English prose, which a century earlier had limped so far behind French in clearness and conciseness, was rapidly catching its rival up, and in the next generation was to run abreast with it. But if we wish to see how far behind the best French writers our own best still were, we need but compare the exquisite speed and elasticity of the "Caractères" with the comparative heaviness and slowness of a famous Theophrastian essay published in the same year, 1688, namely the "Character of a Trimmer." In the characteristics of a lively prose artist, we shall have to confess La Bruyère nearer to Robert Louis Stevenson than to his own immediate contemporary, Lord Halifax.
The surface of La Bruyère's writing is crisp and parched, but it is easy by careful reading to crack it, and to discover the coolness, the softness, the salutary humidity which lie beneath the satirical crust of his irony. He is primarily a satirist, dealing as he says with the vices of the human mind and the subterfuges of human self-deception. He lays bare "the sentiments and the movements of men, exposing the principles which actuate their malice and their frailty"; he aims at showing that such is the native evil implanted in their souls that "no one should any longer be surprised at the thousands of vicious or frivolous actions with which their lives are crowded." We note him at first as entirely devoted to these painful investigations, and we are apt to confound his attitude with that of La Rochefoucauld, the weary Titan, who sighs contemptuously as he holds up to censure the globe of human amour-propre. But we do not begin to understand the attitude of La Bruyère until we notice that there always is, in the popular phrase, "more in him than meets the eye." He is indeed a satirist, but not of the profound order of the Timons of the mind; his satire is superficial, and under it there flows a lenient curiosity mingled with a sympathy that fears to be detected.
There is a note of sadness, a mysterious melancholy, which frequently recurs in the "Caractères," and this produces a constant variety in its appeal to the feelings. We find the author amusing himself by detailing the weaknesses of his fellow-beings, but the entertainment they offer him soon leaves him dissatisfied and sad. He is overheard to sigh, he is seen to shake his head, as he turns his clear eyes away from the self-humiliation of men. There is nothing of this in the hard superiority of La Rochefoucauld, and one of the most important things which we have to note is the advance in feeling which the later moralist makes, in spite of his extremely unpretentious attitude. La Bruyère attains to a reasoned tolerance which neither his immediate predecessor nor Pascal nor Bossuet reached or had the least wish to reach. In him we meet, not commonly nor prominently presented, but quite plainly enough, the modern virtue of indulgence, of tolerance. Here is a passage which could scarcely have been written by any other moralist of the seventeenth century:—
"It is useless to fly into a passion with human beings because of their harshness, their injustice, their pride, their self-love and their 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 or with the flame for rising."
Here is the voice of the man who had lived and who was still living in the house of that Prince de Condé of whom Saint Simon said that, "A pernicious neighbour, he made everybody miserable with whom he had to do." I like to imagine La Bruyère escaping from some dreadful scene where Henry Jules had injured his dependants and insulted his familiars, or had drawn out in public the worst qualities of his son, "incapable of affection and only too capable of hatred." I imagine him escaping from the violence and meanness of those intolerable tyrants up into the asylum of his own hushed apartment at Versailles; there flinging himself down for a moment in the alcove, on the painted bedstead, then presently rising, with a smile on his lips and the fright and anger gone out of his eyes, and advancing to the great oaken bureau which displayed his faience and his guitar. He would glance, for encouragement, at the framed portrait of Bossuet which was the principal ornament of the wall above it, and then, listening a moment to be sure that he was safe from disturbance, he would unlock one of the three drawers, and take out the little portfolio in which for years and years he had been storing up his observations upon society and his consolations in affliction. Presently, with infinite deliberation and most fastidious choice of the faultless phrase and single available word, he would paint the Holbein portrait of one of the prodigious creatures whom he had just seen in action, some erratic, brilliant and hateful "ornament of society" such as the Duke de 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 had beautiful dreams, he has bad ones: what am I saying? people don't dream as he has lived. No one has ever extracted out of a destiny more than he has. The preposterous and the commonplace are equally familiar to him. He has shone, he has suffered, he has dragged along a humdrum existence: nothing has escaped him…. He is an enigma, a riddle that can probably be never solved."
