Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France Part 4

This inconspicuous personage, who glided almost like a ghost through less than thirty-two years of pain and adversity, was not merely the greatest moralist that France produced in the course of the eighteenth century, but was of all the world's writers perhaps the one who has lifted highest the banner of hope and joy in heroism and virtue. In La Rochefoucauld we encountered a representative of the dominant cla.s.s, the prince-dukes. La Bruyere was a typical bourgeois. In our third example of the moral energy of France we meet with a specimen of the _pet.i.te n.o.blesse_, the impoverished country gentlemen who dragged out a provincial existence in obscurity and ignorance, supported by their pride in a long pedigree. Luc de Clapiers, whose father was raised to the marquisate of Vauvenargues in 1722, was born seven years earlier than that, at Aix in Provence, where his father was mayor. It is a pleasant touch to be told that his father was the only magistrate who did not desert his post when Aix was swept by the plague in 1720.

There seems a foreshadowing here of his famous son's high courage. But it seems also certain that there was no appreciation of scholars.h.i.+p or literature in the household. No atmosphere less benevolent to learning can be imagined. The future philosopher went to school at Aix for a little while, and then his weak health was made the excuse for cancelling what was perhaps looked upon as a needless expense. He was thrown upon himself, and what education he secured was the result of his own desultory reading.

Vauvenargues never acquired a knowledge of Greek or even Latin,[16] but when he was about sixteen years of age he came across a book which absolutely transfigured his outlook upon the world and decided the course of his aspirations. This was none less than a translation of the "Lives" of Plutarch, a work which has had a very remarkable moral effect on the Frenchmen of four centuries. We know not which this particular translation was, but it would be pleasant to think it was that made by Amyot in 1559. The effect it had on the temperament of Vauvenargues must be told in his own words. He says in a letter to Mirabeau (March 22, 1740)--

[Footnote 16: Suard is definite as to this: "Il est mort sans etre en etat de lire Horace et Tacite dans leur langue."]

"I wept for joy while I read these 'Lives' [of Plutarch]. No night went by but I had spent part of it in talking to Alcibiades, to Agesilas, or to others. I walked in the streets of Rome that I might argue with the Gracchi, and when stones were flung at Cato, there was I to defend him. You remember that when Caesar wished to pa.s.s a law which was too much in favour of the populace, Cato tried to prevent his doing so, and put his hand on Caesar's mouth to prevent his speaking? These modes of action, so unlike our fas.h.i.+ons of to-day, made a deep impression on me."

He attributed to the teaching of Plutarch his introduction to the master-pa.s.sions of his brief future existence, namely, his devotion to a sense of heroic duty and his determination to live up to the measure of his high calling. In the pages of Plutarch he says that he discovered "la vraie grandeur de notre ame"; here was exposed before him a scene of life ill.u.s.trated by "virtue without limit, pleasure without infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity, and vices without baseness and without disguise." This boyish appreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains the future moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutsh.e.l.l. To our great regret, it is the only positive record which survives of the adolescence of this great mind, on whose development we should so gladly dwell if it were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrases Vauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man," In his own case those "earliest days" are hopelessly sunken into oblivion.[17]

[Footnote 17: We know, at least, that he taught himself to write on the "sedulous ape" system, by imitating Bossuet and Fenelon. He must have been in several respects very much like Robert Louis Stevenson. His modesty led him to distrust his own taste, and it is worthy of notice that the corrections he made to please Voltaire often reduce the vigour of his thought in its original expression. Voltaire-- it is beyond conjecture why--cancelled the famous maxim, "Les feux de l'aurore".]

