The sufferings and bereavements of war were not his only trials. Vauvenargues was beset throughout the whole of his short life with the sordid and humiliating embarrassments of narrow means. His letters to Saint-Vincens, the most intimate of his friends, disclose the straits to which he was driven. The nature of these straits is an old story all over the world, and Vauvenargues did the same things that young men in want of money have generally done. It cannot be said, I fear, that he passed along those miry ways without some defilement. He bethinks him on one occasion that a rich neighbour has daughters. 'Why should I not undertake to marry one of them within two years, with a reasonable dowry, if he would lend me the money I want and provided I should not have repaid it by the time fixed?'[6] We must make allowance for the youth of the writer, and for a different view of marriage and its significance from our own. Even then there remains something to regret. Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues, in a maxim smacking unwontedly of commonplace, cannot debase strong souls, any more than riches can elevate low souls.[7] That depends. If poverty means pinching and fretting need of money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense, but it is extremely likely to wear away a very priceless kind of delicacy in a man's estimate of human relations and their import.
Vauvenargues has told us what he found the life of the camp. Luxurious and indolent living, neglected duties, discontented sighing after the delights of Paris, the exaltation of rank and mediocrity, an insolent contempt for merit; these were the characteristics of the men in high military place. The lower officers meantime were overwhelmed by an expenditure that the luxury of their superiors introduced and encouraged; and they were speedily driven to retire by the disorder of their affairs, or by the impossibility of promotion, because men of spirit could not long endure the sight of flagrant injustice, and because those who labour for fame cannot tie themselves to a condition where there is nothing to be gathered but shame and humiliation.[8]
To these considerations of an extravagant expenditure and the absence of every chance of promotion, there was added in the case of Vauvenargues the still more powerful drawback of irretrievably broken health. The winter-march from Prague to Egra had sown fatal seed. His legs had been frost-bitten, and before they could be cured he was stricken by small-pox, which left him disfigured and almost blind. So after a service of nine years, he quitted military life (1744). He vainly solicited employment as a diplomatist. The career was not yet open to the talents, and in the memorial which Vauvenargues drew up he dwelt less on his conduct than on his birth, being careful to show that he had an authentic ancestor who was Governor of Hyères in the early part of the fourteenth century.[9] But the only road to employment lay through the Court. The claims even of birth counted for nothing, unless they were backed by favour among the ignoble creatures who haunted Versailles. For success it was essential to be not only high-born, but a parasite as well. 'Permit me to assure you, sir,' Vauvenargues wrote courageously to Amelot, then the minister, 'that it is this moral impossibility for a gentleman, with only zeal to commend him, of ever reaching the King his master, which causes the discouragement that is observed among the nobility of the provinces, and which extinguishes all ambition.'[10] Amelot, to oblige Voltaire, eager as usual in good offices for his friend, answered the letters which Vauvenargues wrote, and promised to lay his name before the King as soon as a favourable opportunity should present itself.[11]
Vauvenargues was probably enough of a man of the world to take fair words of this sort at their value, and he had enough of qualities that do not belong to the man of the world to enable him to confront the disappointment with cheerful fortitude 'Misfortune itself,' he had once written, 'has its charms in great extremities; for this opposition of fortune raises a courageous mind, and makes it collect all the forces that before were unemployed: it is in indolence and littleness that virtue suffers, when a timid prudence prevents it from rising in flight and forces it to creep along in bonds.'[12] He was true to the counsel which he had thus given years before, and with the consciousness that death was rapidly approaching, and that all hope of advancement in the ordinary way was at an end, even if there were any chance of his life, he persevered in his project of going to Paris, there to earn the fame which he instinctively felt that he had it in him to achieve. Neither scantiness of means nor the vehement protests of friends and relations—always the worst foes to superior character on critical occasions—could detain him in the obscurity of Provence. In 1745 he took up his quarters in Paris in a humble house near the School of Medicine. Literature had not yet acquired that importance in France which it was so soon to obtain. The Encyclopædia was still unconceived, and the momentous work which that famous design was to accomplish, of organising the philosophers and men of letters into an army with banners, was still unexecuted. Voltaire, indeed, had risen, if not to the full height of his reputation, yet high enough both to command the admiration of people of quality, and to be the recognised chief of the new school of literature and thought. Voltaire had been struck by a letter in which Vauvenargues, then unknown to him, had sent a criticism comparing Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Coming from a young officer, the member of a profession which Voltaire frankly described as 'very noble, in truth, but slightly barbarous,' this criticism was peculiarly striking. A great many years afterwards Voltaire was surprised in the same way, to find that an officer could write such a book as the Félicité Publique of the Marquis de Chastellux. To Vauvenargues he replied with many compliments, and pointed out with a good deal of pains the injustice which the young critic had done to the great author of Cinna. 'It is the part of a man like you,' he said admirably, 'to have preferences, but no exclusions.'[13] The correspondence thus begun was kept up with ever-growing warmth and mutual respect. 'If you had been born a few years earlier,' Voltaire wrote to him, 'my works would be worth all the more for it; but at any rate, even at the close of my career, you confirm me in the path that you pursue.'[14]
