof lord-in-waiting. He had probably a large increase of salary, sincein 1687 he seems to have resigned his "charge" at Caen. Instead ofbeing pinned to the dark apartment in the recesses of the Cité, he nowrevolved in ceaseless movement between Chantilly and Fontainebleau, Paris and Versailles. He became a sort of confidential reader to theDuke and Duchess, an essential part of the suite. After the firstyears, he had a great deal of leisure. He could retire to the securityof a handsomely furnished apartment--upholstered in green--on thesecond floor of the Hôtel de Condé, opposite the Luxembourg, and hehad another set of rooms at Versailles. The bondage became, I expect, no real bondage at all. 

But why had he, so long completely his own master, consented to becomethe servant even of famous Royal princes? I think that as mothersaccept irksome situations for the support of their children, so LaBruyère became the serf of the Condés for the sake of his book. For itis now time to reveal the fact that in this apparently listless, emptylife there was one absorbing secret interest. This was the collectionof the maxims, reflections, pictures, and what not which he had beenquietly absorbing and turning into the honey of more and moreexquisite prose ever since his early youth. I think that La Bruyèredeliberately accepted all that might prove irksome in the captivity tothe House of Condé for the sole sake of his book. He needed to seemore types, and types of a more brilliant and effective kind than hecould become familiar with in his mediocre condition. He knew all thatwas to be known about the artizans and the shopkeepers of the Cité; hewanted to examine the rulers of society, and while he watched themlike a naturalist, they might make what contortions they pleased. Howdid one of his contemporaries describe him? "When Ménippe leaves hishome, it is for the purpose of studying the attitudes of the wholehuman race and of painting them from the life. But he is not merely aportrait-painter, he is an anatomist as well. Do you see that vain andarrogant fellow in the midst of his good fortune? He is enchanted tothink Ménippe is admiring him. What a mistake! At this very momentMénippe is dissecting him and preparing him as a specimen for a publiclecture in the schools. Not a vein, not a fibre will escape him, andfrom that man's heart he will draw the inmost springs of passion andexpose the circulation of every vice. "

It is time, however, to present the famous book in which all theseinvestigations were noted, the cabinet where all these butterflies andless beautiful insect-forms were exhibited. The final title of it is"Characters; or, the Manners of this Age. " It was published in January1688, but, as is believed, had been begun nearly thirty years earlier, and slowly finished, the final revision and arrangement dating from1686 and 1687. The book, like so many of the world's masterpieces, isshort, and a fashionable novelist of to-day could scribble in afortnight as many words as it contains. But there is not a carelessphrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in therange of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the"Caractères. " It started, probably, with the jotting down of socialremarks at long intervals. Then, I think, La Bruyère, always extremelyfastidious, observed that the form of his writing was growing toresemble too much that of La Rochefoucauld, and so he began todiversify it with "portraits. " These had been in fashion in Paris formore than a generation, but La Bruyère invented a new kind ofportrait. He says, on the very first page of the "Caractères, " "youmake a book as you make a clock"; he ought to have said, "I make _my_book, " for no other work is quite so clock-like in its variety ofparts, its elaborate mechanism, and its air of having been constructedat different times, in polished fragments, which have needed the mostworkmanlike ingenuity to fit them together into an instrument thatmoves and, rings. 

What perhaps strikes us most, when we put down the "Caractères" aftera close re-perusal of one of the most readable books in allliterature, is its extraordinary sustained vitality. It hums andbuzzes in our memory long after we have turned the last page. We mayexpand the author's own mage, and compare it, not with a clock, butwith a watchmaker's shop; it is all alive with the tick-tick of adozen chronometers. La Bruyère's observations are noted in a mannerthat is disjointed, apparently even disordered, but it was no part ofhis scheme to present his maxims in a system. We shall find that hewas incessantly improving his work, revising, extending and weighingit. He was one of those timid men who surprise us by their craftyintrepidity. It was dangerous to publish sarcastic "portraits" ofwell-known influential people, and there are few of these in the firstedition, but when the success of the book was once confirmed thesewere made more and more prominent. It was not until the eighthedition, of 1694, that La Bruyère ventured to print the followingstudy of one of the most influential men of letters of that day. Fontenelle--

THE PORTRAIT OF CYDIAS

"Ascange is a sculptor, Hegion a bronze-founder; Æschine a fuller, andCydias a wit--that is his profession. He has a signboard, a workshop, finished articles for sale, mechanics who work under him. He cannotdeliver for more than a month the stanzas which he has promised you, unless he breaks his word to Dosithée, who has ordered an elegy fromhim. He has an idyl on the loom; it is for Crantor, who is hurryinghim, and from whom he expects a handsome price. Prose, verse, which doyou want? He is equally successful with either. Ask him for letters tosympathize with a bereavement or to explain an absence, and he willundertake them. If you want them ready-made, you have only to enterhis shop, and to choose what you like. He has a friend whose only dutyupon this earth is to promise Cydias a long time ahead to a certainset of people, and then to present him at last in their houses as aman of rare and exquisite conversation; and, there, just as a musiciansings or a lute-player touches his lute before the people who haveengaged him, Cydias, after having coughed, and lifted the ruffle fromhis wrist, stretched out his hand and opened his fingers, begins toretail his quintessential thoughts and his sophistical arguments. .. . He opens his mouth only to contradict. 'It seems to me, ' he gracefullysays, 'that the truth is exactly the contrary of what you say, ' or 'Icannot agree with your opinion, ' or even 'that used to be myprepossession, as it is yours, but now----!'"

The idol of the gossips, "the prettiest pedant in the world, " was thuspaid out for his intrigues against La Bruyère in the FrenchAcademy. [13]

 [Footnote 13: The contemporary "keys, " which were generally ill-informed and ill-forming, said that Cydias was Perrault. But it is almost certain that Fontenelle was meant. M. A. Chassang has brought together a formidable list of Fontenelle's activity. He wrote for Thomas Corneille part of "Psyché" (1678) and of "Bellerophon" (1679); for Donneau le Visé the comedy of "La Comète" (1681); for Beauval the "Éloge" on Perrault (1688); for Catherine Bernard part of her tragedy of "Brutus" (1691), a discourse for the prize of eloquence given by the French Academy, and signed by Brunel (1695); and part of "L'Analyse des infiniments petits" for the Marquis de l'Hôpital (1696). This is merely part of the work turned out of Fontenelle's factory before the death of La Bruyère. Another candidate for the type of Cydias is Fontenelle's uncle, Thomas Corneille (1625-1709). ]

There was great danger, or so it would seem to a timid man like LaBruyère, in affronting public opinion with a book so full of sarcasmand reproof, so unflinching in its way of dealing with success, as the"Caractères. " He adopted a singular mode of self-protection. That wasthe day of the mighty dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns, and La Bruyère, at all events ostensibly, took the highly respectableside of the Greeks and Romans. There had lived a philosopher in thefourth century B. C. , Theophrastus, the successor and elucidator ofAristotle, who left a book of "Ethical Characters" (_[Greek: HThikoicharaktêres]_), which had been introduced to the Western world byCasaubon at the end of the sixteenth century. For some reason orother, the greatest impression had been made by Theophrastus inEngland, where there appeared a large number of successive imitationsor paraphrases of his "Characters. " In France, on the other hand, Theophrastus was still unknown to the vulgar, when La Bruyère took himup. It seems likely that his own collection of portraits and maximswas practically finished, when, as M. Paul Morillot has put it, hedetermined to hoist the Greek flag as a safeguard. He made a Frenchtranslation of the sketches of Theophrastus, and he put this at thehead of his book, waving it to keep off the public, as a lady unfurlsher parasol at a cow whose intentions are uncertain. 

The evidences of La Bruyère's extreme caution are amusing. Hehesitated long, but in 1687 he submitted his MS. To Boileau, who washighly encouraging, and to the poet-mathematician, Malizian, who said, "This will bring you plenty of readers and plenty of enemies. " Finallyhe determined to risk the dive, and he took the book to Michallet, thepublisher, saying as he did so, "If it is successful, the result shallbe your daughter's dowry, " the said daughter being a little child whowas then seated on La Bruyère's knee. The ultimate success of the bookbeing prodigious, Mlle Michallet must, by the time she wasmarriageable, have become a remarkable _parti_, but the story is notone which commends itself to the Incorporated Society of Authors. "LesCaractères" was published in January 1688, and the critics, with theveteran Bussy-Rabutin at their head, welcomed it with shouts ofapplause. Bussy frankly said, "It must be admitted that having provedthe merit of Theophrastus by his translation, he has obscured the fameof that writer by what he has done next, for he has penetrated, in hisown portraits, deeper into the heart of man than Theophrastus did, andhas penetrated with even greater delicacy and by means of moreexquisite language. " This must have been very gratifying from thesurvivor of the great school of Malherbe and Balzac. 

At the age of forty-three, then, previously unknown in the world ofletters, this shy and obscure gentleman-in-waiting to the Princes ofCondé, rose into fame, and enjoyed the admiration or the envy ofwhatever was most prominent in Paris. The public which he addressedwas one which we may pause a moment to contemplate. The authority ofthe Academic and noble _salons_ was practically at an end, andintellectual culture had spread to a somewhat wider circle. Those whogoverned taste had thrown off many affectations of a previousgeneration, and in particular the curious disease of "preciousness. "They were healthier, soberer and slightly less amusing than theirforerunners. But they formed, in the heart of Paris, the most compactbody of general intelligence to be met with at that time in any partof the world. They were certain, in their little sphere, of theiræsthetic and logical aims. They were the flower of an intensecivilization, very limited, in a way very simple; so far as theadoption of outer impulses went, very inactive, and yet within its ownrange energetic, elegant and audacious. To this world the "Caractères"was now offered, modestly, as though it were a summing up of themoralizations of the last fifty years. The author begins bydeprecating the idea that he has anything new to impart. His trick israther subtle; he concentrates our attention on the sayings of anancient Aristotelian philosopher, and then, as if to fill up the time, he ventures to repeat a few reflexions of his own. These he introduceswith the words: "Everything has been said, and we arrive too late intoa world of men who have been thinking for more than seven thousandyears. In the field of morals, all that is fairest and best has beenreaped already; we can but glean among the ancients and among thecleverest of the moderns. " In this insinuating manner, he leads thereader on to the perusal of his own part of the book, and soon webecome aware how cold and dry and pale the Greek translation seemsbeside the rich and palpitating world of the new French morality. 

Whether he perceived it or not--and I for one am convinced that he didperceive it--La Bruyère introduced a new thing into French literature;he opened out, we may almost say, a new world. The classical attitudeof the great age had produced splendid manifestations of thought andform. However revolutionary it pleases us of 1918 to be, we cannot getaway from the perfection of the age of Bossuet and Racine and LaFontaine and Fénelon. We come back to these solid and passionatewriters after each one of our romantic excursions, not entirelysatisfied with them, as our forefathers were, but with a sense oftheir solid glory, with a confidence in their permanent value instimulating and supporting human effort. They may not give us all thatthey were once presumed to give, but they offer us a firm basis; theyare always there for the imagination to start from. We must notforget, of course, that in 1688 in Paris these classics of the hourrepresented a great deal more than that; their prestige wasuntarnished. They so completely outshone, in cultivated opinion, allelse that had been produced since the Christian era, that the Italy ofDante, the Spain of Cervantes, and the England of Shakespeare did notso much as exist. If the intelligence was not satisfied by Descartes, well! there was nothing for it but to go back to Plato, and if Racinedid not sufficiently rouse the passions, they must be worked upon bySophocles. In all this, the divines took a particularly prominentplace because they alone presented something for which no definiteparallel could be found in antiquity. It was the great theologians ofthe age with whom La Bruyère chiefly competed. 

These theologians were themselves artists to a degree which we havenow a difficulty in realizing, although in the seventeenth century theChurch of England also had some great artists in her pulpits. IfJeremy Taylor had been a Frenchman, the work of La Bruyère might havebeen different. But the French orators lacked the splendour and oddityof the author of "The Great Exemplar, " and we can feel that LaBruyère, who was instinct with the need for colour, was dissatisfiedwith the broad outlines and masses of character for which the Frenchdivines were famous; indeed, even Bossuet, to an English reader freshfrom Fuller and Taylor, seems with all his magnificence too abstractand too rhetorical. La Bruyère determined to be less exacting and yetmore exact; he would sink to describing emotions less tremendous andto designing figures of more trifling value, but he would paint themwith a vivid detail hitherto unsolicited. The consequence was that thepublic instantly responded to his appeal, and we have continued tocontemplate with reverence Bossuet's huge historical outlines, but toturn for sheer pleasure to La Bruyère's finished etchings of thetulipomaniac and the collector of engravings. 

Everyone who approaches an analysis of the "Caractères" is obliged topause to commend the style of La Bruyère. It is indeed exquisite. Atthe time his book was published our own John Locke was puttingtogether his famous "Thoughts on Education, " and he remarked on the"policy" of the French, who were not thinking it "beneath the publiccare to promote and reward the improvement of their own language. Polishing and enriching their tongue, " so Locke proceeds, "is no smallbusiness amongst them. " It is perhaps not extravagant to believe thatin writing these words the English philosopher was thinking of the newParisian moralist. For La Bruyère was a great artist, who understoodthe moral value of form in a degree which would peculiarly commenditself to the lucid mind of Locke. He says, early in his book, "Amongall the different expressions which can render a single one of ourthoughts, there is only one which is right. We do not always hit uponit in speaking or composing; nevertheless it is a fact that somewhereit exists, and everything else is feeble and does not satisfy a man ofintelligence who desires to be understood. " This search for the oneand only perfect expression was an unfailing passion with La Bruyère. In another place he says: "The author who only considers the taste ofhis own age is thinking more of himself than of his writings. We oughtalways to be striving after perfection, and then posterity will renderus that justice which is sometimes refused to us by ourcontemporaries. " This is an ideal to which Locke, anxious to makedisciples by his regular and sometimes racy use of language, neverattained. La Bruyère, who did not address the passing age, so polishedhis periods that all successive generations have hailed him as one ofthe greatest masters of prose. 

Voltaire's definition of the style of La Bruyère is well known, butcannot too often be repeated. He calls it "a rapid, concise, nervousstyle, with picturesque expressions, a wholly novel use of the Frenchlanguage, yet with no infringement of its rules. " Fortunately, withall his admiration of others--and his great chapter "Des Ouvrages del'Esprit" is one of the most generous and catholic examples of currentcriticism which we possess in all literature--with his modest andglowing appreciation of his famous predecessors, he did not attempt toimitate them in the grand manner. We are able to perceive thatBossuet, who was nearly twenty years his senior, to whom he owed hisadvancement in life, whose majestic genius and princely prestige wereso well adapted to dazzle La Bruyère, remained his indefatigablepatron and probably his closest friend. But we do not find in LaBruyère a trace of imitation of the great preacher whom he loved andhonoured. If we think what the authority of Bossuet had come to be atthe time when the "Caractères" was published, how hardly itsevangelical science pressed upon the convictions of all Frenchmen, andparticularly upon those of men who accepted it as unquestionably asdid the author of that book, that there should be no trace of Bossueton his style is a great tribute to the originality of La Bruyère. 