How harshly his tastes were condemned at home may be judged by an anecdote about his father which occurs in the "Essai sur quelques caracteres":--

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

There were but two alternatives for a lad of his cla.s.s who had to make a living, the Church and the Army. For Vauvenargues there could be no question, he was born to be a soldier. At the age of eighteen he entered the King's Regiment as a second-lieutenant, and he marched into Lombardy under the orders of that ill.u.s.trious marshal-general, the Duke of Villars, now in his eighty-first year, but still the unquestioned summit of French military genius. The idea of "following Hannibal over the mountains" filled our young philosopher with an enthusiasm beyond his years. He took part in the victories of Parma and Guastalla, and he was probably with Villars at Turin when that indomitable octogenarian died in June 1734. The War of the Polish Succession presently sank into a mere armistice, and until 1736 we dimly perceive Vauvenargues sharing the idle and boring life of the officer who, too poor to retire to Paris, vegetates in some deplorable frontier-garrison of Burgundy or Franche Comte. We know that he was dissipated and idle, for he tells us so, but his confession is marred by no sort of priggishness, and it is very important to insist that this greatest of moralists never exaggerated the capacity of ordinary human virtue. He pretended to no exceptional loftiness in his own conduct; he demanded no excessive sacrifice on the part of others.

Suard speaks of the "sweet indulgence" which marked his relations with those with whom he lived, and he tells us that Vauvenargues "gradually rose above the frivolous occupations of his time of life, without ever contracting, in the development of serious ideas, that austerity which commonly accompanies the virtues of youth.... Vauvenargues, thrown upon the world directly he ceased to be a child, learned to know men before it occurred to him to judge them. He saw their weaknesses before he had reflected on their duties; and virtue, when it entered his heart, found there all possible dispositions to indulgence."

"Dispositions to indulgence"--we linger on this phrase, which has an engaging beauty of its own. It distinguishes Vauvenargues at once from all the great French moralists who preceded him, from La Rochefoucauld with his savage cynicism, from Pascal with his contempt of the natural man. Vauvenargues rejected the idea which had so tormented the great spirits of the seventeenth century, that the n.o.blest life was a life of mortification, and he made no demand on the soul to divorce itself from all human interests as being things naturally vile and ignominious. He was to come down to us waving an olive-branch, the most amiable of all idealists, an apostle of tolerance. He says that he "hated scorn of human things." To this we must presently return, but we may pause to note it here, as a faint light thrown over the obscurity of his adolescence.

The Marquis of Mirabeau was the cousin of Vauvenargues and almost exactly his coeval. The discovery of a packet of letters which pa.s.sed between the young men from the summer of 1737 to that of 1740 has dissipated in some measure the otherwise total darkness which had gathered around the youth of our philosopher. Mirabeau (who was to be the father of the famous orator) was a man of talent, but violent, chimerical and lawless, "farouche," as he himself put it. Later he was the author of the redoubtable "Ami des Hommes." This prodigal uncle of the Revolution, this dangerous and violent "physiocrate" as he called himself, would seem divided, as pole from pole, from the gently-reasoning, the benevolently-meditative Vauvenargues.

Nevertheless, they are seen in warm relation of friends.h.i.+p to each other, and the letters exhibit their characteristics. Mirabeau shamelessly pours out the catalogue of his s.h.i.+fting and venal loves, in confidences which Vauvenargues invariably receives with discretion, unupbraiding, but not volunteering any like confidence in his turn. A single example must be quoted: Mirabeau, wis.h.i.+ng to get rid of a mistress of whom he is tired, but who is still devoted to him, writes her a letter of the most studied insolence, cleverly turned, and sends a copy of it, with infinite fatuity, to his friend. Vauvenargues replies that he has read out this letter at dinner to his fellow-officers, who have been greatly diverted by its wit. "But,"

said Vauvenargues, "we are sorry" (that is to say, of course, Vauvenargues is sorry) "for the poor girl, who shows intelligence, and who loves you." Could anything be a more indulgent, or at the same time a more definite reproof? The germ of the _Reflexions_ is found in this pa.s.sing phrase, so unexpected in a soldier of that time and place.