The personal impression was as fascinating as that which had been conveyed by Vauvenargues' letters. Voltaire took every opportunity of visiting his unfortunate friend, then each day drawing nearer to the grave. Men of humbler stature were equally attracted. 'It was at this time,' says the light-hearted Marmontel, 'that I first saw at home the man who had a charm for me beyond all the rest of the world, the good, the virtuous, the wise Vauvenargues. Cruelly used by nature in his body, he was in soul one of her rarest masterpieces. I seemed to see in him Fénelon weak and suffering. I could make a good book of his conversations, if I had had a chance of collecting them. You see some traces of it in the selection that he has left of his thoughts and meditations. But all eloquent and full of feeling as he is in his writings, he was even more so still in his conversation.'[15] Marmontel felt sincere grief when Vauvenargues died, and in the Epistle to Voltaire expressed his sorrow in some fair lines. They contain the happy phrase applied to Vauvenargues, 'ce cœur stoïque et tendre.'[16]
In religious sentiment Vauvenargues was out of the groove of his time. That is to say, he was not unsusceptible of religion. Accepting no dogma, so far as we can judge, and complying with no observances, very faint and doubtful as to even the fundamentals—God, immortality, and the like—he never partook of the furious and bitter antipathy of the best men of that century against the church, its creeds, and its book. At one time, as will be seen from a passage which will be quoted by and by, his leanings were towards that vague and indefinable doctrine which identifies God with all the forces and their manifestations in the universe. Afterwards even this adumbration of a theistic explanation of the world seems to have passed from him, and he lived, as many other not bad men have lived, with that fair working substitute for a religious doctrine which is provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance in a devotional spirit, of all larger mortal experiences and higher human impressions. There is a Meditation on the Faith, including a Prayer, among his writings; and there can be little doubt, in spite of Condorcet's incredible account of the circumstances of its composition, that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling.[17] It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one who ardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who already possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but he could not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the period. The one fact delivered him from dogma and superstition, and the other from scoffing and harsh unspirituality. He saw that apart from the question of the truth or falsehood of its historic basis, there was a balance to be struck between the consolations and the afflictions of the faith.[18] Practically he was content to leave this balance unstruck, and to pass by on the other side. Scarcely any of his maxims concern religion. One of these few is worth quoting, where he says: 'The strength or weakness of our belief depends more on our courage than our light; not all those who mock at auguries have more intellect than those who believe in them.'[19]
The end came in the spring of 1747, when Vauvenargues was no more than thirty-two. Perhaps, in spite of his physical miseries, these two years in Paris were the least unhappy time in his life. He was in the great centre where the fame which he longed for was earned and liberally awarded. A year of intercourse with so full and alert and brilliant a mind as Voltaire's, must have been more to one so appreciative of mental greatness as Vauvenargues, than many years of intercourse with subalterns in the Regiment of the King. With death, now known to be very near at hand, he had made his account before. 'To execute great things,' he had written in a maxim which gained the lively praise of Voltaire, 'a man must live as though he had never to die.'[20] This mood was common among the Greeks and Romans; but the religion which Europe accepted in the time of its deepest corruption and depravation, retained the mark of its dismal origin nowhere so strongly as in the distorted prominence which it gave in the minds of its votaries to the dissolution of the body. It was one of the first conditions of the Revival of Reason that the dreary memento mori and its hateful emblems should be deliberately effaced. 'The thought of death,' said Vauvenargues, 'leads us astray, because it makes us forget to live.' He did not understand living in the sense which the dissolute attach to it. The libertinism of his regiment called no severe rebuke from him, but his meditative temper drew him away from it even in his youth. It is not impossible that if his days had not been cut short, he might have impressed Parisian society with ideas and a sentiment, that would have left to it all its cheerfulness, and yet prevented that laxity which so fatally weakened it. Turgot, the only other conspicuous man who could have withstood the license of the time, had probably too much of that austerity which is in the fibre of so many great characters, to make any moral counsels that he might have given widely effective.
Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint of the pedagogue or the preacher to have dispelled the sophisms of licence, less by argument than by the gracious attraction of virtue in his own character. The stock moralist, like the commonplace orator of the pulpit, fails to touch the hearts of men or to affect their lives, for lack of delicacy, of sympathy, and of freshness; he attempts to compensate for this by excess of emphasis, and that more often disgusts us than persuades. Vauvenargues, on the other hand, is remarkable for delicacy and half-reserved tenderness. Everything that he has said is coloured and warmed with feeling for the infirmities of men. He writes not merely as an analytical outsider. Hence, unlike most moralists, he is no satirist. He had borne the burdens. 'The looker-on,' runs one of his maxims, 'softly lying in a carpeted chamber, inveighs against the soldier, who passes winter nights on the river's edge, and keeps watch in silence over the safety of the land.'[21] Vauvenargues had been something very different from the safe and sheltered critic of other men's battles, and this is the secret of the hold which his words have upon us. They are real, with the reality that can only come from two sources; from high poetic imagination, which Vauvenargues did not possess, or else from experience of life acting on and strengthening a generous nature. 'The cause of most books of morality being so insipid,' he says, 'is that their authors are not sincere; is that, being feeble echoes of one another, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims and private sentiments.'[22] One of the secrets of his own freedom from this ordinary insipidity of moralists was his freedom also from their pretentiousness and insincerity.
Besides these positive merits, he had, as we have said, the negative distinction of never being emphatic. His sayings are nearly always moderate and persuasive, alike in sentiment and in phrase. Sometimes they are almost tentative in the diffidence of their turn. Compared with him La Rochefoucauld's manner is hard, and that of La Bruyère sententious. In the moralist who aspires to move and win men by their best side instead of their worst, the absence of this hardness and the presence of a certain lambency and play even in the exposition of truths of perfect assurance, are essential conditions of psychagogic quality. In religion such law does not hold, and the contagion of fanaticism is usually most rapidly spread by a rigorous and cheerless example.
We may notice in passing that Vauvenargues has the defects of his qualities, and that with his aversion to emphasis was bound up a certain inability to appreciate even grandeur and originality, if they were too strongly and boldly marked. 'It is easy to criticise an author,' he has said, 'but hard to estimate him.'[23] This was never more unfortunately proved than in the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the great Molière. There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a writer who can say that 'La Bruyère, animated with nearly the same genius, painted the crookedness of men with as much truth and as much force as Molière; but I believe that there is more eloquence and more elevation to be found in La Bruyère's images.'[24] Without at all undervaluing La Bruyère, one of the acutest and finest of writers, we may say that this is a truly disastrous piece of criticism. Quite as unhappy is the preference given to Racine over Molière, not merely for the conclusion arrived at, but for the reasons on which it is founded. Molière's subjects, we read, are low, his language negligent and incorrect, his characters bizarre and eccentric. Racine, on the other hand, takes sublime themes, presents us with noble types, and writes with simplicity and elegance. It is not enough to concede to Racine the glory of art, while giving to Molière or Corneille the glory of genius. 'When people speak of the art of Racine—the art which puts things in their place; which characterises men, their passions, manners, genius; which banishes obscurities, superfluities, false brilliancies; which paints nature with fire, sublimity, and grace—what can we think of such art as this, except that it is the genius of extraordinary men, and the origin of those rules that writers without genius embrace with so much zeal and so little success?'[25] And it is certainly true that the art of Racine implied genius. The defect of the criticism lies, as usual, in a failure to see that there is glory enough in both; in the art of highly-finished composition and presentation, and in the art of bold and striking creation. Yet Vauvenargues was able to discern the secret of the popularity of Molière, and the foundation of the common opinion that no other dramatist had carried his own kind of art so far as Molière had carried his; 'the reason is, I fancy, that he is more natural than any of the others, and this is an important lesson for everybody who wishes to write.'[26] He did not see how nearly everything went in this concession, that Molière was, above all, natural. With equal truth of perception he condemned the affectation of grandeur lent by the French tragedians to classical personages who were in truth simple and natural, as the principal defect of the national drama, and the common rock on which their poets made shipwreck.[27] Let us, however, rejoice for the sake of the critical reputation of Vauvenargues that he was unable to read Shakespeare. One for whom Molière is too eccentric, grotesque, inelegant, was not likely to do much justice to the mightiest but most irregular of all dramatists.