"There is no pleasure without variety, " this same mighty Bossuet hadwritten in 1670, and his young friend had taken the axiom to heart. Wefind him pursuing almost beyond the bounds of good taste the searchfor variety of manner. He has strange sudden turns of thought, startling addresses, inversions which we should blame as violent, ifthey were not so eminently successful that we adopt them at once, aswe do Shakespeare's. La Bruyère passes from mysterious ironies to boldand coarse invective, from ornate and sublime reflections to phrasesof a roguish simplicity. He suddenly drops his voice to a shudderingwhisper, and the next moment is fluting like a blackbird. The gaietywith which he mocks the ambitions of the rich is suddenly relieved bythe dreadful calm with which he reveals the horror of theirdisappointments. He is never in the same mood, or adopting the sametone, for two pages running. It is difficult in a translation to givean idea of the surprising element in his style, but something of itsoddity may be preserved in such an attempt as this--

"There are creatures of God whom we call men, who have a soul which isintelligence, and whose whole life is spent and whose whole attentionis centred in the sawing of marble. This is a very simple, a verylittle thing. There are others who are amazed at this, but whothemselves are utterly useless, and who spend their days in doingnothing at all. This is a still smaller thing than sawing marble. "

English prose, which a century earlier had limped so far behind Frenchin clearness and conciseness, was rapidly catching its rival up, andin the next generation was to run abreast with it. But if we wish tosee how far behind the best French writers our own best still were, weneed but compare the exquisite speed and elasticity of the"Caractères" with the comparative heaviness and slowness of a famousTheophrastian essay published in the same year, 1688, namely the"Character of a Trimmer. " In the characteristics of a lively proseartist, we shall have to confess La Bruyère nearer to Robert LouisStevenson than to his own immediate contemporary, Lord Halifax. 

The surface of La Bruyère's writing is crisp and parched, but it iseasy by careful reading to crack it, and to discover the coolness, thesoftness, the salutary humidity which lie beneath the satirical crustof his irony. He is primarily a satirist, dealing as he says with thevices of the human mind and the subterfuges of human self-deception. He lays bare "the sentiments and the movements of men, exposing theprinciples which actuate their malice and their frailty"; he aims atshowing that such is the native evil implanted in their souls that "noone should any longer be surprised at the thousands of vicious orfrivolous actions with which their lives are crowded. " We note him atfirst as entirely devoted to these painful investigations, and we areapt to confound his attitude with that of La Rochefoucauld, the wearyTitan, who sighs contemptuously as he holds up to censure the globe ofhuman _amour-propre_. But we do not begin to understand the attitudeof La Bruyère until we notice that there always is, in the popularphrase, "more in him than meets the eye. " He is indeed a satirist, butnot of the profound order of the Timons of the mind; his satire issuperficial, and under it there flows a lenient curiosity mingled witha sympathy that fears to be detected. 

There is a note of sadness, a mysterious melancholy, which frequentlyrecurs in the "Caractères, " and this produces a constant variety inits appeal to the feelings. We find the author amusing himself bydetailing the weaknesses of his fellow-beings, but the entertainmentthey offer him soon leaves him dissatisfied and sad. He is overheardto sigh, he is seen to shake his head, as he turns his clear eyes awayfrom the self-humiliation of men. There is nothing of this in the hardsuperiority of La Rochefoucauld, and one of the most important thingswhich we have to note is the advance in feeling which the latermoralist makes, in spite of his extremely unpretentious attitude. LaBruyère attains to a reasoned tolerance which neither his immediatepredecessor nor Pascal nor Bossuet reached or had the least wish toreach. In him we meet, not commonly nor prominently presented, butquite plainly enough, the modern virtue of indulgence, of tolerance. Here is a passage which could scarcely have been written by any othermoralist of the seventeenth century:--

"It is useless to fly into a passion with human beings because oftheir harshness, their injustice, their pride, their self-love andtheir 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 orwith the flame for rising. "

Here is the voice of the man who had lived and who was still living inthe house of that Prince de Condé of whom Saint Simon said that, "Apernicious neighbour, he made everybody miserable with whom he had todo. " I like to imagine La Bruyère escaping from some dreadful scenewhere Henry Jules had injured his dependants and insulted hisfamiliars, or had drawn out in public the worst qualities of his son, "incapable of affection and only too capable of hatred. " I imagine himescaping from the violence and meanness of those intolerable tyrantsup into the asylum of his own hushed apartment at Versailles; thereflinging himself down for a moment in the alcove, on the paintedbedstead, then presently rising, with a smile on his lips and thefright and anger gone out of his eyes, and advancing to the greatoaken bureau which displayed his faience and his guitar. He wouldglance, for encouragement, at the framed portrait of Bossuet which wasthe principal ornament of the wall above it, and then, listening amoment to be sure that he was safe from disturbance, he would unlockone of the three drawers, and take out the little portfolio in whichfor years and years he had been storing up his observations uponsociety and his consolations in affliction. Presently, with infinitedeliberation and most fastidious choice of the faultless phrase andsingle available word, he would paint the Holbein portrait of one ofthe prodigious creatures whom he had just seen in action, someerratic, brilliant and hateful "ornament of society" such as the Dukede 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 hadbeautiful dreams, he has bad ones: what am I saying? people don'tdream as he has lived. No one has ever extracted out of a destiny morethan he has. The preposterous and the commonplace are equally familiarto him. He has shone, he has suffered, he has dragged along a humdrumexistence: nothing has escaped him. .. . He is an enigma, a riddle thatcan probably be never solved. "

La Bruyère aimed at the improvement of human nature. La Rochefoucauldhad said, "Don't be ridiculous--a blatant love of self is the onlyspring of your being. " Pascal, less haughty but more overwhelming, hadsaid, "Insect that you are, doomed to damnation, cease to striveagainst your own miserable impotence. " La Bruyère's teaching was notso definite, partly because his intellect was not so systematic astheirs, but partly because he was more human than either, human withmore than a touch of the modern democratic humanity. His attitude wasthe easier one implied in the sense that "there is so much that's goodin the worst of us, and so much that's bad in the best of us" thatthere is room, even among moralists, for an infinite indulgence. Hiswas, on the whole, and accounting for some fluttering of the nerves, avery tranquil spirit. He is much less formal and mechanical than LaRochefoucauld, and he seems to study men with less dependence on atheory. His own statement should not be overlooked; he says, veryplainly, that he desired above all things to make men live betterlives. 

Boileau said that the style of La Bruyère was "prophetic, " and I donot know that any one has attempted to explain this rather curiousphrase. But we may adopt it in the light of more than two centurieswhich were unknown to Boileau. More than any other writer of the endof the seventeenth century La Bruyère prophesied of a good timecoming. He did not speak out very plainly, but it is the privilege ofprophets to be obscure, and their predictions are commonly notcomprehensible until after the event. But we may claim for La Bruyèrethe praise of being a great civilizer of French thought; more thanthat, he widened human social intelligence throughout Europe. He isthe direct ancestor of the Frenchman of to-day who observes closelyand clearly, who has the power to define what he sees, and who retainsthe colour and movement of it. To this day, as may be amply seen inthe records and episodes of the war, in the correspondence of officersat the front, in the general intellectual conduct of the contest, Frenchmen rarely experience a difficulty in finding the exact wordthey want. These men who arrest for our pleasure an impression, whorebuild before us the fabric of their experience, descend in directline from La Bruyère. It was he who taught their nation to seize theattitude and to photograph the gesture. 

La Bruyère's express aim is to clarify our minds, to make us thinklucidly and in consequence speak with precision. We have already seenwhat value he sets on the right word in the right place. He is theenemy of all those who shamble along in the supposition that aninaccurate phrase will "do well enough, " and that any slipshoddefinition is excused by our saying, "Oh, you know what I mean!" Hisown style is finished up to the highest point, and it is brightenedand varied with such skill that the author never ceases to hold theattention of the reader. He reaches the very ideal of that elegantwandering art of writing which the Latins called _sermo pedestris_. Indeed, he gives so much attention to the perfect mode of sayingthings that some critics have brought it as a charge against him thathe overdoes it, that in fact his style is more weighty than hissubject. This, I think, is a very hasty judgment, founded a little, nodoubt, 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 amore or less primitive character, to which sparkle and force must begiven by illustrative examples. These examples gave him his greatchance, and he built them up, those exemplary "portraits" of his, withinfinite 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 otherfault that can be laid to their charge. 

One of the most important qualities of La Bruyère was that he preparedthe popular mind for liberty. He is democratic in many ways, in hislanguage, where he often borrows words from the _patois_ of the commonpeople; in his exposure of the errors of the _ancien régime_, itstyranny, its selfishness, its want of humanity and imagination; in hishatred of wealth, the scandalous triumph of which had already reacheda pitch which the next generation was to see outdone. In all this, ascannot be too often insisted upon, it was essential for a reformer tobe prudent. The People had no voice, and that their interests shouldbe defended was inconceivable. [14] In the next century, after the reignof 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 expressany criticism of the feudal order. For instance, there is a longpassage at the end of the chapter "De la Ville, " which scandalized thepolitical reformers of the eighteenth century. It is that whichbegins, "The emperors never triumphed in Rome so softly, soconveniently, or even so successfully, against wind and rain, dust andsunshine, as the citizen of Paris knows how to do as he crosses thecity to-day in every direction. How far have we advanced beyond themule of our ancestors!" La Bruyère was charged, and even by Voltaire, with attacking the progress of civilization, and with preferring therude subterfuges of Carlovingian times to the comforts of 1688. But hewas really making an appeal for thrift and modesty of expenditure onthe part of those bourgeois who had suddenly become rich, as asatirist of our own day might denounce the pomp of a too successfulshopkeeper, without being accused of denying the convenience ofmotor-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 amonstrous disproportion existed between the fortune of the rich and ofthe poor. [15] If we read the chapter "Des Biens de Fortune" we may beastonished at his courage, and we may see in him a direct precursor ofthe revolution which took a little more than a hundred years to gatherbefore it broke on France. He describes the great of the earth with asavage serenity, and then he adds, "Such people are neither relatives, nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even men. Theyhave money. " There are many such maxims in the chapter "De l'homme"which must have set people's thoughts running in channels which hadbefore been wholly dry. La Bruyère was not a political reformer, andwe must not exaggerate the influence of his charming book in thisparticular direction. But, as a popular imaginative writer, he took along step in the democratic direction. Frenchmen were already touchedin their consciences and beginning to examine the state of their soulswith anxiety; but the teachers of the ascetic revival had been toouncompromising. Ordinary mortals could not hope to reach the asceticideal of Port Royal, they could only be discouraged by the savageattacks on _amour-propre_, while in the "Caractères" they met with alay-preacher who was one of themselves, and who did not disdain toencourage 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, thathe was able to descend from the pulpit, and walk about among hisreaders with a smile, recognizing them as reasonable beings. He ispersuasive; his forerunners had been denunciatory. He may be harsh andsometimes unjust, but he is never contemptuous to human nature. Hefeels that he is addressing a wide public of intelligent men andwomen, whom he would fortify against the moral tyranny of the violentand the rich. For this purpose, though he would tell them theirfaults, he would not shut the gates of mercy in their faces. But howadmirably he himself puts it in his chapter "Des Jugements":--

"A man of talent and reputation, if he allows himself to be peevishand censorious, scares young people, makes them think evil of virtue, and frightens them with the idea of an excessive reform and a tiresomestrictness of conduct. If, on the other hand, he proves easy to get onwith, he sets a practical lesson before them, since he proves to themthat a man can live gaily and yet laboriously, and can hold seriousviews without renouncing honest pleasures; so he becomes an examplewhich they find it possible to follow. "

When we look round for an author of high importance on whom theinfluence of La Bruyère was direct, we find the most obvious to be anEnglishman, and our own enchanting "Mr. Spectator. " Addison was bornwhen La Bruyère was twenty-seven; when the "Caractères" was publishedhe was an undergraduate at Queen's College, Oxford, walking inmeditation under the elms beside the Cherwell. Addison was not inFrance until La Bruyère had been some months dead; there can have beenno personal intercourse between them; but he stayed at Blois for overtwelve months in 1699 and 1700, and during that time he was much incompany with the Abbé Phélippeaux, member of that family of friendswho had so efficiently supported La Bruyère's candidature to theFrench Academy only six years before. I do not think this fact hasbeen noted, but surely it is almost certain that in their talks aboutliterature Phélippeaux must have described La Bruyère to Addison?Another contributor to the _Spectator_, Eustace Budgell, translatedTheophrastus and knew La Bruyère's book. Dr. Johnson mentions that theFrench moralist is the source of Addison's effort, but Englishcritical opinion then, and since, has held that La Bruyère wrotewithout any of the earnestness of the moral reformer. I haveindicated, I hope, the hasty error contained in such a judgment. 

There is one point, however, on which it must be admitted that Addisonshows himself much in advance of his French precursor, or ratherperhaps we should consider it a proof of the advantage of Englishsociety under Anne over French society under Louis XIV. The delicacyand sympathy with which women are treated in the _Spectator_ has noparallel in the "Caractères. " In that volume, the chapter "Des Femmes"is perhaps the least agreeable to a sensible reader of to-day. It iscrowded with types of pretentious and abnormal womanhood, which itcaricatures very effectively. Addison had manifestly studied it, forhere we see the origin of his coquettes and prudes, with their"brocade petticoat which rises out of the mines of Peru, and thediamond necklace out of the bowels of Indostan. " But what we misscompletely in La Bruyère is that cordial recognition of women as theproper companions of men and the organizers of intelligent societywhich is so admirably sustained in the _Spectator_. It was Addison, and not La Bruyère, who broke down once for all, and finally, themonkish 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 havepreceded that on Addison. We may observe that Steele says, in thegeneral preface to the _Tatler, _ "the elegance, purity and correctnesswhich appeared in [Mr. Addison's] writings were not so much to mypurpose as. .. To rally all those singularities of human life, throughthe different professions and _characters_ in it, which obstructanything that is truly good and great, " The similarity of expressionhere is certainly not accidental; La Bruyère stood before Steele as amodel when he wrote, for instance, in 1709, Mr. Isaac Bickerstaffs"portraits" of Chloe and Clarissa, or the "lucubration" on Deferenceto Public Opinion. When La Bruyère died, Steele was already an author, and what is more, a moralist. It is impossible not to believe that hehad been reading the "Caractères" when it occurred to him that hemight 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 hewas a confirmed and impenitent bachelor. He thought that marriageenchained a philosopher, and would have said, in the words of RudyardKipling, "He rideth the faster who rideth alone, " Boileau, after avisit from La Bruyère, remarked that nature had not consented to makehim so agreeable as he wished to be. It seems that he was shy andgauche, and that he strove to conceal these defects by occasionaloutbursts of a dreadful playfulness. There are stories about hisbehaviour in the House of Condé, which if they are true seem to carryeccentricity beyond the bounds of what is permitted even to aphilosopher. Nevertheless, contemporaries report that, in spite of hisplain features and his "look of a common soldier" (a dreadful thing tosay in the seventeenth century), the ladies ran after him. I am afraidthat when they did so, he repulsed them. He says about love none ofthe charming things which he says about friendship, such as "To bewith 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 indifferentthings, but in their presence, --all is equally pleasant. " Or this:"Pure friendship has a flavour which is beyond the taste of those whoare born mediocre. " Or again. "There ought to be, deep down in theheart, inexhaustible wells of sorrow in readiness for certain losses. "The tenderness of such thoughts as these may surely outweigh thedryness of the portraits of Corinne and Clarice. 