La Bruyère aimed at the improvement of human nature. La Rochefoucauld had said, "Don't be ridiculous—a blatant love of self is the only spring of your being." Pascal, less haughty but more overwhelming, had said, "Insect that you are, doomed to damnation, cease to strive against your own miserable impotence." La Bruyère's teaching was not so definite, partly because his intellect was not so systematic as theirs, but partly because he was more human than either, human with more than a touch of the modern democratic humanity. His attitude was the easier one implied in the sense that "there is so much that's good in the worst of us, and so much that's bad in the best of us" that there is room, even among moralists, for an infinite indulgence. His was, on the whole, and accounting for some fluttering of the nerves, a very tranquil spirit. He is much less formal and mechanical than La Rochefoucauld, and he seems to study men with less dependence on a theory. His own statement should not be overlooked; he says, very plainly, that he desired above all things to make men live better lives.
Boileau said that the style of La Bruyère was "prophetic," and I do not know that any one has attempted to explain this rather curious phrase. But we may adopt it in the light of more than two centuries which were unknown to Boileau. More than any other writer of the end of the seventeenth century La Bruyère prophesied of a good time coming. He did not speak out very plainly, but it is the privilege of prophets to be obscure, and their predictions are commonly not comprehensible until after the event. But we may claim for La Bruyère the praise of being a great civilizer of French thought; more than that, he widened human social intelligence throughout Europe. He is the direct ancestor of the Frenchman of to-day who observes closely and clearly, who has the power to define what he sees, and who retains the colour and movement of it. To this day, as may be amply seen in the records and episodes of the war, in the correspondence of officers at the front, in the general intellectual conduct of the contest, Frenchmen rarely experience a difficulty in finding the exact word they want. These men who arrest for our pleasure an impression, who rebuild before us the fabric of their experience, descend in direct line from La Bruyère. It was he who taught their nation to seize the attitude and to photograph the gesture.
La Bruyère's express aim is to clarify our minds, to make us think lucidly and in consequence speak with precision. We have already seen what value he sets on the right word in the right place. He is the enemy of all those who shamble along in the supposition that an inaccurate phrase will "do well enough," and that any slipshod definition is excused by our saying, "Oh, you know what I mean!" His own style is finished up to the highest point, and it is brightened and varied with such skill that the author never ceases to hold the attention of the reader. He reaches the very ideal of that elegant wandering art of writing which the Latins called sermo pedestris. Indeed, he gives so much attention to the perfect mode of saying things that some critics have brought it as a charge against him that he overdoes it, that in fact his style is more weighty than his subject. This, I think, is a very hasty judgment, founded a little, no doubt, 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 a more or less primitive character, to which sparkle and force must be given by illustrative examples. These examples gave him his great chance, and he built them up, those exemplary "portraits" of his, with infinite 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 other fault that can be laid to their charge.
One of the most important qualities of La Bruyère was that he prepared the popular mind for liberty. He is democratic in many ways, in his language, where he often borrows words from the patois of the common people; in his exposure of the errors of the ancien régime, its tyranny, its selfishness, its want of humanity and imagination; in his hatred of wealth, the scandalous triumph of which had already reached a pitch which the next generation was to see outdone. In all this, as cannot be too often insisted upon, it was essential for a reformer to be prudent. The People had no voice, and that their interests should be defended was inconceivable.[14] In the next century, after the reign of 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 express any criticism of the feudal order. For instance, there is a long passage at the end of the chapter "De la Ville," which scandalized the political reformers of the eighteenth century. It is that which begins, "The emperors never triumphed in Rome so softly, so conveniently, or even so successfully, against wind and rain, dust and sunshine, as the citizen of Paris knows how to do as he crosses the city to-day in every direction. How far have we advanced beyond the mule of our ancestors!" La Bruyère was charged, and even by Voltaire, with attacking the progress of civilization, and with preferring the rude subterfuges of Carlovingian times to the comforts of 1688. But he was really making an appeal for thrift and modesty of expenditure on the part of those bourgeois who had suddenly become rich, as a satirist of our own day might denounce the pomp of a too successful shopkeeper, without being accused of denying the convenience of motor-cars or desiring to stop the progress of scientific invention.