An anecdote, preserved like a spark of light in the darkness of those early garrison years, takes us a step further. The sentiment of compa.s.sion was scarcely known to the early eighteenth century in France; it was certainly never extended to those unfortunate women who, as Vauvenargues puts it, "watch for young men as evening begins to darken." He was himself accosted on one occasion by a girl, whom he allowed to walk by his side while he gently questioned her. She easily told him of the wretched poverty which had driven her to vice, and Vauvenargues, after trying to revive in her some sentiment of modesty, left her with the gift of a little money. His fellow-officers of the regiment greeted the incident with shouts of mirth: such behaviour was unheard of. Vauvenargues replied: "My friends, you laugh too easily. I am sorry for these poor creatures, obliged to ply such a profession to earn their bread. The world is full of sorrows which wring my heart; if we are to be kind only to those who deserve it, we may never be called upon at all. We must be indulgent to the weak who have more need of support than the virtuous; and we must remember that the errors of the unfortunate are always caused by the harshness of the rich." M. Paleologue, in a very interesting pa.s.sage, has remarked that we have to wait a hundred years before there is a repet.i.tion in French literature of this peculiar mansuetude.

Bearing in mind this capacity for indulgence, for pity, and remembering how little it was conceived in the age he lived in, we may look forward a moment to recognize that in his whole teaching Vauvenargues differs from other moralists, but particularly from his great predecessors in France, in that he has a constructive object. He wishes exceedingly to help the unfortunate to live happily, easily and profitably, and he regards almost the whole human race as more or less unhappy. His desire, therefore, is not, as that of the seventeenth-century moralists had been, to put human egotism in the pillory and to pelt it with rotten eggs, but so far as possible to encourage and affirm a decent, self-respecting egotism. Vauvenargues finds the lock of life to be rusty; he touches it with the oiled feather of his advice, so that the key may turn without resistance, and without noise. He does not profess to strive after perfection in conduct, but after improvement, and he is most careful never to recommend violent means or an excessive austerity; nor does he condemn or scold, even when his own humanity is most affronted, but he tries to induce every one to make the best of his relations with other men during the fugitive and frail duration of their common existence. If he hated anything--in his universal benignity--Vauvenargues hated a rigid puritanism. In one place he says, "We believe no longer in witches, and yet there are people who still believe in Calvin!"

Vauvenargues was twenty-six years of age when the war of the Austrian Succession broke out, and swept him into military action. He was vegetating in garrison at Metz when the armies of Marshal de Belle-Isle, the gallant and thrice-unfortunate, streamed eastward into Germany and carried our philosopher with them. The Regiment of the King, of which Vauvenargues was an officer, reached Bohemia in July 1741. In a night attack of extraordinary rapidity and audacity Prague was captured, and Vauvenargues took a personal part in this adventure, which must have cast fuel on the fire of his rising military ambition.

But the conduct of war is all composed of startling ups and downs, and at the height of the successes of the French, their luck abandoned them. Relieved by no reinforcements and pressed hard by famine, the army of Belle-Isle could no longer hold Prague, and on the night of December 16-17, 1742, began the retreat from Bohemia which is one of the most noted disasters of the eighteenth century. Nine days later, what remained of the French army arrived at Egra, but after a march through thick fog over frozen ground, without food, without shelter, in a chaotic frenzy of despair.

Vauvenargues was one of those who never recovered from the agony of the retreat from Prague. Both his legs were frost-bitten, so that for the remainder of his life he was lame; his eyesight was permanently impaired; and he appears to have sown the seeds of the pulmonary disease which was to carry him off five years later. But his tender heart endured what were still severer pangs from the sufferings and death of those of his companions for whom he had the greatest regard.

Among these the first place was held by Hippolyte de Seyres, whose figure pervades the earliest developments of the genius of Vauvenargues. De Seyres was a lieutenant in the philosopher's regiment. He was only eighteen years of age, and Vauvenargues felt for him the interest of an elder brother and the affection of a devoted friend. We can trace the progress of the sentiment, in which are fully revealed for the first time the peculiar qualities of our author's mind. He does not conceal from himself the weaknesses of the character of De Seyres, he blames him for his lack of suppleness, of simplicity of manner, of self-confidence. He found in him a proud and delicate spirit which exaggerated its own frailties and shrank morbidly from their consequences. He was anxious that the spirit of the young man should not be debased by low a.s.sociations; he did not think the slightly older officers who surrounded De Seyres to be wholesome companions for him. The lad displayed a lack of moral force; he hoped to succeed less by his own exertions than by the favour of others; he was in despair over his own faults without having the energy to correct them. It is in writing about De Seyres that Vauvenargues first defines his central axiom, that the only sources of success are virtue, genius and patience. He observed the lack of them all in De Seyres, and his incapacity for expansion made his case the more difficult to handle. "Son coeur est toujours serre," Vauvenargues exclaims. But he nourished a deep and ever-deepening affection for this sensitive lad, and became desirous, almost pa.s.sionately desirous, to lead him up to better things from out of the mediocrity of his present a.s.sociations.