The career of our moralist, after the publication of his single book, was a short one. His startling success as a writer irresistiblypointed him out as a candidate for election to the French Academy, buthere he was met by the barbed wire of jealousy and exasperated vanity. He had laughed at too many pretentious mandarins to hope to escapetheir resentment. At last, in 1693, but alas! at the expense of a vastdeal of intrigue on the part of his illustrious protectors, he stormedthat reluctant fortress. In his Reception Discourse, he revengedhimself on his enemies by firing volley after volley of irony intotheir ranks, and the august body was beside itself with rage. Nopompous Academician, for instance, likes to hear, in the solemnconclave of his colleagues, that he is so Christian and so charitablethat "writing well may be said to be among the least of hisqualities. " La Bruyère summed up his attacks in a preface to theeighth edition of the "Caractères" in 1694. He then retired again tohis independence as a crafty old bachelor, and Saint Simon gives us apleasant snapshot of him in these latest years, "a verystraightforward man, capital company, simple, with nothing of thepedant about him, and entirely disinterested. "

He remained the man of one book until nearly the close of his life. Itis thought that Bossuet, who had always been his great exemplar, urgedhim 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 allevents, he started a series of "Dialogues on Quietism, " in which allthe extreme doctrines of Molinos and his disciples were examined andridiculed. On May 8, 1696, La Bruyère dined with Antoine Bossuet, thebishop's elder brother; after dinner he took out the MSS. From hispocket, and read extracts to his host. Two days afterwards, afterwalking in the garden at Versailles, he had a stroke, and two daysafter that he died. He had had no premonition of illness, and therumour went round that the Quietists had poisoned him. His body wasexhumed, but of course no trace of poison was to be found. The"Dialogues, " revised and completed by the Abbé Elliès du Pin, werepublished the next year. Their authenticity has been obstinatelycontested, but, as I confess it seems to me, without excuse. Bothexternal and internal evidence go to prove, I think, that they aresubstantially the work of La Bruyère, and for those who are notalarmed at theological discussions conducted in rather a profanespirit, they make very good reading. 

One last word about our amiable author. His great book remainseminently alive, and wields after two centuries and a half a permanentinfluence. When you refer to it, you must not expect a logicaldevelopment of philosophical theory. We do not look to find a systemin a book of maxims and portraits. La Bruyère was a moralist, pure andsimple; he awakened sensibility, he encouraged refinement, and heexposed the vicious difference which existed around him--and which noone else had seemed to notice--that the possession of more or fewerpieces of money made between human beings otherwise equal. He had ademocratic philosophy which is sometimes that of Mr. Micawber, "Celui-là est riche qui reçoit plus qu'il ne consume; celui-là estpauvre dont la dépense excède la recette, " But he is seldom so prosyas this. Let us think of him as one who wished to turn his talent as apainter of still life to the benefit of his nation, and who succeededin 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 seenemerge from a modest house in the ungenteel rue du Paon (PeacockStreet) a young man of less than twenty-nine years of age. It isimprobable that we should have been attracted to him without warning, for though his expression was very pleasant, he was notdistinguished-looking, and though he was uncomplaining, his evident airof suffering was painful to witness. He had the gallant bearing of asoldier and a certain noble elegance, but a shade across his foreheadtestified to the failure of his eyesight, and he shambled along withdifficulty on two lame legs. If we followed him he would probably takeus slowly to the Garden of the Luxembourg, where it was very unlikelythat any one would greet him. 

He would presently turn out of the fashionable promenade, tocontemplate the poor and the unfortunate. Sometimes he would stopthose who seemed most wretched, and would try to share their sorrows, but sympathy on the part of a gentleman was strange, or else there wassomething in himself which failed to express his tenderness, for hecomplained that the unfortunate always turned away from him. If, atthe moment of such a repulse, we had addressed him, and hadrespectfully offered him our sympathy, he would have struggled withhis painful shyness, and would have told us that he felt no resentmentagainst those who rejected his help. Nothing hardened his heart, andthe lack of response merely doubled his pity. He would assure us, withthe pale smile which was the charm of his anæmic countenance, thatthose 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 simplepoliteness he would leave us wondering a little who this patheticyoung man, with all the stigmata upon him of poverty and sicknessbravely borne, might be; and there would be none to explain to us thatit was the Marquis de Vauvenargues, come home a broken man from thewars in Bohemia. 

This inconspicuous personage, who glided almost like a ghost throughless than thirty-two years of pain and adversity, was not merely thegreatest moralist that France produced in the course of the eighteenthcentury, but was of all the world's writers perhaps the one who haslifted highest the banner of hope and joy in heroism and virtue. In LaRochefoucauld we encountered a representative of the dominant class, the prince-dukes. La Bruyère was a typical bourgeois. In our thirdexample of the moral energy of France we meet with a specimen of the_petite noblesse_, the impoverished country gentlemen who dragged outa provincial existence in obscurity and ignorance, supported by theirpride in a long pedigree. Luc de Clapiers, whose father was raised tothe marquisate of Vauvenargues in 1722, was born seven years earlierthan that, at Aix in Provence, where his father was mayor. It is apleasant touch to be told that his father was the only magistrate whodid 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. Butit seems also certain that there was no appreciation of scholarship orliterature in the household. No atmosphere less benevolent to learningcan be imagined. The future philosopher went to school at Aix for alittle while, and then his weak health was made the excuse forcancelling what was perhaps looked upon as a needless expense. He wasthrown upon himself, and what education he secured was the result ofhis own desultory reading. 

Vauvenargues never acquired a knowledge of Greek or even Latin, [16] butwhen he was about sixteen years of age he came across a book whichabsolutely transfigured his outlook upon the world and decided thecourse of his aspirations. This was none less than a translation ofthe "Lives" of Plutarch, a work which has had a very remarkable moraleffect on the Frenchmen of four centuries. We know not which thisparticular translation was, but it would be pleasant to think it wasthat made by Amyot in 1559. The effect it had on the temperament ofVauvenargues must be told in his own words. He says in a letter toMirabeau (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 nightwent by but I had spent part of it in talking to Alcibiades, toAgesilas, or to others. I walked in the streets of Rome that I mightargue with the Gracchi, and when stones were flung at Cato, there wasI to defend him. You remember that when Cæsar wished to pass a lawwhich was too much in favour of the populace, Cato tried to preventhis doing so, and put his hand on Cæsar's mouth to prevent hisspeaking? 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 themaster-passions of his brief future existence, namely, his devotion toa sense of heroic duty and his determination to live up to the measureof his high calling. In the pages of Plutarch he says that hediscovered "la vraie grandeur de notre âme"; here was exposed beforehim a scene of life illustrated by "virtue without limit, pleasurewithout infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity, and vices without baseness and without disguise. " This boyishappreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains thefuture moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutshell. To our greatregret, it is the only positive record which survives of theadolescence of this great mind, on whose development we should sogladly dwell if it were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrasesVauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm thanthe budding virtue of a young man, " In his own case those "earliestdays" 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 ananecdote about his father which occurs in the "Essai sur quelquescaractères":--

"Anselme was shocked that his son should show a taste for science. Heburnt the young man's papers and books, and when he learned that hehad gone to sup with certain men of letters, he threatened to banishhim to the country if he persisted in keeping _bad company_. 'Sinceyou are fond of reading, ' he said to him, 'why don't you read thehistory of your own family? You will not find any savants there, butyou will find men of the right sort. Do you wish to be the firstpedant of your race?'"

There were but two alternatives for a lad of his class who had to makea living, the Church and the Army. For Vauvenargues there could be noquestion, he was born to be a soldier. At the age of eighteen heentered the King's Regiment as a second-lieutenant, and he marchedinto Lombardy under the orders of that illustrious marshal-general, the Duke of Villars, now in his eighty-first year, but still theunquestioned summit of French military genius. The idea of "followingHannibal over the mountains" filled our young philosopher with anenthusiasm beyond his years. He took part in the victories of Parmaand Guastalla, and he was probably with Villars at Turin when thatindomitable octogenarian died in June 1734. The War of the PolishSuccession presently sank into a mere armistice, and until 1736 wedimly perceive Vauvenargues sharing the idle and boring life of theofficer who, too poor to retire to Paris, vegetates in some deplorablefrontier-garrison of Burgundy or Franche Comté. We know that he wasdissipated and idle, for he tells us so, but his confession is marredby no sort of priggishness, and it is very important to insist thatthis greatest of moralists never exaggerated the capacity of ordinaryhuman virtue. He pretended to no exceptional loftiness in his ownconduct; he demanded no excessive sacrifice on the part of others. Suard speaks of the "sweet indulgence" which marked his relations withthose with whom he lived, and he tells us that Vauvenargues "graduallyrose above the frivolous occupations of his time of life, without evercontracting, in the development of serious ideas, that austerity whichcommonly accompanies the virtues of youth. .. . Vauvenargues, thrownupon the world directly he ceased to be a child, learned to know menbefore it occurred to him to judge them. He saw their weaknessesbefore he had reflected on their duties; and virtue, when it enteredhis heart, found there all possible dispositions to indulgence. "

"Dispositions to indulgence"--we linger on this phrase, which has anengaging beauty of its own. It distinguishes Vauvenargues at once fromall the great French moralists who preceded him, from La Rochefoucauldwith his savage cynicism, from Pascal with his contempt of the naturalman. Vauvenargues rejected the idea which had so tormented the greatspirits of the seventeenth century, that the noblest life was a lifeof mortification, and he made no demand on the soul to divorce itselffrom all human interests as being things naturally vile andignominious. He was to come down to us waving an olive-branch, themost amiable of all idealists, an apostle of tolerance. He says thathe "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 theobscurity of his adolescence. 

The Marquis of Mirabeau was the cousin of Vauvenargues and almostexactly his coeval. The discovery of a packet of letters which passedbetween the young men from the summer of 1737 to that of 1740 hasdissipated in some measure the otherwise total darkness which hadgathered around the youth of our philosopher. Mirabeau (who was to bethe father of the famous orator) was a man of talent, but violent, chimerical and lawless, "farouche, " as he himself put it. Later he wasthe author of the redoubtable "Ami des Hommes. " This prodigal uncle ofthe Revolution, this dangerous and violent "physiocrate" as he calledhimself, would seem divided, as pole from pole, from thegently-reasoning, the benevolently-meditative Vauvenargues. Nevertheless, they are seen in warm relation of friendship to eachother, and the letters exhibit their characteristics. Mirabeaushamelessly 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. Asingle example must be quoted: Mirabeau, wishing to get rid of amistress of whom he is tired, but who is still devoted to him, writesher a letter of the most studied insolence, cleverly turned, and sendsa copy of it, with infinite fatuity, to his friend. Vauvenarguesreplies that he has read out this letter at dinner to hisfellow-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, andwho loves you. " Could anything be a more indulgent, or at the sametime a more definite reproof? The germ of the _Réflexions_ is found inthis passing phrase, so unexpected in a soldier of that time and place. 

An anecdote, preserved like a spark of light in the darkness of thoseearly garrison years, takes us a step further. The sentiment ofcompassion was scarcely known to the early eighteenth century inFrance; it was certainly never extended to those unfortunate womenwho, as Vauvenargues puts it, "watch for young men as evening beginsto darken. " He was himself accosted on one occasion by a girl, whom heallowed to walk by his side while he gently questioned her. She easilytold him of the wretched poverty which had driven her to vice, andVauvenargues, after trying to revive in her some sentiment of modesty, left her with the gift of a little money. His fellow-officers of theregiment greeted the incident with shouts of mirth: such behaviour wasunheard of. Vauvenargues replied: "My friends, you laugh too easily. Iam sorry for these poor creatures, obliged to ply such a profession toearn 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 becalled upon at all. We must be indulgent to the weak who have moreneed of support than the virtuous; and we must remember that theerrors of the unfortunate are always caused by the harshness of therich. " M. Paléologue, in a very interesting passage, has remarked thatwe have to wait a hundred years before there is a repetition in Frenchliterature of this peculiar mansuétude. 

Bearing in mind this capacity for indulgence, for pity, andremembering how little it was conceived in the age he lived in, we maylook forward a moment to recognize that in his whole teachingVauvenargues differs from other moralists, but particularly from hisgreat predecessors in France, in that he has a constructive object. Hewishes exceedingly to help the unfortunate to live happily, easily andprofitably, and he regards almost the whole human race as more or lessunhappy. His desire, therefore, is not, as that of theseventeenth-century moralists had been, to put human egotism in thepillory and to pelt it with rotten eggs, but so far as possible toencourage and affirm a decent, self-respecting egotism. Vauvenarguesfinds the lock of life to be rusty; he touches it with the oiledfeather of his advice, so that the key may turn without resistance, and without noise. He does not profess to strive after perfection inconduct, but after improvement, and he is most careful never torecommend violent means or an excessive austerity; nor does he condemnor scold, even when his own humanity is most affronted, but he tries toinduce every one to make the best of his relations with other menduring the fugitive and frail duration of their common existence. Ifhe hated anything--in his universal benignity--Vauvenargues hated arigid puritanism. In one place he says, "We believe no longer inwitches, and yet there are people who still believe in Calvin!"

Vauvenargues was twenty-six years of age when the war of the AustrianSuccession broke out, and swept him into military action. He wasvegetating in garrison at Metz when the armies of Marshal deBelle-Isle, the gallant and thrice-unfortunate, streamed eastward intoGermany and carried our philosopher with them. The Regiment of theKing, of which Vauvenargues was an officer, reached Bohemia in July1741. In a night attack of extraordinary rapidity and audacity Praguewas 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, andat the height of the successes of the French, their luck abandonedthem. Relieved by no reinforcements and pressed hard by famine, thearmy of Belle-Isle could no longer hold Prague, and on the night ofDecember 16-17, 1742, began the retreat from Bohemia which is one ofthe most noted disasters of the eighteenth century. Nine days later, what remained of the French army arrived at Egra, but after a marchthrough 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 ofthe retreat from Prague. Both his legs were frost-bitten, so that forthe remainder of his life he was lame; his eyesight was permanentlyimpaired; and he appears to have sown the seeds of the pulmonarydisease which was to carry him off five years later. But his tenderheart endured what were still severer pangs from the sufferings anddeath of those of his companions for whom he had the greatest regard. Among these the first place was held by Hippolyte de Seyres, whosefigure pervades the earliest developments of the genius ofVauvenargues. De Seyres was a lieutenant in the philosopher'sregiment. He was only eighteen years of age, and Vauvenargues felt forhim the interest of an elder brother and the affection of a devotedfriend. We can trace the progress of the sentiment, in which are fullyrevealed for the first time the peculiar qualities of our author'smind. He does not conceal from himself the weaknesses of the characterof De Seyres, he blames him for his lack of suppleness, of simplicityof manner, of self-confidence. He found in him a proud and delicatespirit which exaggerated its own frailties and shrank morbidly fromtheir consequences. He was anxious that the spirit of the young manshould not be debased by low associations; he did not think theslightly older officers who surrounded De Seyres to be wholesomecompanions for him. The lad displayed a lack of moral force; he hopedto succeed less by his own exertions than by the favour of others; hewas in despair over his own faults without having the energy tocorrect them. It is in writing about De Seyres that Vauvenargues firstdefines his central axiom, that the only sources of success arevirtue, genius and patience. He observed the lack of them all in DeSeyres, and his incapacity for expansion made his case the moredifficult to handle. "Son coeur est toujours serré, " Vauvenarguesexclaims. But he nourished a deep and ever-deepening affection forthis sensitive lad, and became desirous, almost passionately desirous, to lead him up to better things from out of the mediocrity of hispresent associations. 

