“is careful of his appearance, goeth forth adorned like a woman. He is hardly out of doors before he has composed his looks and countenance so that he may appear all of a piece when he is in public, the same thing to all men. Passers-by are to find him graciously smiling upon them; and nobody must miss it. He goes into the corridor, turns to the right where everybody is, or to the left where there is no one: he will salute those who are there, and those who are not. He will embrace the first man he comes across and press his head to his bosom; then he will ask you who it was he was greeting. Perhaps you have need of him in some little business or other, you go to him, ask him to help. Theognis lends you a ready ear, is overjoyed to be of use, implores you to find him other chances of serving your occasions. Then, when you urge your immediate affair, he will tell you that he cannot manage that; he will ask you to put yourself in his place, judge for yourself. So you take your leave, escorted to the door, caressed, and puzzled, but almost gratified to have been refused.”
That is excellent, done with a light-hearted malice worth all the coquins, fats and sots in the world. But of all his “portraits” by far the most agreeable is that of Madame de Boislandry, whom he calls Arténice. It appears as a fragment in the section Des Jugements, but I don’t think really belongs there. There is nothing else like it; it has a gusto and charm of its own. Steele comes to mind again, with his Lady Elizabeth Hastings. It must be my last example:
“ ... He was saying that the mind of that beautiful person was like a well-cut diamond; and continuing his talk of her, ‘There is,’ he added, ‘a ray of reasonableness and charm in it which engages at once the eyes and the hearts of those who converse with her. One hardly knows whether one loves or admires: she has that in her to make her a perfect friend, and that too which might lead you beyond friendship. Too young and too lovely not to please, too modest to dream of it, she makes little account of men but upon their merits, and looks for no more from them than their friendship. Brimming over with life and quick to feel, she surprises and attracts; and while perfectly aware of the delicate shades and subtleties of the best conversation, she is yet capable of happy improvisations which among other charms have that of inspiring repartee. Her intercourse is that of one who, without learning of her own, is aware of it, and desires to inform herself; and yet she listens to you as one who, after all, knows a good deal, can appraise the worth of what you say and will lose nothing that you may choose to impart. Far from seeking to contradict you, she takes up your points, considers them as her own, enlarges and enhances them. You find yourself gratified to have thought them out so well and to have put them forward better than you had supposed....’”
There is more in that strain of intense appreciation, done by a writer who knows that what he says of you is worth having, even if it be flattery. La Bruyère had his reasons for flattering Arténice: it is agreed that he was very fond of her. So were many others: she had her adventures, though he did not share them. Evidently he knew that she was not for him; for there is no tarnish of jealousy upon his praise. He was one whom there were few to love, and he found very few to praise. But he praised and loved Madame de Boislandry.
Although he became a person of consequence from the day his book was out, he was not chosen to the Academy until 1693, and then not without several postponements, considerable effort on the side of his friends and strenuous opposition from Fontenelle and his partisans, whom he had fustigated as Les Théobaldes in his Caractères. When he was in fact chosen it was a very near thing. A M. de la Loubère, who blocked his road, retired in his favour and transferred to him the suffrages of his own supporters. For that generous act La Bruyère paid him a handsome and a happy compliment in his address of reception:
“A father,” he said, “takes his son to the theatre: a great crowd, the door besieged. But he is a tall man and a stout. He breaks a way to the turnstile, and as he is on the point of passing in, puts the lad before him, who, without that foresight, would either have come in late or not come in at all.”
A pretty turn to give his gratitude! Apart from that he was unnecessarily provocative. He went out of his way to praise Racine at the expense of Corneille, which, seeing that Thomas Corneille was a brother, and Fontenelle a nephew of the great man, and that both were present was asking for trouble. Trouble there was—efforts to refuse him inscription in the archives, a foaming attack in the Mercure Galant, a plot to print and publish separately the address of his co-nominee, and so on. But the Abbé Bignon stood by him; both addresses were published together, La Bruyère’s with a fighting preface, and inscription in the records followed.
In his preface he girds at his critics for not having seen what he was driving at in Les Caractères. They had taken it, he says, for a collection of aphorisms and sentences loosely assorted under headings, with portraits here and there of distinguished persons, scandalous or malicious as might be. They took it, in short, for a nosegay of flowers of speech, selected more for their pungency than their fragrance, relieved by foliage luxuriant enough, but beset with thorns. That was not at all his own idea of it.
“Have they not observed,” he asks, “that of the sixteen chapters comprised in it, there are fifteen which, applied to the discovery of what is false and absurd in the objects of the passions and attachments of mankind, aim only at breaking down the growths which first enfeeble and presently extinguish the knowledge of God in men—nothing therefore but preliminary to the sixteenth and last, in which atheism is attacked, and possibly routed.”
I confess that if the critics had not detected all that in the plan or content of Sections I-XV, there is much excuse for them. I am in the same condemnation. It is true that those sections may be said to attack false gods in general: folly, ostentation, vainglory, evil concupiscence and such like. It is true that La Bruyère is a censor morum, like many a man before him and since. But it is not at all obvious that he is clearing a way by his analytic philosophy for a synthetic which will seat the true God firmly on his throne in the heart. Nor is the effort to do that conspicuous. “I feel that there is a God,” he says in his sixteenth section, “and I do not feel that there is no God. That is enough for me; all the reasoning in the world is beyond the purpose: I conclude that God is.” Very good; but then, why all the reasoning in the book? Pascal said the same thing, rather better. “It is the heart that feels God, not the reason. That is faith: God sensible to the heart, not to the reason.” It is probably as near as one can go. But how does La Bruyère make it more pointed by what has gone before? If you prove to demonstration that the goods of this world are but vanity, does that of itself imply, first that there is another world, whose goods (secondly) are not vain? Not at all. My impression is that La Bruyère had no such large intention when he began, and that if he had had it, he would have declared it in his opening observations. He was moralist and satirist both; but as much of one as the other. Character rather than characteristics attracted him, as I think, and the sharp sentences he aimed at were more literary than ethical. As for maxim-drawing, although he drew plenty, he expressly disavowed it. “I ought to say that I have had no desire to write maxims. Maxims are the laws of morality, and I own that I have neither the authority nor the genius which would fit me to legislate.... Those, in a word, who make maxims desire to be believed. I, on the other hand, am willing that anyone should say of me that I have not always well observed, provided that he himself observe better.”