It appears certain to me that it was the study expended on the character of Hippolyte de Seyres and the shock received by his dreadful death which gave the earliest expansion to the genius of Vauvenargues and left their definite mark on his writings. I do not know why this all-important episode seems to have attracted so little of the attention of those who have written about him. The "Conseils a un Jeune Homme," which was evidently finished in 1743, is the earliest complete work of Vauvenargues which we possess; it contains in embryo the whole of his teaching as a moralist, and it was written for the guidance of young De Seyres. On the other hand, I think that Gilbert and other editors are mistaken in attributing the "Discours sur la Gloire" to the same date and occasion; it seems to me much later in style, and addressed to a very different person. The note of the address to De Seyres is accurately given in the exquisite essay ent.i.tled "Love of the n.o.ble Pa.s.sions." But it appears that the edifice built up by the tender affection of Vauvenargues was rased to the ground in December 1742. The young friend so pa.s.sionately guarded, so anxiously watched, died under his eyes in the course of the terrible retreat over the icy pa.s.ses of Bohemia, a victim to the united agony of famine, cold and fatigue. Vauvenargues wrote an "eloge" on his young friend, which betrays something of the hysterical agitation of his own soul. Here is a fragment of this strange doc.u.ment--

"Open, ye formidable sepulchres! Solitary phantoms, speak, speak! What unconquerable silence! O sad abandonment! O terror! What hand is it which holds all nature paralyzed beneath its pressure? O thou hidden and eternal Being, deign to dissipate the alarm in which my feeble soul is plunged. The secret of Thy judgments turns my timid heart to ice. Veiled in the recesses of Thy being, Thou dost forge fate and time, and life and death, and fear and joy, and deceitful and credulous hope. Thou dost reign over the elements and over h.e.l.l in revolt. The smitten air shudders at Thy voice. Redoubtable judge of the dead, take pity upon my despair."

This is a voice we hear, so far as I remember, nowhere else in the French literature of the eighteenth century. There is a certain accent of Bossuet in it; it is still more like the note which a group of English poets were striking. It may really seem to us an extraordinary coincidence that the "eloge" on Hippolyte de Seyres should belong to the very same year, 1743, which saw the publication of Blair's "Grave"

and Young's "Night Thoughts."

The rhetorical turn of the sentences I have just read was not habitual with Vauvenargues; it was in this case the mask worn by the intensity of his feeling, but he confesses in an early letter, "I like sometimes to string big words together, and to lose myself in a period; I make a jest of it." But after this outburst of panic grief in 1743 we see no more trace of such a tendency to eloquence. He became more and more completely himself, that is to say, very simple intellectually, in a pedantic age. He adopted, indeed, a certain gravity at which we may now smile; he did not approve of fairy-tales and fables, on the ground that anything which came between direct truth and the receptive mind of man was a disadvantage. "The disease of our age is to want to make jokes about everything," he complains.

To poor Vauvenargues life was not a laughing matter. His health had been completely ruined by the disastrous campaigns in Austria, and by the hards.h.i.+ps of garrison life; and he was feeling more and more sharply that pinch of genteel poverty which is the hardest of all to bear. But if he never laughed, this martyr of the soul never ceased to smile. His perpetual sufferings did not affect his gentle sobriety of conversation. Those whose privilege it was to see Vauvenargues during these last years of his brief existence are united in their report of his magnanimity. Voltaire wrote, "I have always found him the most unfortunate of human beings and the most tranquil." He was notable for his "indulgent goodness," his "constant peace," his "justice of heart," his "rect.i.tude of soul." His conversation, so Marmontel reports to us, had something more animated, more delicate, than even his divine writings. The same acute observer noted that in the heart of Vauvenargues, when he reflected upon the misery of mankind, pity took the place of indignation and hatred. Sensitive, serene, compa.s.sionate, affable, he tried to conceal from his friends as much as possible his own pain, and even when it was evident that he suffered most, no one dared to be melancholy in his presence.

