“A modern writer will generally prove to you that the ancients are inferior in two ways—by reason and example. The reason will be drawn from his own taste, and the examples from his own works.” Very neat both, but I think La Bruyère’s has the more comic turn. If the Duke had had less prudence, or more bitterness (with as much reason for it), we might have been able to compare his treatment of la Cour. But he hardly touches it. La Bruyère cannot leave it alone. “Let a favourite,” he says, “have a sharp eye on himself; for if he keep me in his ante-chamber a shorter time than usual; if his look be more open; if he frown less, listen more willingly, show me a little further from the door, I shall be thinking him in the way of losing credit; and I shall be right.” Then he breaks into this bitter reflection: “A man can have little resource in himself if he must fall into disgrace or be mortified in order to become more human, more tractable, less of a brute and more of a good fellow.”
There is a note very familiar to us in this:
“How comes it about that Alciopus bows to me this morning, smiles, throws himself half-way out of the carriage window for fear of missing my eye? I am not a rich man—and I am on foot. By all the rules he ought not to have seen me. Is it not rather so that he himself may be seen in the same coach with a lord?”
Thackeray all over; but I don’t think Thackeray had it straight from Les Caractères. The first translation into English was in 1699, and by “Eustace Budgell, Esq.” There were many others—two, anonymous, in 1700 and 1702, one by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, one by “H. Gally” in 1725. Was not Budgell one of the Spectator’s men? Steele and Addison both may have quarried in his version. Here is a specimen Spectator paragraph:
“Narcissus rises in the morning in order that he may go to bed at night. He takes his time for dressing like a woman, and goes every day regularly to mass at the Feuillants or the Minims. He is an affable fellow, who may be counted on in a certain quarter of the town to take a tierce or a cinquième at Ombre or Reversi. So engaged you will see him in his chair for hours on end at Aricia’s, where every evening he will lay out his five gold pistoles. He reads punctually the Gazette de Hollande and the Mercure Galant; he will have read his Cyrano, his des Marete, his Lesclache, Barbin’s story books, assorted poetry. He walks abroad with the ladies; he is serious in paying calls. He will do to-morrow what he does to-day and did yesterday; and after having so lived, so he will die.”
The sting in the tail is perhaps too sharp for Steele, though it is not for Addison. You will find the former more exactly foreshadowed in the fable of Emira, an insensible beauty of Smyrna, who finds that she cannot love until she has first been jealous, and finds that out too late. Style and handling are the very spit of Steele’s. I have not seen the suggestion anywhere, and put it forward for what it may be worth, that Budgell’s translation inspired our pair of essayists to hit off friends and foes under the stock names of Belinda, Sacharissa, Eugenio and the like. The “portrait” had been a popular literary form in France from the days of Richelieu; but it was new to England when Addison and Steele went into journalism. Are there “keys” to the Spectator and Tatler? I suppose so.
Not all his portraits are malicious, not all of them so simple as that of Narcissus; but some of them are really malignant. It is safe to say that a man of whom Saint-Simon had nothing but good to report, had nothing but good to be reported. Such a man was the Duc de Beauvilliers. La Bruyère says of him that he was greedy after office—exactly what he was not. The Comte de Brancas, who figures as Menalcas, is very good fun. Brancas was the George Dyer of Paris and his day, distrait in ways which a knowledge of his time will excuse. The best story of him, when he failed to see the Queen Mother using a certain prie-dieu, and knelt on her, has been told. Another shows him at home, putting down his book to nurse a grandchild; then, when a visitor was announced, jumping to his feet, and flinging the baby on to the floor, where he had just flung the book. There are dozens of such tales, none of them ill-natured. Probably even La Bruyère could not have been unkind to Brancas.
He is certainly more severe than Tallemant, but that is because he will always introduce himself into the story, and always to his own advantage. Tallemant never does that, but uses the historical method invariably. A good example of La Bruyère’s intrusion is in his dealing with a Lord Strafford of ours, a peer whom Saint-Simon calls “une espèce d’imbécile,” and accuses of having 50,000 livres de rentes in England and spending them in Paris. La Bruyère calls him Philémon, and strikes the attitude of Diogenes in his regard:
“Gold, you tell me, glitters upon Philémon’s coat? It glitters as keenly at the tailor’s. He is clothed in the finest tissue? Is it less well displayed in shop-lengths? But the embroideries, the enrichments make him splendid! I praise the needlewoman. But ask him the time, and he will pull out a masterpiece of a watch: the guard of his sword is of onyx; there is a diamond on his finger of a water ...! You have managed to make me curious at last. I must see these priceless things. Send me Philémon’s clothes and gimcracks. You may keep Philémon.”
That is the better part of it. In the next paragraph he turns to scold the old lord, and calls him a fool in so many words. That is a mistake of his. It is not playing the game of satire, but the kind of game which is played at the street corner. On the same page is Harlay, the very unepiscopal Archbishop of Paris, but only a part of him. He leaves the bishop out of the question (as assuredly he was), and gives us the courtier. Harlay was famous for his manners. Theognis, as he calls him,