It appears certain to me that it was the study expended on thecharacter of Hippolyte de Seyres and the shock received by hisdreadful death which gave the earliest expansion to the genius ofVauvenargues and left their definite mark on his writings. I do notknow why this all-important episode seems to have attracted so littleof the attention of those who have written about him. The "Conseils àun Jeune Homme, " which was evidently finished in 1743, is the earliestcomplete work of Vauvenargues which we possess; it contains in embryothe whole of his teaching as a moralist, and it was written for theguidance of young De Seyres. On the other hand, I think that Gilbertand other editors are mistaken in attributing the "Discours sur laGloire" to the same date and occasion; it seems to me much later instyle, and addressed to a very different person. The note of theaddress to De Seyres is accurately given in the exquisite essayentitled "Love of the Noble Passions. " But it appears that the edificebuilt up by the tender affection of Vauvenargues was rased to theground in December 1742. The young friend so passionately guarded, soanxiously watched, died under his eyes in the course of the terribleretreat over the icy passes of Bohemia, a victim to the united agonyof famine, cold and fatigue. Vauvenargues wrote an "Éloge" on hisyoung friend, which betrays something of the hysterical agitation ofhis own soul. Here is a fragment of this strange document--

"Open, ye formidable sepulchres! Solitary phantoms, speak, speak! Whatunconquerable silence! O sad abandonment! O terror! What hand is itwhich holds all nature paralyzed beneath its pressure? O thou hiddenand eternal Being, deign to dissipate the alarm in which my feeblesoul is plunged. The secret of Thy judgments turns my timid heart toice. Veiled in the recesses of Thy being, Thou dost forge fate andtime, and life and death, and fear and joy, and deceitful andcredulous hope. Thou dost reign over the elements and over hell inrevolt. The smitten air shudders at Thy voice. Redoubtable judge ofthe dead, take pity upon my despair. "

This is a voice we hear, so far as I remember, nowhere else in theFrench literature of the eighteenth century. There is a certain accentof Bossuet in it; it is still more like the note which a group ofEnglish poets were striking. It may really seem to us an extraordinarycoincidence that the "Éloge" on Hippolyte de Seyres should belong tothe very same year, 1743, which saw the publication of Blair's "Grave"and Young's "Night Thoughts. "

The rhetorical turn of the sentences I have just read was not habitualwith Vauvenargues; it was in this case the mask worn by the intensityof his feeling, but he confesses in an early letter, "I like sometimesto string big words together, and to lose myself in a period; I make ajest of it. " But after this outburst of panic grief in 1743 we see nomore trace of such a tendency to eloquence. He became more and morecompletely himself, that is to say, very simple intellectually, in apedantic age. He adopted, indeed, a certain gravity at which we maynow smile; he did not approve of fairy-tales and fables, on the groundthat anything which came between direct truth and the receptive mindof man was a disadvantage. "The disease of our age is to want to makejokes about everything, " he complains. 

To poor Vauvenargues life was not a laughing matter. His health hadbeen completely ruined by the disastrous campaigns in Austria, and bythe hardships of garrison life; and he was feeling more and moresharply that pinch of genteel poverty which is the hardest of all tobear. But if he never laughed, this martyr of the soul never ceased tosmile. His perpetual sufferings did not affect his gentle sobriety ofconversation. Those whose privilege it was to see Vauvenargues duringthese last years of his brief existence are united in their report ofhis magnanimity. Voltaire wrote, "I have always found him the mostunfortunate of human beings and the most tranquil. " He was notable forhis "indulgent goodness, " his "constant peace, " his "justice ofheart, " his "rectitude of soul. " His conversation, so Marmontelreports to us, had something more animated, more delicate, than evenhis divine writings. The same acute observer noted that in the heartof Vauvenargues, when he reflected upon the misery of mankind, pitytook the place of indignation and hatred. Sensitive, serene, compassionate, affable, he tried to conceal from his friends as muchas possible his own pain, and even when it was evident that hesuffered most, no one dared to be melancholy in his presence. 

In the fleeting and impoverished life of Vauvenargues his friendshipswere the main adventure. We have mentioned a name which is toofrequently the object of malignity on English lips, the name ofVoltaire. No one would pretend that the multiform energy of this giantof literature did not take some unseemly directions and severalunlovely shapes. But the qualities of Voltaire must, in the eyes ofany unbiassed observer, vastly overtop his defects. If, however, wewish to see Voltaire at his best, we must contemplate him in relationto our soldier-philosopher. As soon as his health had recovered alittle from the horror of the Bohemian campaign, Vauvenargues took thestep of writing to Voltaire, then a stranger, for his opinion on thatcrying question, the relative greatness of Corneille and of Racine, aquestion to all Frenchmen like that between predestination andfree-will to Milton's rebel angels. This was towards the end of 1743, when Voltaire, who had reached his fiftieth year, was recognised asthe first living historian and critic in France, and had been recalledto court through the good offices of Mme du Châtelet. It was, no doubt, at a happy moment that Vauvenargues' random letter arrived, Voltaireresponded with ardour; Vauvenargues quickly became to him, asMarmontel says, what Plato was to Socrates, and nothing in the longlife of Voltaire shows him in a more charming light than does hisdevotion to the young friend whom he called "the sweet hope of theremainder of my days. " After the death of the philosopher, Voltairewrote a brief, but invaluable, account of their relations, which hadlasted, without a cloud, until the death of Vauvenargues. 

He reminded Voltaire of Pascal, whose "incurable disease was consoledby study, " but the elder friend noted a striking distinction; theeloquence of Pascal was fiery and imperious, that of Vauvenargues was"insinuating. " The powerful physical force of Voltaire was softened bythe suffering of his young companion, for whom "nature had poured outlarge draughts of hemlock, " and who, "while all his body sank intodissolution, preserved in spirit that perfect tranquillity which thepure alone enjoy. " Although Vauvenargues was twenty years younger thanhis friend, Voltaire succumbed to the gravity of his demeanour; likethe fellow-officers at Arras or at Metz, we smile to find himaddressing Vauvenargues as _mon père_. One of the philosopher's maximsis, "Great thoughts proceed from the heart, " and Voltaire in a notehas added, "In writing this, though he knew it not, he painted his ownportrait. " He found in Vauvenargues "the simplicity of a timid child, "and it seems that he had a difficulty in overcoming his modesty so faras to make him write down those Reflections which are now placed forever among the masterpieces of French literature. It is to Voltairethat we owe the fact that Vauvenargues found resolution enough tobecome an author. 

A typical instance of the mixture of courage and tact in the youngauthor is to be found in the attitude which he took up towardsVoltaire with regard to the Marquise de Pompadour, without in theleast offending his tempestuous friend. That remarkable young lady, then still known as la petite Étoile, had succeeded in catching theKing's eye, and was soaring into the political heavens like a rocket, carrying, among other incongruous objects, the genius of Voltaire inher glittering train. Voltaire must have boasted to his young friendthat his fortune was made. Vauvenargues surprisingly expresses in hisreply the evil which must be done by great authors who flatter viceand think to conceal its corruption by heaping flowers over a lie. Theincident is important for us, because it led Vauvenargues, thusdisappointed in Voltaire as he had been disappointed in Mirabeau, toexamine into the sources of the low moral condition of the age. Heattributed it to "le mépris de la gloire, " and he set himself todefine this quality and to impress it, with all the force ofrepetition, on the dulled consciences of his contemporaries. 

It is extremely difficult, it is well-nigh impossible, to find anequivalent in English for the word "gloire. " It is a Frenchconception, and one to which our language does not readily, orgracefully, lend itself. In the mind of Vauvenargues the idea of"gloire" took the central place, and we may form an intelligentconception of the meaning he stamped upon the word, by repeating someof his axioms. 

He says: "The flush of dawn is not so lovely as the earliestexperiences of _gloire_. _Gloire_ makes heroes beautiful. " Again:"Nothing is so essential as renown, and nothing so surely gives renownas merit; these are things that reason itself has united, and whyshould we distinguish true _gloire_ from merit, which is the source ofit, and of which it is the proof?" This moral union of merit, gloryand renown, in triple splendour revolving round each other, was themain object of Vauvenargues' contemplation, and he admits that thecentral passion of his life was "l'amour de la gloire. " What, then, isthe exact meaning of "la Gloire, " which the dictionaries superficiallytranslate by "glory, "--a very different thing?

Vauvenargues starts a new conception of the value of self-esteem, orrather of the desire of being esteemed by others. The seventeenthcentury had poured its vials of contempt over the _amour-propre_ ofmankind, and no doubt that had led to a corresponding decline in theenergy of the nation. Pascal had severely ridiculed the vanity whichhe says is anchored in the heart of man, and he actually mocks at theidea of a desire for renown; expressing his astonishment that evenphilosophers have the fatuity to wish for fame. Vauvenargues isprobably thinking of Pascal when he says that those who dilate uponthe inevitable nothingness of human glory would feel vexation if theyhad to endure the open contempt of a single individual. Men are proudof little things--of dancing well or even of skating gracefully, or ofstill meaner accomplishments, yet those very persons despise realrenown. "But us, " he says in one of his noble outbursts, "but us itexcites to labour and virtue. " We note, then, at once that the_amour-propre_ of the seventeenth century, the sentiment against whichwe saw the most burning arrows of La Rochefoucauld directed, was notthe source of Vauvenargues' desire of glory; that with him renown wasnot a matter of egotistic satisfaction, but of altruistic stimulus, awakening in others, by a happy rivalry, sentiments of generosity andself-sacrifice which might redeem society and the dying world ofFrance. And this may perhaps at this point be observed as the centreof his action, namely the discovery that a wholesome desire for fameproceeds not from our self-satisfaction, but from our profound senseof emptiness, of imperfection. 

How needful the lesson was, no one who examines the social history ofthe first half of the eighteenth century can doubt. Without fallinginto errors of a Puritanic kind, we cannot fail to see that opinionand action alike had become soft, irresolute, superficial; that strongviews of duty and piety and justice were half indulged in, halfsneered at, and not at all acted upon. The great theologians whosurrounded Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux, had died one by one, and hadleft successors who were partly pagan, partly atheist. Art andliterature tripped after the flowered skirts of the emancipatedDuchess of Maine. Looking round the world of France in 1746, Vauvenargues could but cry, like a preacher in the wilderness, "wehave fallen into decadence, into moral desuetude, " but he criedwithout anger, remembering that "still the love of _gloire_ is theinvisible soul of all those who are capable of any virtue. "

It was a critical moment in the history of France. After the long andpainful wars of Louis XIV. The army had become unpopular; it was thefashion to sneer at it. The common soldiers were considered, and oftenwere, the offscourings of the community. The officers, who had lefttheir homes too soon, in most cases, to acquire the rudiments ofeducation, were bored with garrison life, and regretted Paris, whichthey made every excuse to regain. They affected to have no curiosityabout military science, and to talk "army shop" was the worst of badform. Those who were poor lived and grumbled in their squalor; thosewho were rich gave themselves up to sinful extravagance. There was noinstinctive patriotism in any section of the troops. What pleasure cana 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 Vauvenargueshimself, who had seen all classes of officers, who asks that question. From his "Réflexions" of 1746 a chapter on "Our Armies at the PresentMoment" was omitted, and not published in its proper sequence untillong after his death. No doubt its searching exposure of the rot inthe 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 generallyregarded as a popular error. " Those few officers who still desire tosee their country glorious, are forced to retire into civil lifebecause they cannot endure a condition in which there is no reward butshame for a man of courage and ambition. 

These were prominent among the considerations which filled the mind ofVauvenargues when, at the age of twenty-nine, he saw himself drivenout of military life by the rapid aggravation of ill-health. Histhoughts turned to diplomacy. He greatly admired the writings of SirWilliam Temple, on whom he may have partly modelled his own style asan essayist; he dreamed of becoming an ambassador of the same class, known, as Temple was, "by their writings no less than by theirimmortal actions. " But his inexorable bad luck followed him in thisdesign. A pathetic letter to the King remained unanswered, and so didanother to Amelot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. 

After waiting a long time he wrote again to Amelot, and this secondletter is highly characteristic of the temper and condition ofVauvenargues--

"MONSEIGNEUR. 

"I am painfully distressed that the letter which I had the honour ofwriting to you, as well as that which I took the liberty of asking youto forward to the King, have not been able to arrest your attention. It is not, perhaps, surprising that a minister so fully occupied asyou are should not find time to examine such letters; but, Monseigneur, will you permit me to point out to you that it isprecisely this moral impossibility for a gentleman, who has no claimbut zeal, to reach his master, which leads to that discouragement thatis noticeable in all the country nobility, and which extinguishes allemulation?

"I have passed, Monseigneur, my youth far from all worldlydistractions, in order to prepare myself for the species of employmentfor which it was my belief that my temperament designed me; and I wasbold enough to think that so concentrated an effort would place me atleast on a level with those who depend for all their fortune upontheir intrigues and upon their pleasures. It overwhelms me, Monseigneur, to discover that the confidence which I had based mainlyon the love of my duty, should be so disappointed. My health no longerpermitting 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, ina situation so piteous, refrain from informing you of my despair. Pardon me, Monseigneur, if it has led me into any extravagance ofexpression. 

"I am, etc. "

To this last appeal the Minister for Foreign Affairs did respond in abrief and perfunctory note, promising to find an occasion of bringingthe talents of Vauvenargues to the notice of the King, but nothingresulted. Vauvenargues had been living in a dream of military glory, and had been thirsting to serve his country in the loftiest and mostresponsible capacities. His very physical appearance now completed thebankruptcy of his wishes, for he was attacked with the smallpox, whichdisfigured him so badly that, to use his own expression, "it preventedhis soul from appearing in his features. " Thus without fortune, orprofession, without hope for the future, half-blind, with gangrenedlimbs that tottered under his feeble body, Vauvenargues started on thesteadily downward path which was to lead in less than four years tohis grave. History presents to us no more dolorous figure of physicaland social failure, nor a more radiant example of moral success. 

The alternative now presented itself of a wretched solitude in thecastle of his Provençal ancestors, or a garret, perhaps even morewretched, but certainly far less solitary, in Paris. In either case itwould be necessary to relinquish all the luxuries, all the comforts oflife. He chose to finish his suffering years in Paris, and in humblefurnished rooms in the street of the Peacock, where he was consoled bythe visits of Voltaire and Marmontel. We find him settled there in May1745, and seven months later there crept into circulation an anonymousvolume of moral essays, which was absolutely ignored by the literaryworld of France. We do not appreciate to the full the Calvary whichVauvenargues so meekly mounted, unless we realize that to all hisother failures was added a complete disregard of his ideas by theliterary public of his own day. He died unknown, save by two or threefriends, having never experienced anything but languor, disappointmentand obscurity. Under the pseudonym of Clazomène, just before hisdeath, he drew a picture of his own fortune and character which provesthat he had no illusion about himself, and which yet contains not amurmur against the injustice of fate nor a breath of petulance orresentment. "Let no one imagine, " this portrait closes, "thatClazomène would exchange his wretchedness for the prosperity of weakmen; fortune may sport with the wisdom of brave souls, but it has nopower to subdue their courage. "

It is time, however, to examine the actual compositions of ourauthor. [18] Until his friendship with Voltaire began, Vauvenargues hadnot given much attention to verse, but he now began a series ofcritical essays on the poets. He says, in the course of these"Réflexions, " that what little he knew of poetry he owed to M. DeVoltaire. His remarks on this subject, however, are more independentthan he would give us to suppose, and they are always worthy ofattention because they illustrate the moral attitude of Vauvenargueshimself. He was not embarrassed by tradition in advancing along hisroad through the masterpieces of literature. He was always an amateur, never a man in bondage to the "authorities;" he seems, indeed, to haveavowed a dislike for general reading: "Pascal avait peu lu, ainsi queMalebranche, " was his excuse. In the case of Pascal, we may questionthe fact, but it is recorded that when at last Malebranche waspersuaded to read Descartes' "Traité de l'homme, " it excited him soviolently as to bring on palpitation of the heart. Such are thedangers of a retarded study of the classics. Vauvenargues was no lessinflammable. He met with the tragedies of Racine at a moment when thereputation of that poet had sunk to its lowest point, and, totallyindifferent to the censure of the academical sanhedrim, he extolledhim 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 frompoetry what we require in the twentieth century. The critics of theearly eighteenth century in France talked about Homer and Virgil, butwhat they really admired were Ariosto and Pope. Voltaire, the greatestof them, considered the "épopée héroï-comique" the top-stone of modernpractical effort; we know what astonishing feats he was himself guiltyof in that species of architecture. But his whole teaching andpractice tended towards an identity of speech between prose and verse, the prosodical pattern or ornament being the sole feature whichdistinguished the latter from the former. His own poetry, when it wasnot fugitive or satiric, was mainly philosophical, that is to say, itdid not stray beyond the confines of logic and wit. At the same time, Voltaire was an energetic protagonist for verse, and he did very muchto prevent the abandonment of this instrument at a time when prose, insuch hands as those of Montesquieu and Buffon, was manifestly in theascendant. He earnestly recommended the cultivation of a form in whichprecision of thought and elegance of language were indispensable, andhe employed it in tragedies which we find it impossible to read, butwhich enchanted the ear and fancy of Vauvenargues. 