In the fleeting and impoverished life of Vauvenargues his friends.h.i.+ps were the main adventure. We have mentioned a name which is too frequently the object of malignity on English lips, the name of Voltaire. No one would pretend that the multiform energy of this giant of literature did not take some unseemly directions and several unlovely shapes. But the qualities of Voltaire must, in the eyes of any unbia.s.sed observer, vastly overtop his defects. If, however, we wish to see Voltaire at his best, we must contemplate him in relation to our soldier-philosopher. As soon as his health had recovered a little from the horror of the Bohemian campaign, Vauvenargues took the step of writing to Voltaire, then a stranger, for his opinion on that crying question, the relative greatness of Corneille and of Racine, a question to all Frenchmen like that between predestination and free-will to Milton's rebel angels. This was towards the end of 1743, when Voltaire, who had reached his fiftieth year, was recognised as the first living historian and critic in France, and had been recalled to court through the good offices of Mme du Chatelet. It was, no doubt, at a happy moment that Vauvenargues' random letter arrived, Voltaire responded with ardour; Vauvenargues quickly became to him, as Marmontel says, what Plato was to Socrates, and nothing in the long life of Voltaire shows him in a more charming light than does his devotion to the young friend whom he called "the sweet hope of the remainder of my days." After the death of the philosopher, Voltaire wrote a brief, but invaluable, account of their relations, which had lasted, without a cloud, until the death of Vauvenargues.

He reminded Voltaire of Pascal, whose "incurable disease was consoled by study," but the elder friend noted a striking distinction; the eloquence of Pascal was fiery and imperious, that of Vauvenargues was "insinuating." The powerful physical force of Voltaire was softened by the suffering of his young companion, for whom "nature had poured out large draughts of hemlock," and who, "while all his body sank into dissolution, preserved in spirit that perfect tranquillity which the pure alone enjoy." Although Vauvenargues was twenty years younger than his friend, Voltaire succ.u.mbed to the gravity of his demeanour; like the fellow-officers at Arras or at Metz, we smile to find him addressing Vauvenargues as _mon pere_. One of the philosopher's maxims is, "Great thoughts proceed from the heart," and Voltaire in a note has added, "In writing this, though he knew it not, he painted his own portrait." He found in Vauvenargues "the simplicity of a timid child,"

and it seems that he had a difficulty in overcoming his modesty so far as to make him write down those Reflections which are now placed for ever among the masterpieces of French literature. It is to Voltaire that we owe the fact that Vauvenargues found resolution enough to become an author.

A typical instance of the mixture of courage and tact in the young author is to be found in the att.i.tude which he took up towards Voltaire with regard to the Marquise de Pompadour, without in the least offending his tempestuous friend. That remarkable young lady, then still known as la pet.i.te etoile, had succeeded in catching the King's eye, and was soaring into the political heavens like a rocket, carrying, among other incongruous objects, the genius of Voltaire in her glittering train. Voltaire must have boasted to his young friend that his fortune was made. Vauvenargues surprisingly expresses in his reply the evil which must be done by great authors who flatter vice and think to conceal its corruption by heaping flowers over a lie. The incident is important for us, because it led Vauvenargues, thus disappointed in Voltaire as he had been disappointed in Mirabeau, to examine into the sources of the low moral condition of the age. He attributed it to "le mepris de la gloire," and he set himself to define this quality and to impress it, with all the force of repet.i.tion, on the dulled consciences of his contemporaries.

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

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

Vauvenargues starts a new conception of the value of self-esteem, or rather of the desire of being esteemed by others. The seventeenth century had poured its vials of contempt over the _amour-propre_ of mankind, and no doubt that had led to a corresponding decline in the energy of the nation. Pascal had severely ridiculed the vanity which he says is anch.o.r.ed in the heart of man, and he actually mocks at the idea of a desire for renown; expressing his astonishment that even philosophers have the fatuity to wish for fame. Vauvenargues is probably thinking of Pascal when he says that those who dilate upon the inevitable nothingness of human glory would feel vexation if they had to endure the open contempt of a single individual. Men are proud of little things--of dancing well or even of skating gracefully, or of still meaner accomplishments, yet those very persons despise real renown. "But us," he says in one of his n.o.ble outbursts, "but us it excites to labour and virtue." We note, then, at once that the _amour-propre_ of the seventeenth century, the sentiment against which we saw the most burning arrows of La Rochefoucauld directed, was not the source of Vauvenargues' desire of glory; that with him renown was not a matter of egotistic satisfaction, but of altruistic stimulus, awakening in others, by a happy rivalry, sentiments of generosity and self-sacrifice which might redeem society and the dying world of France. And this may perhaps at this point be observed as the centre of his action, namely the discovery that a wholesome desire for fame proceeds not from our self-satisfaction, but from our profound sense of emptiness, of imperfection.

How needful the lesson was, no one who examines the social history of the first half of the eighteenth century can doubt. Without falling into errors of a Puritanic kind, we cannot fail to see that opinion and action alike had become soft, irresolute, superficial; that strong views of duty and piety and justice were half indulged in, half sneered at, and not at all acted upon. The great theologians who surrounded Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux, had died one by one, and had left successors who were partly pagan, partly atheist. Art and literature tripped after the flowered skirts of the emanc.i.p.ated d.u.c.h.ess of Maine. Looking round the world of France in 1746, Vauvenargues could but cry, like a preacher in the wilderness, "we have fallen into decadence, into moral desuetude," but he cried without anger, remembering that "still the love of _gloire_ is the invisible soul of all those who are capable of any virtue."

It was a critical moment in the history of France. After the long and painful wars of Louis XIV. the army had become unpopular; it was the fas.h.i.+on to sneer at it. The common soldiers were considered, and often were, the offscourings of the community. The officers, who had left their homes too soon, in most cases, to acquire the rudiments of education, were bored with garrison life, and regretted Paris, which they made every excuse to regain. They affected to have no curiosity about military science, and to talk "army shop" was the worst of bad form. Those who were poor lived and grumbled in their squalor; those who were rich gave themselves up to sinful extravagance. There was no instinctive patriotism in any section of the troops. What pleasure can a man have in being a soldier if he possesses neither talent for war, nor the esteem of his men, nor a taste for glory? It is Vauvenargues himself, who had seen all cla.s.ses of officers, who asks that question.

From his "Reflexions" of 1746 a chapter on "Our Armies at the Present Moment" was omitted, and not published in its proper sequence until long after his death. No doubt its searching exposure of the rot in the military state of France was the cause of this suppression.

"Courage," he says in this deleted chapter of his book, "courage, which our ancestors admired as the first of virtues, is now generally regarded as a popular error." Those few officers who still desire to see their country glorious, are forced to retire into civil life because they cannot endure a condition in which there is no reward but shame for a man of courage and ambition.

These were prominent among the considerations which filled the mind of Vauvenargues when, at the age of twenty-nine, he saw himself driven out of military life by the rapid aggravation of ill-health. His thoughts turned to diplomacy. He greatly admired the writings of Sir William Temple, on whom he may have partly modelled his own style as an essayist; he dreamed of becoming an amba.s.sador of the same cla.s.s, known, as Temple was, "by their writings no less than by their immortal actions." But his inexorable bad luck followed him in this design. A pathetic letter to the King remained unanswered, and so did another to Amelot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

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

"MONSEIGNEUR.

"I am painfully distressed that the letter which I had the honour of writing to you, as well as that which I took the liberty of asking you to forward to the King, have not been able to arrest your attention.

It is not, perhaps, surprising that a minister so fully occupied as you are should not find time to examine such letters; but, Monseigneur, will you permit me to point out to you that it is precisely this moral impossibility for a gentleman, who has no claim but zeal, to reach his master, which leads to that discouragement that is noticeable in all the country n.o.bility, and which extinguishes all emulation?