The taste of the age of Louis XV. Affected to admire Corneille to thedisadvantage of all other rivals, and Voltaire was not far fromblaming Vauvenargues for his "extreme predilection" for Racine. ButVauvenargues, with unexpected vivacity, took up the cudgels, andaccused the divine Corneille of "painting only the austere, stern, inflexible virtues, " and of falling into the affectation of mistakingbravado for nobility, and declamation for eloquence. He is extremelysevere on the faults of the favourite tragedian, and he blamesCorneille for preferring the gigantic to the human, and for ignoringthe tender and touching simplicity of the Greeks. It is from the pointof view of the moralist that these strictures are now important; theyshow us that Vauvenargues in his reiterated recommendation of virtueand military glory did not regard those qualities from the Cornelianpoint of view, which he looked upon as fostering a pompous and falsely"fastueux" conception of life. He blamed Corneille's theatricalferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the passage "adetestable piece of criticism" and ran his blue pencil through it. Nodoubt the fact is that Vauvenargues saw in the rhetoric of Corneille aparody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade. 

The publications of Vauvenargues during his lifetime come under twocategories. His "Introduction à la Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain" isa short book, and it is also a fragment. The author had begun tocollect notes for it during his Bohemian campaign, in 1741; but "thosepassions which are inseparable from youth, and ceaseless physicalinfirmity, brought on by the war, interrupted my studies, " he says. Voltaire has expressed his amazement that under such piteousconditions, 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 toapply them, " but though Vauvenargues takes this dictum as his text herefutes it. He says that maxims originally "good, " in Pascal's sense, may have grown sleepy in popular use, and may have ceased to act, sothat we ought to rid ourselves of conventional prejudice and go to thefountain-head, to try all spirits, in fact, and find out what spiritsreally are of God. When Vauvenargues began to reflect, he wasastonished at the inexactitude and even self-contradiction of thephilosophical language of his day. He was not, and probably neverwould have become, what we understand now as a philosopher. He was amoralist, pure and simple, and had no more relation with men likeDescartes or Berkeley than a rousing revivalist preacher has with aregius professor of Theology. 

The only thing which really interested Vauvenargues was the socialduty of man, and to discover what that is he attempted to definemorals, politics and religion. He had an intense desire for clearguidance, and he waited for the heavenly spark to fall. He said tohimself, before he made it plain to others, that if we are not guidedby _truth_, we fall into the pit. There was a certain childishness inhis attitude in this matter, for he was inclined to regard abstracttruth as the only one worthy of pursuit. That he was advancing inbreadth of view is shown by the fact that he cancelled in the secondedition of his book a whimsical passage in which he urged people whowere studying conchology, to throw away their shells, asking them toconsider "whether glory is but a name, virtue all a mistake, and lawnothing else than a phantom. " The "Introduction" is all written inthis spirit; it is a passionate appeal to the French nation to leavemean and trivial pursuits, and to live for pure and passionate ideals, for glory gained by merit, and as the reward of solid and strenuouseffort. 

Vauvenargues' attitude to the English moralists has not beensufficiently examined. So far as is known he never visited thiscountry, although he desired to do so. In one of his letters he speaksof intending to consult a famous oculist in London, but this projectwas not carried out; his poverty doubtless prevented it. Whether heknew English is not certain, but he appears to have read Temple andLocke, possibly in the original, and a reference to a remarkableEnglish contemporary appears to have hitherto escaped observation. Inthe "Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain, " he speaks ofa writer who has argued that private vices are public benefits, and heattempts to show that this is a fallacy. He returns, less definitely, to the same line of thought in the "Discours sur la gloire, " where hedenies that vice has any part in stimulating social action. It isstrange that no one, so far as I know, has observed this proof thatVauvenargues was acquainted with the celebrated paradox of BernardMandeville, whose "Fable of the Bees" was in 1747 continuing to causeso scandalous a sensation, and was still so completely misunderstood. There seems, occasionally, a trace of the idealism of Shaftesbury inthe colour of Vauvenargues' phrase, but on this it would be dangerousto insist. 

His own views, however, were more emphatically defined, and moredirectly urged, in the other contribution to literature published byVauvenargues in his lifetime, the "Réflexions sur divers sujets. " Herehe abandons the attempt at forming a philosophical system, and admitsthat his sole object is "to form the hearts and the manners" of hisreaders. Perhaps the most penetrating of all his sentences is that inwhich he says: "If you possess any passion which you feel to be nobleand generous, be sure you foster it. " This was diametrically opposedto all the teaching of the seventeenth-century moralists who hadpreceded him, and also had taught us that we should mistrust ourpassions and disdain our enthusiasms. To see how completelyVauvenargues rejected the Christian doctrine of the utter decrepitudeand hopeless inherent badness of the human mind, we have but to gathersome of his sparse thoughts together. He says, in defiance of Pascaland the Jansenists, "Mankind is the only source of our happiness, outside that there is nothing. " Again, "As it is the heart, in mostpeople, that doubts, so when once the heart is converted, all is done;it leads them along the path to virtue. " He deprecated the constantchecking and blaming of children which was part of the system ofeducation then in vogue; he declared that it sapped the confidence ofthe young, their inherent sense of virtue; and he exclaimed, "Why doesno one dream of training children to be original, bold andindependent?"

Those who knew Vauvenargues recognized in the purity and sweetness andseverity of his teaching the record of his own conduct. Marmontelspeaks of the "tender veneration" with which all the more serious ofhis early comrades in the army regarded him. In his works we trace theresult of a curious thing, experience superseding, taking the placeof, education. "He observed the weaknesses of mankind before he hadtime to reflect upon their duties, " says a contemporary. His mind, although assaulted by such a crowd of disadvantages, remained calm, and free from prejudice; remained gently indulgent to human weaknesson the one hand, rigid in allegiance to his ideal pursuit of "lagloire" on the other. The noble movements of his mind were native, notacquired, and he had not been hardened or exasperated by the pressureof a mortifying theology. He does not take so exalted or so pitilessan attitude as the classic seventeenth-century moralist. Pascalscourges the mass of humanity down a steep place into the sea;Vauvenargues takes each wanderer by the hand, and leads him along theprimrose path. 

A singular charm in the French character lies in its gift forcomposite action. Frenchmen prefer marching towards victory in a bodyto a scattered effort of individual energy. It was part of theconstructive genius of Vauvenargues to find the aim and joy of life ina combination of sentiment and action, in a community of rivalsamiably striving for the crown with fellowmen of like instincts and oflike experience. He was of all moralists the least solitary; he hadspent his life as a soldier among soldiers, among those who did theirbest, in the midst of hardships, to live a life of pleasure withoutreflection. He was no prig, but he had formed the habit of givingfatherly counsel which was much beyond his years. He observes that"the advice of old men is like winter sunshine that gives out lightwithout warmth, " but that the words of a wise and genial young man mayradiate heat and glow. His own advice, given first to hisfellow-officers, then to a circle of literary friends, then to Franceso long as her classic literature finds readers, was identical. Hehated conscientious subterfuges which equalize good and evil. He lookedupon "gloire" and "vertu" as the two great motive forces of a sane andbeneficent life. In this he was unique; Voltaire notes thatVauvenargues soared, in an age of mediocrities, _un siècle despetitesses_, by his refusal to adopt the spirit of the world. He was apuritan of the intelligence, and for the ideal of Sully or Villars heput up the ideal of Oliver Cromwell. 

The moral grandeur and spiritual force of Vauvenargues' philosophydemanded in the disciple a constant exercise of energy and will. Faithinspired by effort was to be pursued through sacrifice to the utmostlimits of endurance, and with no ultimate reward but _gloire_. Thiswas, however, modified, as it is in the most strenuous direction ofcharacter in the Frenchmen of to-day, by an illuminating humanity. Lofty as was the aim of Vauvenargues, nothing could have been moretender than his practice. We are told that the expression in the eyesof a sick animal, the moan of a wounded deer in the forest, moved himto compassion. He carried this tolerance into human affairs, for hewas pre-eminently a human being; "the least of citizens has a right tothe honours of his country. " He set a high moral value on courtesy, and exposed, as a fallacy, the pretence that to be polite is to lacksincerity. His disposition was easy-going, although his intellect wassuch a high-flyer; in pagan times he would have believed in ridiculousdivinities rather than set himself up as an atheist. He did notbelieve that excess of knowledge gives firmness to the judgment, andhe remarks that the opulence of learned men often leads to more errorsthan the poverty of those who depend on the native virtues of instinctand experience. He has phrases which seem meant to condemn themechanical emptiness of the modern German system of _kultur_. 

Full of ardour for all that is beautiful and good, tortured by diseaseand pinched by poverty, but never allowing his personal misfortunes toaffect his view of life, or to cloud his vision of the trinity ofheavenly lights, _mérite_, _vertu_, _gloire_, Vauvenargues pursued hispainful life in the Street of the Peacock. He knew his feebleness, buthe refused to let it depress him; "labour to get _gloire_ is notlost, " he said, "if it tends to make us worthy of it. " In his curiousmixture of simplicity and acuteness, in his gravity and ardour, he wasmorally just like the best types which this great war has produced, heis like Paul Lintier in France, like Julian Grenfell among ourselves, meeting the worst blows of fate with serenity and almost with ecstasy, with no shadow of indignation or rebellion. Some posthumousreflections have let us into the secret that, as the shadows darkenedaround him, he occasionally gave way, if not to despair, yet todepression, and permitted himself to wonder whether all his effort inthe cause of manliness and virtue had been useless. He had notawakened the sleepers in France; he doubted that his voice would everreach them; he asked himself whether all his effort had not been invain. This was the natural inner weakness consequent on his physicalstate; he gave no outward sign of it. Marmontel, who watched his lasthours with enthusiastic affection, says that, "In his company welearned how to live, --and how to die. " He lay like Socrates, surrounded by his friends, talking and listening to the last; heastonished them by the eloquence and gravity of his discourse. Hislatest recorded utterance was, "Fortune may sport with the wisdom ofthose who are courageous, but it has no power to bend their courage. "Gently but firmly refusing the importunities of the Church, Vauvenargues was released from his life-in-death on May 28, 1747, inhis thirty-second year. 

You will not find in the pages of Vauvenargues a distinct revival ofthat passion for the very soil of France, "la terre sainte, la douceFrance, " which inspired the noble "Chanson de Roland" and has been sostrongly accentuated in the recent struggle for Alsace-Lorraine. Buthe recalled to the memory of a generation which had grown denselymaterial the forgotten ideal of France as the champion of chivalry. Wemust not forget that we possess in the writings of Vauvenargues merelythe commencements of reflection, the first fruit of a life which wasbroken before its summer was complete. But we find in his teaching, and in that of no other moralist of the early eighteenth century, theinsistence on spiritual courage as the necessary opposite to brutalforce and mere materialism. He connected that high ambition, thatcraving for _la gloire_, with all pure and elevated things, with theart and literature, with the intelligence and beauty of the Frenchcreative mind. He recommended, in that gray hour of European dulness, a fresh ornament to life, a scarlet feather, a _panache_, as ourFrench friends say. And the gay note that he blew from his batteredclarion was still sounding last year in the heroic resistance of theforts of Verdun. 

 THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE

The spirit displayed by the young French officers in this war deservesto be compared in many essential respects with that which is blazonedin the glorious "Chanson de Roland. " It is interesting to rememberthat during the long years in which the direct influence of thatgreatest of medieval epics was obscured, it was chiefly known throughthe paraphrase of it executed in German by the monk Konrad in thetwelfth century. Many years ago, Gaston Paris pointed out the curiousfact that Konrad completely modified the character of the "Chanson deRoland" by omitting all expressions of warlike devotion to "la douceFrance, " and by concentrating the emotion of the poem on its religioussentiment. But the real theme of the "Chanson de Roland, " as we knownow, was the passionate attachment of the heroes to the soil ofFrance; "ils étaient poussés par l'amour de la patrie, de l'empereurfrançais leur seigneur, de leur famille, et surtout de la gloire. "

It is a remarkable instance of German "penetration" that in theparaphrase of the "Chanson de Roland" which Germany so long foistedupon Europe, these elements were successfully effaced. There was asort of poetical revenge, therefore, in the attitude of those whoanswered the challenge of Germany in the true spirit of Roland andOliver. 

We have seen that Vauvenargues--to whose memory the mind incessantlyreverts in contemplation of the heroes of this war--says in one of his"Maximes"--written nearly two centuries ago--"The earliest days ofspring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man. " Nofigure of 1914 exemplifies this quality of grace more surprisinglythan Jean Allard (who called himself in literature Méeus). He was onlytwenty-one and a half when he was killed at Pierrepont, at the verybeginning of the war, but he was already one of the promising figuresof his generation. Allard was looked upon as an incipient AdmirableCrichton; he was a brilliant scholar, an adroit and multiform athlete, the soul of wit and laughter, the centre of a group of adoringadmirers. This sparkling poet was suddenly transformed by thedeclaration of war into the sternest of soldiers. His poem, called"Demain, " created, or rather expressed, the patriotic passion whichwas simultaneously evoked all over France; it is really a lesser"Marseillaise. " Not less popular, but more elaborate and academic, isAllard's aviation poem, "Plus haut toujours!"--an extraordinary visionof the flight and ecstasy and tragic death of a solitary airman. Wemay notice that in this, and many other verses describing recentinventions of science, the young French poets contrive to be verylucid and simple in their language, and to avoid that display oftechnical verbiage which deforms too many English experiments in thesame class. 

It is not, however, so much by his writings, which are now collectedin two, or perhaps three, little volumes, that Allard-Méeus strikesthe imagination of a foreign spectator, as by his remarkable attitude. From the first, this lad of twenty-one exemplified and taught thevalue of a chivalrous behaviour. In the face of events, in thatcorruption of all which could make the martial spirit seem noble, thatGermany has forced upon the world, this attitude of young Frenchofficers at the very opening of the war is pathetic, and might evenlend itself, if we were disposed for mirth, to an ironic smile. But itshould be recorded and not forgotten. It was Allard who revived theetiquette of going to battle dressed as sprucely as for a wedding. Weshall do well to recollect the symbolic value which the glove holds inlegends of medieval prowess. When the dying Roland, under thepine-trees, turns to the frontier of Spain, he offers, as a dyingsoldier, his glove to God--

"_Pur ses pecchiez deu puroftrid son guant_. "

Allard-Méeus at St. Cyr made all the young officers swear that theywould not go into battle except in white gloves and with their _képi_adorned with the _casoar_, the red and white dress-plume. "Ce serment, bien français, est aussi élégant que téméraire, " he said, and the restfollowed him with acclamation. He was one of the first French officersto fall in battle, at the head of his infantry, and his mother waspresented by the regiment with his _casoar_ and his gloves, worn atthe moment of his death, on August 22, 1914, and stained with hisblood. Allard offers a fugitive but typical specimen of the splendourof French sentiment in the first flush of its enthusiasm. 

On March 26, 1917, the Société des Gens de Lettres in Paris held asolemn assembly under the presidency of M. Pierre Decourcelle tocommemorate those authors who, during the present war, have fallen inthe service of France. Touching and grave in the extreme was thescene, when, before a crowded and throbbing audience, the secretaryread the name of one young writer after another, pausing for thepresident to respond by the words "Mort au champ d'honneur!" In eachcase there followed a brief silence more agitating in its emotion thanany eloquence could be. 