"I have pa.s.sed, Monseigneur, my youth far from all worldly distractions, in order to prepare myself for the species of employment for which it was my belief that my temperament designed me; and I was bold enough to think that so concentrated an effort would place me at least on a level with those who depend for all their fortune upon their intrigues and upon their pleasures. It overwhelms me, Monseigneur, to discover that the confidence which I had based mainly on the love of my duty, should be so disappointed. My health no longer permitting me to continue my services in the war, I have written to M.

the Duke de Biron to beg him to appoint my successor. I could not, in a situation so piteous, refrain from informing you of my despair.

Pardon me, Monseigneur, if it has led me into any extravagance of expression.

"I am, etc."

To this last appeal the Minister for Foreign Affairs did respond in a brief and perfunctory note, promising to find an occasion of bringing the talents of Vauvenargues to the notice of the King, but nothing resulted. Vauvenargues had been living in a dream of military glory, and had been thirsting to serve his country in the loftiest and most responsible capacities. His very physical appearance now completed the bankruptcy of his wishes, for he was attacked with the smallpox, which disfigured him so badly that, to use his own expression, "it prevented his soul from appearing in his features." Thus without fortune, or profession, without hope for the future, half-blind, with gangrened limbs that tottered under his feeble body, Vauvenargues started on the steadily downward path which was to lead in less than four years to his grave. History presents to us no more dolorous figure of physical and social failure, nor a more radiant example of moral success.

The alternative now presented itself of a wretched solitude in the castle of his Provencal ancestors, or a garret, perhaps even more wretched, but certainly far less solitary, in Paris. In either case it would be necessary to relinquish all the luxuries, all the comforts of life. He chose to finish his suffering years in Paris, and in humble furnished rooms in the street of the Peac.o.c.k, where he was consoled by the visits of Voltaire and Marmontel. We find him settled there in May 1745, and seven months later there crept into circulation an anonymous volume of moral essays, which was absolutely ignored by the literary world of France. We do not appreciate to the full the Calvary which Vauvenargues so meekly mounted, unless we realize that to all his other failures was added a complete disregard of his ideas by the literary public of his own day. He died unknown, save by two or three friends, having never experienced anything but languor, disappointment and obscurity. Under the pseudonym of Clazomene, just before his death, he drew a picture of his own fortune and character which proves that he had no illusion about himself, and which yet contains not a murmur against the injustice of fate nor a breath of petulance or resentment. "Let no one imagine," this portrait closes, "that Clazomene would exchange his wretchedness for the prosperity of weak men; fortune may sport with the wisdom of brave souls, but it has no power to subdue their courage."

It is time, however, to examine the actual compositions of our author.[18] Until his friends.h.i.+p with Voltaire began, Vauvenargues had not given much attention to verse, but he now began a series of critical essays on the poets. He says, in the course of these "Reflexions," that what little he knew of poetry he owed to M. de Voltaire. His remarks on this subject, however, are more independent than he would give us to suppose, and they are always worthy of attention because they ill.u.s.trate the moral att.i.tude of Vauvenargues himself. He was not embarra.s.sed by tradition in advancing along his road through the masterpieces of literature. He was always an amateur, never a man in bondage to the "authorities;" he seems, indeed, to have avowed a dislike for general reading: "Pascal avait peu lu, ainsi que Malebranche," was his excuse. In the case of Pascal, we may question the fact, but it is recorded that when at last Malebranche was persuaded to read Descartes' "Traite de l'homme," it excited him so violently as to bring on palpitation of the heart. Such are the dangers of a r.e.t.a.r.ded study of the cla.s.sics. Vauvenargues was no less inflammable. He met with the tragedies of Racine at a moment when the reputation of that poet had sunk to its lowest point, and, totally indifferent to the censure of the academical sanhedrim, he extolled him as a master-anatomist of the human heart.

[Footnote 18: The writings of Vauvenargues exist in a confusion which is not likely to be ever remedied, for the bulk of his MSS. were burned during the Commune in May 1871.

But much grat.i.tude is owing to Suard (1806) and Gilbert (1857) for their pious labours. A variorum edition might even yet be attempted, and although not complete, might at least be final.]