The great number of young men of high intellectual promise who werekilled early in this war is a matter for grave and painful reflection. Especially in the first months of the autumn of 1914 the holocaust wasterrible. There was no restraining the ardour of the young, who soughttheir death in a spirit of delirious chivalry, each proud to be theIphigenia or the Jephtha's Daughter of a France set free. It has beennoted since that the young generation, born about 1890, had beenprepared for the crisis in a very significant way. The spiritualcondition of these grave and magnificent lads resembled nothing thathad been seen before, since the sorrows of 1870. They gave theimpression of being dedicated. As we now read their letters, theirjournals, their poems, we are astonished at the high level of moralsentiment which actuated them all. There is often even a species ofrapturous detachment which seems to lift them into a higher spherethan that of vain mortality. Examples might be given by the sheaf, butit suffices here to quote a letter from the youthful Léo Lantil, whowas killed early in 1915, in one of the obscure battles of Champagne. He says, in writing to his parents, shortly before his death, "All oursacrifice will be of sweet savour if it leads to a really gloriousvictory and brings more light to human souls. " It was this Léo Lantil, dying in his twenty-fifth year, whose last words were "Priez pour laFrance, travaillez pour la France, haussez-la!"

A story is told by M. Henri Bordeaux which illustrates the impressionmade by these young soldiers. A peasant of Savoy, while ploughing hisfields in the autumn of 1914, saw his wife crossing to him with thelocal postman, who had a letter in his hands. He took it from them, and put on his spectacles, and read that his two sons had been killedin an engagement in the Vosges. He said quietly, "God has found themready, " and then, slowly, "My poor wife!" and he returned to his yokeof oxen. It would seem that the French accepted, without reserve andwithout difficulty, an inward discipline for which the world hadformed little conception of their readiness. There is no question now, since all the private letters and diaries prove it, that thegeneration which had just left college, and had hardly yet gone outinto the world, had formed, unsuspected by their elders, a conceptionof life which might have been called fatalistic if it had not been sorigorously regulated by a sense of duty. They were singularly calmunder a constant presentiment of death. When the war came, theyaccepted the fiery trial not merely with resignation, but even withrelief. Their athletic stoicism took what fortune offered them, instead of attempting to rebel against it. Their sentiment was that adifficulty had been settled. Life had been producing upon theirconsciences a sense of complication, a tangle of too many problems. Now they might, and did, cheerfully relinquish the effort to solvethem. One of the most extraordinary features of the moral history ofthe young French officers in this war has been the abandonment oftheir will to the grace of God and the orders of the chief. In theletters of the three noble brothers Belmont, who fell in rapidsuccession, this apprenticeship to sacrifice is remarkable, but itrecurs in all the records. "God found them ready!"

When all is of so inspired an order of feeling, it is difficult, it iseven invidious, to select. But the figure of Paul Lintier, whosejournals have been piously collected by M. Edmond Haraucourt, standsout before us with at least as much saliency as any other. We may takehim as a peculiarly lucent example of his illuminated class. Quartermaster Lintier died on March 15, 1916, struck by a shell, onthe Lorraine frontier, at a place called Jeandelincourt. He had notyet completed his twenty-third year, for he was born at Mayenne on May13, 1893. In considering the cases of many of these brilliant andsympathetic young French officers, who had already published or haveleft behind them works in verse and prose, there may be a disposition, in the wonderful light of their experience, to exaggerate the positivevalue of their productions. Not all of them, of course, havecontributed, or would have contributed, durable additions to the storeof the literature of France. We see them, excusably, in the rose-lightof their sunset. But, for this very reason, we are inclined to givethe closer attention to Paul Lintier, who not only promised well butadequately fulfilled that promise. It seems hardly too much to saythat the revelation of a prose-writer of the first class was broughtto the world by the news of his death. 

His early training predicted nothing of romance. He was intended for acareer in commerce, but, showing no aptitude for trade, he dalliedwith legal studies at Lyons, and "commenced author" by publishing someessays in that city. At the age of twenty he joined a regiment ofartillery, and seems to have perceived, a year before the war, thatthe only profession he was fitted for was soldiering. Towards theclose of September 1914, in circumstances which he recounts in hisbook, he was severely wounded; he went back to the front in July 1915, and, as we have said, fell fighting eight months later. This is thehistory of a young man who will doubtless live in the annals of Frenchliterature; and brief as it seems, it is really briefer still, sinceall we know of Paul Lintier, or are likely ever to know, is what hetells us himself in describing what he saw and practised and enduredbetween August 1 and September 22, 1914. This wonderful book, "MaPièce, " was written by the young gunner, night after night, on hisknee, during seven weeks of inconceivable intensity of emotion, and itis by this revelation of his genius that his memory will be preserved. 

The style of Paul Lintier is one of the miracles of art. There is noevidence that this youth had studied much or had devoted himself toany of the training which adequate expression commonly demands. Weknow nothing about him until he suddenly bursts upon us, in theturmoil of mobilization, as a finished author. What strikes a criticalreader of "Ma Pièce, " as distinguishing it from other works of itsclass, is a certain intellectual firmness most remarkable in a lad ofLintier's age, suddenly confronted by such a frenzy of public action. There is no pessimism, and no rhetoric, and no touch of humour, but anobsession for the truth. This is displayed by another and an extremelypopular recent publication, "En Campagne, " by M. Marcel Dupont, whichexhibits exactly the same determination to exaggerate nothing and toreduce nothing, but to report exactly what the author saw with his owneyes, in that little corner of the prodigious battle-field in whichhis own regiment was fighting. Truth, the simple unvarnished truth, has been the object of these various writers in setting down theirimpressions, but the result exemplifies the difference between whatis, and what is not, durable as literature. For this purpose, it iswell to turn from Lintier's pages to those of the honest writers ofwhom Dupont is the type, and then back again to Lintier. All evoke, through intense emotion, most moving and most tragic sensations, butLintier, gifted with some inscrutable magic, evokes them in theatmosphere of beauty. 

A quality of the mind of Paul Lintier which marked him out for a placeabove his fellows was the prodigious exactitude of his memory. Thiswas not merely visual, but emotional as well. Not only did it retain, with the precision of a photograph, all the little fleeting details ofthe confused and hurried hours in which the war began, but it kept aminute record of the oscillation of feeling. Those readers who take apleasure in the technical parts of writing may enjoy an analysis ofcertain pages in "Ma Pièce, " for instance, the wonderful descriptionof an _alerte_ at 2 A. M. Above the village of Tailly-sur-Meuse (pp. 131, 132). With the vigorous picturesqueness of these sentences we maycompare the pensive quality and the solidity of touch which combine toform such a passage as the following account of a watch at Azannes(August 14, 1914):--"La nuit est claire, rayée par les feux desprojecteurs de Verdun qui font des barres d'or dans le ciel;merveilleuse nuit de mi-août, infiniment constellée, égayée d'étoilesfilantes qui laissent après elles de longues phosphorescences. 

"La lune s'est levée. Elle perce mal les feuillages denses despruniers et le cantonnement immobile reste sombre. Çà et là, seulement, elle fait des taches jaunes sur l'herbe et sur les croupesdes chevaux qui dorment debout. Le camarade avec qui je partage cettenuit de garde est étendu dans son manteau au pied d'un grand poirier. Devant moi, la lune illumine la plaine. Les prairies sont voilées degaze blanche. Les deux armées, tous feux éteints, dorment ou seguettent. "

Lintier has no disposition to make things out better than they were. His account of the defeat at Virton, on August 22, is grave and calmin its sad stoicism, it is even harsh in its refusal to overlook anyof the distressing features of the affair. But hope rises in his heartlike clear water in a troubled well, and it is just after thismelancholy set-back that the noble French spirit most vividly assertsitself. In the very forefront of physical and moral misery, "quelleémouvante compréhension de la Patrie s'est révélée à nous!" An armywhich is instantly and completely victorious can never experience thedepth of this sentiment. It is necessary to have fought, to havesuffered, to have feared (if only for a moment) that all was lost, inorder to comprehend with passion what the mother-country means to aman. Lying in the fog, soaked with rain, at the edge of the copsesfrom which the German guns had ejected them, it was at that wretchedmoment that the full apprehension came to Paul Lintier that Francecomprised for him all the charm of life, all the affections, all thejoys of the eyes and the heart and the brain. "Alors, on préfèretomber, mourir là, parce qu'on sent que la France perdue, ce seraitpire que la mort. " This is a feeling which animates the darkest pagesof his book--and many of them perforce are gloomy; through all theconfusion and doubt, the disquietude, the physical dejection, thesense of a kind of blind-man's buff intolerably wearisome andfatiguing--through all this, which the young author does not seek toconceal, there runs the ceaseless bright thread of hope sustained bylove. 

For us English the book has a curious interest in its unlikeness toanything which an English lad of twenty would have dreamed of writing. It strikes an English reader, in comparison with the equally gallantand hardly less picturesque records which some of our own youngofficers have produced, as extraordinarily "grown up. " The newgeneration which France sent into the war of defence was more simpleand more ardent at the outset than our own analogous generation was. It was less dilettante and more intellectual. The evidences ofthought, of reasoned reflection carried out to its full extent, of anadequate realization of the problems presented by life, are manifest, though in various degree, in all these records of French officerskilled in the months which preceded Christmas 1914. These Frenchmendid not go out light-heartedly, nor with a pathetic inability tofathom the purpose for which they so generously went, but they hadgiven the matter a study which seemed beyond their years. They marchedto the blood-baths of Belgium and Lorraine with solemnity, as thoughto a sacrament. 

It must be remarked as an interesting point that this generation hadrecovered a sense of the spirituality of a war of national defence. Insimpler words, it had recovered that honest pride which France, incertain of its manifestations since the war of 1870, seemed to havelamentably lost. Posterity will compare the serene simplicity of Péguyand Lintier with the restlessness and bitter disenchantment of the1880 generation, which arrived at manhood just when France was mostdeeply conscious of her humiliation. If we seek for the sources ofthis recovery of self-respect, which so beautifully characterizedFrench character at the immediate crisis of 1914, we have to find it, of course, in the essential elasticity of the trained French mind. TheFrenchman likes the heroic attitude, which is unwelcome to us, and headopts it instinctively, with none of our national shyness and falsemodesty. But, if we seek for a starting-point of influence, we mayprobably find it in the writings of a soldier whose name is scarcelyknown in England, but whose "Études sur le Combat, " first published in1880, have been the text-book of the young French officer, and werenever being so much read as just before the outbreak of the war. 

The author of these "Études sur le Combat" was Colonel Ardent du Picq, who fell at the battle of Longeville-les-Metz, on August 15, 1870. Hehad predicted the calamity of that war, which he attributed to themental decadence of the French army, and to the absence of anyadequate General Staff organization. Ardent du Picq had received noencouragement from within or from without, and the reforms which henever ceased to advocate were treated as the dreams of an eccentricidealist. He died, unrecognized, without having lived to see carriedout one of the reforms which he had so persistently advocated. Histongue was rough and his pen was dipped in acid; the military criticwho ridiculed the "buffooneries" of his generals and charged hisfellow-officers with trying to get through their day's work with aslittle trouble to themselves as possible, was not likely to carry muchweight at the close of the Second Empire. But the scattered papers ofthe forgotten Colonel Ardent du Picq were preserved, and ten yearsafter his death a portion of them was published. Every scrap whichcould be found of the work of so fruitful a military thinker waspresently called for, and at the moment of the outbreak of the presentwar the "Études sur le Combat" had become the text-book of everypunctilious young officer. It is still unknown how much of themagnificent effort of 1914 was not due to the shade of Ardent du Picq. Although the name of that author does not occur in the pages of "MaPièce, " we are constrained to believe that Lintier had been, like somany young men of his class, an infatuated student of the "Études. " Hehad comprehended the essence of military vitality and the secret ofmilitary grandeur. He had perceived the paramount importance of moralforce in contending with formidable hostile organizations. Ardent duPicq, who possessed the skill of his nation in the manufacture ofmaxims, laid it down that "Vaincre, c'est d'être sûr de la victoire. "He assented to the statement that it was a spiritual and not amechanical ascendancy which had gained battles in the past and mustgain them in the future. Very interesting it is to note, in thedelicately scrupulous record of the mind and conscience of PaulLintier, how, side by side with this uplifted patriotic confidence, the weakness of the flesh makes itself felt. At Tailly, full of thehope of coming battle, waiting in the moonlit forest for the sound ofapproaching German guns, suddenly the heroism drops from him, and hemurmurs the plaintive verses of the old poet Joachim du Bellay to theecho of "Et je mourrai peut-être demain!" The delicate sureness withwhich he notes these changes of mood is admirable; and quickly thedepression passes: "vite notre extraordinaire insouciance l'emporte, et puis, jamais heure a-t-elle été plus favorable à la revanche?"

In defining the particular principles which have actuated themagnificent French General Staff in the present crisis, Lord Haldanehas dwelt on the fact that the French have displayed throughout "thatmoral effect which comes from certainty of purpose and which onlyconcentrated thought can give. " The value which the higher authoritysets on the cultivation of moral enthusiasm is exemplified by the factthat the French Ministry of War has encouraged the publication ofthose personal records, from which we have here made a selection, onthe ground that they carry throughout the army a contagion of energyand courage. We are far here from the obscure jealousy of thoughtwhich made a military representative of the British War Office theother day lay down the brilliant axiom "A hairdresser is of more valueto the country at war than a librarian!" Such a man could not exist ina French community, where, at the very height of hostilities, soprominent a military authority as Colonel Émile Manceau could pause tosay, "Let us read, let us give much time to reading!" It is a curiousreflection that the present struggle has been, for the French, themost literary of all wars, the one in which the ordered expression ofclear thought in language has been most carefully and consciouslycultivated. 

This was very far from being the case with the war of 1870, when theabsence of literature was strongly felt during and after the crisis. The old satirist of the "Iambes, " Auguste Barbier, wrote, immediatelyafter the declaration of peace, a poem in which he rehearsed theincidents of the war, and commented on the absence from the list ofits victims of a single distinguished writer. He said--

_"La Muse n'a pas vu tomber un seul poète_, "

and it was out of any one's power to refute the sinister and prosaicverse. The contrast with 1914 is painful and striking. In the existingwar the holocaust of victims, poets and historians, painters andsculptors, musicians and architects, has been heartrending, and it cannever in future years be pretended that the Muses have this timespared us their most poignant sacrifices. A year ago the _RevueCritique_, one of the most serious and original of the learnedjournals of Paris, announced the losses it had endured. It wasconducted by a staff of forty scholars; by the summer of 1916 thisnumber was reduced by twenty-seven; thirteen had been killed, elevenseverely wounded, three had disappeared. 

Many writers have asked, and M. Maurice Barrès prominently among them, what is the reason of the fact that intelligence has taken a frontplace in this war? What has been the source of the spirit ofself-immolation which has driven the intellectual and imaginative sectionof French youth to hold out both hands to catch the full downpour ofthe rain of death? There is no precedent for it in French history, andwe may observe for ourselves how new a thing it was, and howunexpected, by comparing with the ardent and radiant letters and poemsof the youngest generation the most patriotic expressions of theirelders. A single example may suffice. No man of letters has given anobler witness to the truth of his patriotism than Colonel PatriceMahon, known in letters as Art Roë. His novels, which dealt largelywith modern Russian life, in relation with the French army, werevirile and elevated productions, but he was a man of fifty at the timeof his heroic death at the head of his troops, in the battle ofWisembach (August 22, 1914), and his tone was not that of such youngmen as Camille Violand and Marcel Drouet. To read again the "Pingot etmoi" of Art Roë is to return to a book of the utmost sincerity andvalour, but it was published in 1893, and there is no touch of thesplendour of 1914 about it. 

A figure which stands midway between the generation of Art Roë andthat of the adolescent comrades of a new Sophocles of whom we shallpresently speak, is Captain E. J. Détanger, who seems to betransitional, and to share the qualities of both. This name has, evennow, scarcely grown familiar to the eye and ear, but it proves to havebeen the real name of Émile Nolly, whose romances of modern life inthe Extreme East had been widely read just before the war. Nolly'searliest books, "Hien le Maboul" and "La Barque Annamite" (butparticularly the latter), gave promise of a new Pierre Loti or a newRudyard Kipling, but totally distinct in manner from both. Détangerwas just thirty-four when the war broke out, and he was one of itsearly victims, dying at Blainville-sur-l'Eau on September 5. Hegreatly distinguished himself by his personal bravery, and the crossof the Legion of Honour was pinned to his blood-stained uniform on hislast battle-field. The tribute of a fellow-officer to this devoted manof letters may be quoted here. It is an example of the sudden andcomplete transformation which turned artists into soldiers at thefirst sound of the bugle:--

"Émile Nolly proved a magnificent soldier. He had a youthful, blithe, fervent and resolute soul; he had the soul of a hero completelyprepared to sacrifice himself with joy for his country. After havingserved valiantly and brilliantly in Indo-China, and then in Morocco, it was with a radiant hope that he set out for the frontier ofLorraine. 'What does the life of any one of us matter?' he said to mejust before he left. 'All that is essential is that France shouldlive, that she should be victorious. '"

Marcel Drouet, who has just been mentioned, was much younger. He was anative of the invaded department of the Ardennes, and had notcompleted his twenty-sixth year when he was killed in the trenches ofConsenvoye, in the Woëvre, when he was taking part in the outerdefence of Verdun. He seems to have been distinguished by a refinementof spirit, which is referred to, in different terms, by every one whohas described him. He leaves behind him a volume of poems, "L'Ombrequi tourne, " and various essays and fragments. The journal of the lastdays of his life has been edited by M. Maurice Barrès, and is a recordof singular delicacy and courage. We see him facing the dreadfulcircumstances of the war, made the more dreadful to him because thehorrors are committed in the midst of the familiar scenes of his ownhome, and we find him patiently waiting for the signal to lead his meninto action while he holds a volume of Chateaubriand open upon hisknee. The reflections of Marcel Drouët differ in some respects fromthose of his most enthusiastic companions. There is a note oftenderness in them which is unusual, and which is very pathetic. Atthe very close of his brief and heroic life, the thoughts of Drouëtreverted to the historic town in which he was born, to Sedan whichstill shuddered in his infancy at the recollection of the horrors of1870. He thought of the dead who fell on that melancholy field; andthen his thoughts turned to those dear faces which he had so recentlyleft behind. The following passage, in its simplicity, in itssweetness, deserves to live in the memorial literature of the war:--

"Je pense à vous, mes chers vivants, aux mains des barbares en cemoment sans doute, mais en le coeur de qui j'ai foi, tant je connaisvotre dévouement aux choses sublimes. 

"Mais aussi je pense à vous, mon Dieu, qui avez voulu toutes ceschoses pour votre plus grand gloire et pour l'établissement de votrejustice. Tous ces malheurs, ces tristesses, tout ce sang répandu sontimposés par vous, mon Dieu, en manière de rédemption. Mais votresoleil glorieux éclairera bientôt, j'en suis absolument certain, lavictoire du bon droit qui attend depuis près d'un demi-siècle. J'ycoopère de toutes mes forces, de toute mon âme. Et si vous me retirezde ce monde, ô Dieu de bonté, permettez que ce soit pour me joindre àceux qui m'out précédé dans votre séjour, et dont l'affectionterrestre me fut précieuse. C'est toute la prière ardente que je faisdevant le soleil levant, ce jour de Toussaint que sillonnent déjà lesobus semeurs de mort, en cette année 1914 qui verra rétablir la paixdu monde, par l'anéantissement du peuple barbare, et la régénérescencede la nation française. "

In most cases there rests an obscurity over the brief lives of thesegallant young officer-authors, whose nature was little observed untilthe flash of battle illuminated them for one last brilliant moment. Wefeel a strong desire, which cannot be gratified, to follow them fromtheir childhood to their adolescence, and to see for ourselves whatimpulses directed them into the path of heroism. It is rarely that wecan do this, but one of these poets has left behind him two friendswho have recaptured the faint and shrouded impressions of his earlylife. The piety of M. Henri Albert Besnard, who was his intimatecompanion, and of that practised narrator M. Henri Bordeaux, who ishis biographer, enable us to form a clearer and fuller conception ofCamille Violand than of any of his compeers. Born in 1891, he wastypical of that latest generation of which we have spoken, in whom allseemed to be unconsciously preparing for the great and criticalsacrifice. He was born at Lyons, but was brought up in the Quercy, that wild and tortured district just north of the Pyrenees, wherenature seems to gather together all that she possesses of thegrotesque and violent in landscape; but he was educated at Alençon, and trained at Vouziers, in the midst of the orchards of Normandy. Thus both sides of France, the Midi and the Manche, were equally knownto him, but the ceaseless peregrinations which he underwent, so farfrom enlarging his horizon, seem to have plunged his soul inmelancholy. At the age of twenty he struck M. Bordeaux as being thetypical _déraciné. _

The letters of Camille Violand and the memories of his friends presentto us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite earlyto exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. Hewas not fixed in any plan of life. His letters--for he wrote withabundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family tokeep his letters--are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. Hewas tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind ofromantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as hepassed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the principal moral qualitywe perceive is a peevish irritation at the slow development of life. He was just twenty-one when the death of his mother, to whom he waspassionately attached, woke him out of this paralyzed condition, andit is remarkable that, in breaking, like a moth from a chrysalis, outof his network of futile and sterile sophisms, it was immediately onthe contingency of war that he fixed his thoughts. The news of hismother's death, by a strange and rapid connexion of ideas, remindedhim of his future responsibility as an officer in the coming struggle. He wrote, in 1913, "Je m'effraie en pensant à cette responsabilité quipèsera certainement un jour sur moi, car je considère la guerre commeà peu près certaine à bref délai. "

Having once formed this conviction, a complete revolution affected thecharacter of the young Violand. His melancholy ceased; his uncertaintyfell from him; it seemed as though his soul threw off her fetters. From the close of 1913, when the chancelleries of Europe were stillprofoundly unconscious of the tremendous upheaval which was in storefor them, this young man, hitherto so timorous and irresolute, is seento be filled with a species of prophetic ecstasy:--

 _"The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness! The vaporous exultation not to be confined! . .. .. .. .. The animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind"_

This remarkable change of character was encouraged by the militarydiscipline which now regulated his life, and which he accepted withrapture and devotion. His mother's one aim had been to make of Camillea soldier and a Christian, and he became the very type of thatcombination. 

To use a striking phrase of M. Henri Bordeaux, the war found CamilleVioland in a state of preparedness. He saw it arrive, not with anxietyor trepidation, but with solemn joy. His father was placed in commandof a brigade of dragoons, and he himself, at another part of thefrontier line, was given the rank of second lieutenant and a commandwhich filled him with the pride of responsibility. Three weeks laterhe was wounded in the head at the battle of Virton, but not until hehad seen the Germans, after a hard fight, retire before the attack ofhis men. "Il a connu l'ivresse de la victoire: il a vu fuirl'ennemi"--so a friend announced it. He was taken back to the hospitalat Limoges, but the victory of the Marne intoxicated him, and it wasfound impossible to hold him back. With a head still bandaged, he madehis appearance once more in his beloved regiment, which was nowfighting in the forest of the Argonne, but on the first occasion onwhich he led his men, Violand was wounded again, now in the shoulder. He was sent far back, into Brittany, to Quimper, where, a second time, by a subterfuge he contrived to escape from the hospital before hiswound was properly healed. He was absolutely intractable in hisdetermination to get back promptly to the fighting line: "il étaitcomme ça, avec son air délicat et tranquille!" Again brought back, hewas set to training men at Quimper. But he could not endure therestraint, and his nerves broke down. 

It was found impossible to hold him back, and on October 8 themilitary authorities consented to his return to his regiment, and withthe permission was combined the news that he had been nominated forthe cross of the Legion of Honour. The letter in which he announcesthat fact to the ladies at home--"mes chères Grand'mère et Tante"--ischarming in its simplicity. "La croix gagnée sur un champ de bataille, c'est à mes yeux le plus beau rêve qu'un jeune Français pût faire; jeregrette seulement de ne pas l'avoir méritée davantage; mais l'avenirme permettra, j'espère, de justifier cette récompense, que jeconsidère comme anticipée. " The official notification specifies thewounds which he had received and the fact that, by the testimony ofall who saw him under fire, the young lieutenant gave evidence of verygreat courage and of indomitable energy. That he was, by what he callsa queer coincidence, the youngest officer of his regiment and its onlymember of the Legion of Honour, afforded him an unaffectedsatisfaction. 

From this time--the end of October 1914--the letters of Camile Violandtestify to the rapid development of his mind and character. He loses acertain childishness which had hitherto clung to him, and he expresseshimself with a more virile sobriety. Nothing could exceed the pathosof his pictures of the terrible life in the Argonne, and we are madeto feel how rapidly the suffering and the responsibility of hismilitary life were bringing out all the deepest and most seriouselements in his character. There is a remarkable letter of January 7, 1915, describing an engagement in which he lost several of his bestmen, and in particular an experienced corporal in whose skill he muchconfided. The briefest fragment broken from this pathetic description, addressed to his father, will give a notion of the tone of it:--

"J'étais absorbé par les blessés dans mon poste de commandement etquand je pus me rendre dans la tranchée où il était, il tombait dansle coma. Ses derniers mots avaient été: 'Adieu, ma Patrie!' Pourtant, il me reconnut à la voix, me répondit faiblement. Je l'assistai dansses derniers moments. Ce fut bien rapide, bien simple et bien beau. _J'étais pour lui le chef, ce qui est plus que le Père et le Prêtreréunis_. Je l'ai bien senti là; quand ce fut presque fini, jel'embrassai et le quittai pour retourner aux soucis que nous donnel'ennemi. "

Thus was this lad of three-and-twenty fortified and ripened by thearduous warfare in the Argonne. He was now spending what leisure thefighting gave him in a careful study of Homer. We gather that he hadjust finished re-reading the "Iliad" when the end came. On March 4, 1915, at Mesnil-les-Hurlus, a ball pierced his heart, splintering inits passage the cross of the Legion of Honour of which he was soproud. In his pocket was found his last letter, still unposted, inwhich he told his father of a fresh distinction for valour which hehad just received, and in the course of which, with a manifestpresentiment of his approaching end, he wrote, "Je mourrai, si Dieuveut, en bon chrétien et en bon Français. "

It is not to be denied that ordinary observers were not in any degreeprepared for the heroic devotion displayed by such young officers asthese at the beginning of the war. The general opinion in peace timewas expressed by M. Maurice Maeterlinck when he laid it down that"courage, moral and physical endurance (if not abnegation, forgetfulness of self, renunciation of all comfort, the faculty ofsacrifice, the power to face death) belong exclusively to the mostprimitive, the least happy, the least intelligent of peoples, thosewhich are least capable of reasoning, of taking danger into account. "It was the common hypothesis among moralists that, as men's nervesgrew more sensitive and the means of destruction more cruel andirresistible, no human being would be able to support the strain ofactual fighting. It seemed inevitable that soldiers would rapidlybecome demoralized, when exposed to the multifarious horrors of modernmechanical battle. Nothing, therefore, could have been more surprisingthan the temper shown by thousands of young men, suddenly called upfrom sedentary and safe pursuits, and confronted by the terrors ofshrapnel and liquid fire and mines and gas, and all the other horribleingenuities of an unseen enemy for killing and mutilating. Theirimaginations were unaccustomed to these terrors, it is true, but thehigher faculties of the human mind asserted themselves, and in thevague collective battle of the trenches these young French officers;despite the refinement and the security in which they had always beenacustomed to exist, instantly reverted to the chivalrous attitudewhich their remote ancestors had adopted in a warfare that wasromantic and personal in its individualism. 

No doubt a not inconsiderable part of the serenity, which is soremarkably evident in the letters and journals of these young men, wasdue to the fact that they had arrived, for the first time, at acomprehension of the unity of life. There is no tedious alternative ofchoice in the active military career. All is regulated, all isarranged in accordance with a hierarchical discipline, and war becomeswhat dogmatic religion is to a weak soul that has been tossed about bythe waves of doubt. It must be also borne in mind that the incessantdread of invasion, especially in the neighbourhood of the easternfrontier, had kept the spirits of those who knew that responsibilitywould fall upon them, in a state of unceasing agitation. It is aparalyzing thing to exist under a perpetual menace which nothing canprecipitate and yet nothing can avert. Captain Belmont, in hisadmirable letters, speaks much of the "romanticism" which attractedmany of his companions, and of the natural satisfaction which thedeclaration of war gave to their restless faculties. The twosentiments were probably one and the same, and to a poeticaltemperament that might well seem "romantic" which filled a less vividmind with restlessness and languor. 

It is noticeable, too, that when once the sickening suspense wasremoved, and the path of pain and glory lay clear before theseyouthful spirits, they grew very rapidly in intellectual stature. Theyhad found their equilibrium, and no more time and force were wasted inuseless oscillations. Each of them had, at last, the occasion, andtherefore the power, to fill out the lines of his properindividuality. As M. Henri Bordeaux excellently says, "L'espritinquiet ne se contente de rien, le coeur inapaisé se croit incompris. "But now these men knew their vocation, and a precocious experience oflife developed in them a temper of meditation. It is extraordinarywhat an intelligent philosophy, what a delicate study of nature, wererevealed at once in the writings of these heroic boys of twenty. Lieutenant Belmont, who fought in Alsace, had spent his infancy andadolescence in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, and his memory was fullof the rich Dauphiné valley, with its great river and its easternhorizon of the Alps. In the misery of the September nights of 1914, inthe harshness of misty mornings among the Alsatian pines, his thoughtsreturn to the luminous twilights of his old home under the great oaksof the Isère, and he expresses his nostalgia in terms of the mostexquisite and the most unstudied grace. Here is a fragment of one ofhis letters home (October 1914):--

"Les journées sont exquises, tristes et pâles, également différentesdes crudités de nos idées et des ténèbres de l'hiver. L'imagination avite fait de s'envoler, à travers cette lumière adoucie, vers tous leshorizons familiers de la petite patrie, vers la vallée de Grenoble, paresseusement allongée dans ce bain de léger soleil, au pied desAlpes déjà engourdies, vers les terres rousses de Lonnes longées parles futaies jaunissantes où s'abritent les gibiers, tranquilles cetteannée. "

No doubt, the reason why this war has been, for France, so peculiarlya literary war, is that the mechanical life in the trenches, alternately so violent and so sedentary, has greatly enforced thehabit of sustained contemplation based on a vivid and tragicexperience. This has encouraged, and in many instances positivelycreated, a craving for literary expression, which has found abundantopportunity for its exercise in letters, journals, and poems; and whatit has particularly developed is a form of literary art in whichFrenchmen above all other races have always excelled, that analysis offeeling which has been defined as "le travail de ciselure morale. "This moral carved-work, or chasing, as of a precious metal, revealingthe rarity and value of spiritual surfaces, is characteristic of thejournals of Paul Lintier, of the beauty of which we have alreadyspoken. His art expends itself in the effect of outward things on thesoul. He speaks of mysterious sights, half-witnessed in the gloaming, of sinister noises which have to be left unexplained. He does notshrink from a record of unlovely things, of those evil thoughts whichattend upon the rancour of defeat, of the suspicion of treason whichcomes to dejected armies like a breath of poison-gas. That portion ofhis "Souvenirs" which deals with the days of the retreat on Paris iswritten in a spasm of savage anger; a whole new temper is instantlyrevealed when once the tide turns at Nanteuil. Nature herself thusendorses his new mood, as he writes "There are still clouds heaped upto the west, but the blue, that cheers us, is chasing them all away. "

Among the noble young poets whose pathetic and admirable fragments thepiety of surviving friends has preserved, it is difficult to selectone name rather than another. But in the rank of these Rupert Brookesand Julian Grenfells and Charles Listers of France, we may perhapspause before the ardent figure of Jacques de Choudens. He was aBreton, and was trained for the law on the other side of France, atLille. He found that the call of the sea was irresistible, and aftertwo years at a desk in that dreary and dusty city, he suddenly flungup his cap and would have no more of such drudgery. To the despair ofhis family, he started on the high seas, and explored the wonderlandof Haiti. After various adventures, he was about to return to France, when the sea again took him by the throat, and he vanished, likeRobert Louis Stevenson, in the Pacific. Having sailed twice round theworld, "beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars, " atired Ulysses under thirty, Jacques de Choudens had just come back toFrance when the war seized him with a fresh and deep enchantment. Heentered into it with a profound ardour, and proved himself to possessexceptional military qualities. He was severely wounded on the secondday of the battle of Charleroi, but slowly recovered, only to bekilled in an engagement on June 13, 1915. His poems, written since warbroke out, have been carefully collected and published by his friend, M. Charles Torquet. They are few, and they suffer from a certainhardness of touch; Jacques de Choudens had, as yet, a deeperacquaintance with life than with literature; but they breathe a spiritof high and romantic heroism. Let the sonnet called "Autre Prière" beoffered as an example:--

 "_Terres, fleuves, forêts, ô puissances occultes, C'est votre âme qui bat au bleu de nos poignets; Notre orgueil s'est enfin cabré sous les insultes Dont, depuis quarante ans, ô France, tu saignais. 