In considering the observations of Vauvenargues with regard to poets, we must bear in mind that he and his contemporaries did not seek from poetry what we require in the twentieth century. The critics of the early eighteenth century in France talked about Homer and Virgil, but what they really admired were Ariosto and Pope. Voltaire, the greatest of them, considered the "epopee hero-comique" the top-stone of modern practical effort; we know what astonis.h.i.+ng feats he was himself guilty of in that species of architecture. But his whole teaching and practice tended towards an ident.i.ty of speech between prose and verse, the prosodical pattern or ornament being the sole feature which distinguished the latter from the former. His own poetry, when it was not fugitive or satiric, was mainly philosophical, that is to say, it did not stray beyond the confines of logic and wit. At the same time, Voltaire was an energetic protagonist for verse, and he did very much to prevent the abandonment of this instrument at a time when prose, in such hands as those of Montesquieu and Buffon, was manifestly in the ascendant. He earnestly recommended the cultivation of a form in which precision of thought and elegance of language were indispensable, and he employed it in tragedies which we find it impossible to read, but which enchanted the ear and fancy of Vauvenargues.

The taste of the age of Louis XV. affected to admire Corneille to the disadvantage of all other rivals, and Voltaire was not far from blaming Vauvenargues for his "extreme predilection" for Racine. But Vauvenargues, with unexpected vivacity, took up the cudgels, and accused the divine Corneille of "painting only the austere, stern, inflexible virtues," and of falling into the affectation of mistaking bravado for n.o.bility, and declamation for eloquence. He is extremely severe on the faults of the favourite tragedian, and he blames Corneille for preferring the gigantic to the human, and for ignoring the tender and touching simplicity of the Greeks. It is from the point of view of the moralist that these strictures are now important; they show us that Vauvenargues in his reiterated recommendation of virtue and military glory did not regard those qualities from the Cornelian point of view, which he looked upon as fostering a pompous and falsely "fastueux" conception of life. He blamed Corneille's theatrical ferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the pa.s.sage "a detestable piece of criticism" and ran his blue pencil through it. No doubt the fact is that Vauvenargues saw in the rhetoric of Corneille a parody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade.

The publications of Vauvenargues during his lifetime come under two categories. His "Introduction a la Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain" is a short book, and it is also a fragment. The author had begun to collect notes for it during his Bohemian campaign, in 1741; but "those pa.s.sions which are inseparable from youth, and ceaseless physical infirmity, brought on by the war, interrupted my studies," he says.

Voltaire has expressed his amazement that under such piteous conditions, Vauvenargues had the fort.i.tude to pursue them at all.

There seems to be a change apparent in the object he put before him; he set out, like Locke, to write an essay on the Human Understanding, but he ended by putting together a chain of maxims. He quoted Pascal, who had said, "All good maxims are in the world; we have only got to apply them," but though Vauvenargues takes this dictum as his text he refutes it. He says that maxims originally "good," in Pascal's sense, may have grown sleepy in popular use, and may have ceased to act, so that we ought to rid ourselves of conventional prejudice and go to the fountain-head, to try all spirits, in fact, and find out what spirits really are of G.o.d. When Vauvenargues began to reflect, he was astonished at the inexact.i.tude and even self-contradiction of the philosophical language of his day. He was not, and probably never would have become, what we understand now as a philosopher. He was a moralist, pure and simple, and had no more relation with men like Descartes or Berkeley than a rousing revivalist preacher has with a regius professor of Theology.

The only thing which really interested Vauvenargues was the social duty of man, and to discover what that is he attempted to define morals, politics and religion. He had an intense desire for clear guidance, and he waited for the heavenly spark to fall. He said to himself, before he made it plain to others, that if we are not guided by _truth_, we fall into the pit. There was a certain childishness in his att.i.tude in this matter, for he was inclined to regard abstract truth as the only one worthy of pursuit. That he was advancing in breadth of view is shown by the fact that he cancelled in the second edition of his book a whimsical pa.s.sage in which he urged people who were studying conchology, to throw away their sh.e.l.ls, asking them to consider "whether glory is but a name, virtue all a mistake, and law nothing else than a phantom." The "Introduction" is all written in this spirit; it is a pa.s.sionate appeal to the French nation to leave mean and trivial pursuits, and to live for pure and pa.s.sionate ideals, for glory gained by merit, and as the reward of solid and strenuous effort.