 Dans le livre où s'apprend le plus hautain des cultes, Marque la page avec nos sabres pour signets; Ceins la couronne d'or qu'en l'An deux tu ceignais, Car c'est dans notre chair à nous que tu la sculptes. 

 France! France! Bénis chaque arme et chaque front; C'est d'ardeur, non de peur, que tremble l'éperon. Nous sommes tes martyrs volontaires, superbes, Sous l'auréole d'or des galons du képi. .. . Nous allons préparer aux faucilles des gerbes, Puisqu'où tombe un soldat pousse un nouvel épi. _"

The poet, shortly before he fell, wrote to a friend "Noustravaillerons mieux après la victoire, ce que nous ferons ayant étémûri par la fatigue et les angoisses. La vie est bonne et belle et laguerre est une chose bien amusante. " This is the type of Frenchman whofights for the love of fighting, who puts above all other happinessthe prize of military honour and glory won in a good cause. We meetwith it in the lyrical effusion of an adventurous poet like Jacques deChoudens and in the straightforward evidence of a practised soldierlike Captain Hassler, whose "Ma Campagne" is a record extraordinaryalike for its courage, for its vivacity, and for its modesty. 

The peculiar spirit of ardent gallantry to which we have dedicatedthese few pages is illustrated, as will be observed, by examples takenwithout exception from the first months of the war. It would be rashto say, without a careful sifting of evidence, how much of thissentiment survived the days which preceded the battle of the Marne. France has, in the succession of her attacks up to the present hour, continued and confirmed the magnificent tradition of her courage. Butit is impossible to overlook the elements which have taken theromantic colour out of the struggle. No chivalry could survive closeexperience of the vile and bestial cruelty of German methods. The sadand squalid aspects of a war of resistance, fought in the verybleeding flesh of the beloved mother-country, were bound to be fatalto "cette bonne humeur bienfaisante" which so marvellouslycharacterized the young French officers of August 1914. Moreover, themere physical element of fatigue has been enough to quench that firstradiant flame. We find it deadening, at last, even the high spirit ofPaul Lintier, and we listen to his confession: "To sleep! to sleep! Oto live without a thought, in absolute silence. To live, after havingso often nearly died. I could sleep for days, and days, and days!"

These are considerations which belong to a heavier and a wearier time. As a matter of history--so that in our hurrying times a gesture of somuch beauty may not, because it was so ephemeral, be forgotten--I haveendeavoured to catch a reflection of the glow which blazed in thehearts of young intellectual officers at the very beginning of thewar. If in the inevitable wear and tear of the interminable struggle, this beauty fades into the light of common day, so much the more isthere need that we should fix it in memory, since in a world whichsavagery and treason have made so hideous, we cannot afford to letthis jewel of pure moral beauty be trampled into oblivion. 

 _breve et irreparabile tempus Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere facti Hoc virtutis opus. _

 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The writings of La Rochefoucauld were subjected to accurate anddetailed examination in the edition begun by Gilbert in 1868, andbrought to a pause at his untimely death in 1870. It was completed in1883 by J. Gourdault. After the lapse of half a century, the shortbiography by Gilbert, with which this edition began, naturallyrequires some revision, and is open to several additions. An earliervolume (1863), by E. De Barthélemy, is of a more technical character, but may be referred to with advantage by those curious regardingdetail. The MSS of Rochefoucauld still in existence--one of these, known as the Liancourt MS. , is in the Duke's handwriting--arenumerous, and may still, no doubt, reward investigation. The bestrecent summary is that by J. Bourdeau (1895), published in M. Jusserand's charming series. There is not, so far as I am aware, anyEnglish biography of the author of the "Maximes. "

The complete works of La Bruyère were elaborately edited in threevolumes (1865-1878) by G. Servois. Much curious information is to befound in Allaire's "La Bruyère dans la Maison de Condé" (1887), and anexcellent summary in the Life by M Paul Morillot, 1904. But the latestand fullest account of La Bruyère's career is to be found in M. EmileMagne's Preface to the selected works (1914). Editions of "LesCaractères" are countless. 

The writings of Vauvenargues were collected by the Marquis de Portiain 1797, by Suard in 1806, by Brière in 1821, by Gilbert in 1857, andagain in 1874; each of these editions added considerably to knowledge. The only recent Life is that by M Maurice Paléologue (1890). 

The principal volumes referred to in "The Gallantry of France" are the following:--

"Ma Pièce" Souvenir d'un canonnier de 1914. Par Paul Lintier. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1916. 

"Anthologie des Écrivains français morts pour la Patrie. " Par Carlos Larronde. Préface de Maurice Barrès. I-IV. Paris: Larousse. 1916-1917

"La Jeunesse Nouvelle. " Par Henri Bordeaux. Paris: Librairie Plon 1917. 

"En Campagne" (1914-1915). Impression d'un officier de Légère. Par Marcel Dupont. Paris: Librairie Plon. 1916. 

"Ma Campagne de jour de jour. " Par le Capitaine Hassler. Paris: Librairie Plon. 1917. 

 INDEX

Academy, French, 91

Addison, at Blois, 87, 88

----compared with La Bruyère, 87

d'Ailly, Abbé, 22

Aix in Provence, 100

Alençon, 155

Allard, Jean, 136-138

Alsace, 162

Alsace-Lorraine, 132

Amelot, 118

Amyot, Jacques, 99

Anne of Austria, 11, 13

Anne of England, 88

Apemantus, 6

Argonne, the, 157

d'Argonne, Bonaventure, 61 _n_. 

Arnauld (d'Andilly), 22

Augustine, St. , 43

Barbier, Auguste, 150

Barrès, M. Maurice, xiii, xv, 153

Belgium, 146

Bellay, Joachim du, 148

Belle-Isle, Marshal de, 106-107

Belmont, the brothers, 140, 161, 162

Berkeley, Bishop, 125

Besnard, H A. , 155

Blair's "Grave, " 110

"Blue Room, " the, 8

Bohemia, the campaign in, 98, 107, 109, 112

Bohemia, Queen of, 33

Boileau, xix, 47, 70, 82

Bordeaux, M Henri, 139, 157, 162

Bossuet, Antoine, 92

Bossuet (Bishop), 35, 44, 47, 61, 62, 76, 91, 101 _n_. 110, 116

Bouillon, Godefroi de, 58

Bourbon, Duc de, 61

Brillon, 55

Brooke, Rupert, 131, 164

Brunetière, Ferdinand, 32 _n_. 

Buckingham, Duke of, 11

Budgell, Eustace, 88

Burney, Fanny, 62

Bussy-Rabutin, 45, 70

Caen, 59, 60, 64

Calvin, 106

Casaubon, 70

"Chambre des Sublimes, " 47

Champagne, 139

"Chanson de Roland, " 132, 135

Chateaubriand, 153

Châtelet, Mme du, 112

Chevreuse, Mme de, 14

Choudens, Jacques de, 164-6

Clapiers, Luc de, 99 _see_ Vauvenargues

Coleridge, his "Table-Talk, " 29

Commune, the, 121 _n_. 

Condé, Prince de (the Grand Condé), 19, 61, 63, 64

Consenvoye, 152

Conti, Prince de, 14

Corneille, Pierre, 123, 124, his "Pulchérie, " 48

Cousin, Victor, 32

Cromwell, Oliver, 129

Decourcelle, M. Pierre, 138

Descartes, 33, 122, 125

Détanger, Capt E J. , 151, 152

Drouet, Marcel, 151-154

Dupont, Marcel, his "En Campagne, " 143

Duryer, his tragedy of "Alcyonée, " 18

Dyke, Daniel, his "Mystery of Self-deceiving, " 28

Egra, 107

d'Enghien, Henri Jules, Duc, 63

Esprit, Jacques, 30-32, 50 _n_

Fénelon, 35, 91, 101 _n_. 

Fontenelle, 61, 69 _n_. ; described as "Cydias", 68

Fresnes, Château de, 36

Fronde, the, 13, 20, 24

Fuller, Thomas, 28, 74

Gilbert, 109

Gourville, 18

Grenfell, Julian, 131, 164

Grenoble, 162, 163

Grignan, Mme de, 39 _n_, 48

Guastalla, victory at, 102

Guienne, 15

Guillot, Léon, xv

Guyon, Mme, 91

Haldane, Lord, quoted, 149, 174

Halifax, Earl of, 77, 78

Haraucourt, M. E. , 141

Hassler, Capt, his "Ma Campagne", 166

d'Hautefort, Mlle, 11

Helvétius, 42

Hobbes, his "Leviathan, " 33, 34

Huet, Bishop of Avranches, 37

Jansenists, 27, 33, 127

Jeandelincourt, 141

Jesuits, 33

Johnson, Dr. , 88

Jouy, Ernest, 28

Kipling, Rudyard, 152, quoted, 90

Konrad, the monk, 135-6

La Bruyère, 55-93; birth and parentage, 58; La Bruyère at Chantilly, 64; contrasted with La Rochefoucauld, 57, described as "Ménippe, " 65, in the House of Condé, 65, 90, at Fontainebleau, 64, Paris, 64; at Versailles, 64; his "Caractères, " 55-57; 66-72, 76, 78, 83, his "Dialogues, " 92

La Bruyère, Louis, 58

La Fayette, Mme de, 36, 37, 39, 45, 46, 48-50

La Fontaine, 47; "Fables" of, 49 _n_

Lagrange, Henri, xiv

Lamb, Charles, 58

Lantil, Léo, 139

La Rochefoucauld, Duc de, 3-52, birth and descent, 8, 9; marriage, 10; his "Letters, " his "Maximes, " xvi, 4-6, 33, 47, 51, 52, 57, his "Mémoires, " 9-17, 21, 23-25; his portrait by himself, 22-25 by Petitot, 19, by Cardinal de Retz, 17

Lauzun, Duc de, 80

La Vergne, Marie de, _see_ La Fayette, Mme de

Lille, 164

Lintier, Paul, 3, 4, 131, 140-149, 163, 169

Lister, Charles, 164

Locke, John, 74, 124, 126

Longeville-les-Metz, 147

Longueville, Mme de, 14, 18, 39 40 _n_

Lorraine, 146

Loti, Pierre, 152

Louis XIII, 8, 9, 13, 14

Louis XIV. , 84

Louis XV, 84, 117, 123

Luxembourg (Palace), 23, 64

Lyons, 141, 155

Mademoiselle, La Grande, 17, 23

Maeterlinck, M. , 160

Magne, M. , Emile, 63

Mahon, Col Patrice, 151

Maine, Duc du, 46, 47

Maine, Duchesse du, 116

Maintenon, Mme de, 46

Malebranche, 122

Malizian, 70

Manceau, Col. Emile, 149

Mandeville, Bernard, 42, 126

Marcillac, Prince de, 11, 12, 47, _see_ La Rochefoucauld

Mirabeau, Marquis de, 100, 103-105

Molière, 48

Nolly, Émile; _see_ Détanger

Paléologue, M. , 105, 169

Paris, Gaston, 135

Parma, French victory at, 102

Pascal, xviii, 22, 23, 32, 33, 35, 55, 81, 113, 115, 122, 127, 128

Péguy, 146

Petitot, 19

Phélippeaux, Abbé, 87, 88

Picq, Col. Ardent du 147, 148

Pierrepont, 136

Pin, Abbé Elliès du, 92

Plessis, Mme du, 36

Plutarch's "Lives, " 99, 100

Pompadour, Mme de, 114

Port Royal, 22, 23, 27, 28, 36, 86

Prague, capture of, 107

Quercy, 155

Quimper, 157, 158

Racine, xix, 35, 47, 122, 123

Rambouillet, Hôtel de, 7

Regnier, Henri, 20

Retz, Cardinal de, 10, 16, 17

_Revue Critique_, 150

Rhine, Passage of the, 40 _n_. 

Richelieu, 10-12, 14

Roë, Art, _see_ Mahon

Rousseau, J. J. , 38

Ruffec, 19

Sablé, Mme de, 4, 5, 21, 23, 29, 31, 32. 36, 41 _n_. 

Saint-Antoine, Faubourg, 18

Saint-Cyr, 137

Saint-Simon, quoted, 79, 91

Schomberg, Duchesse de, 7

Scudery, Mlle de, 39, 45

Sedan, 153

Segrais, 35, 50 _n_

Séguier (Chancellor), 30

Seneca, 43

Seven Years War, 106

Sévigné, Mme de, 34, 39 _n_, 40 _n_, 45 _n_, quoted, 48-50

Seyres, Hippolyte de, 107-110

Shaftesbury, Third Earl, 126

Shakespeare, quoted, 6, 30

Singlin, Antoine, 22

Société des Gens de Lettres, 138

_Spectator_, the, 88, 89

Spinoza, 33

Steele, Sir Richard, 89

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 34

Stevenson, R. L. , 78, 101, 165

Suard, 99, 121

Sully, 129

Tailly-sur-Meuse, 143, 148

Tallemont des Réaux, 22

Temple, Sir William, 118, 126

Theophrastus, 69-71, 88

Thiange, Mme de, 46, 47

Torquet, M. Charles, 165

Turin, 102

Valincourt, 64

Vauban, Sebastien de, 84 _n_. 

Vauvenargues, Marquis de, 97-132; birth and parentage, 99-101; described as "Clazomène, " 121; serves in the Bohemian campaign, 98, 107, 109, 112, in garrison at Arras, 113; in garrison at Metz, 106, 113, in Paris, 120, with Villars in Lombardy, 102; his "Éloge" on De Seyres, 109, his "Discours sur la Gloire, " 109, his "Introduction à la Connaissance de l'Esprit humain, " 124, his "Réflexions sur divers Sujets, " 104, 117, 121, 127

Verdun, 144

Vernulius, 28

Verteuil, 19, 20, 48

Vigneul de Marville, 60, 61 _n_. 

Villars, Marshal de, 102, 129

Violand, Camille, 151, 155-160

Virton, Battle of, 144, 157

Vivonne, Andrée de, 10

Voiture, 8

Voltaire, 40, 84, 101 _n_, 111-114, quoted, 33, 52, 75, 122, 123

Vouziers, 155

Young's "Night-Thoughts, " 110