No. 583. In the adversity of our best friends, we always find something which does not displease us.
Before La Rochefoucauld, Montaigne had said, “Even in the midst of compassion we feel within us an unaccountable bitter-sweet titillation of ill-natured pleasure in seeing another suffer;” and Burke, after both, wrote (in his “Sublime and Beautiful”) with a heavier hand, “I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.”
La Rochefoucauld is not fairly cynical, more than is Montaigne. But as a man he wins upon you less. His maxims are like hard and sharp crystals, precipitated from the worldly wisdom blandly solute and dilute in Montaigne.
The wise of this world reject the dogma of human depravity, as taught in the Bible. They willingly accept it—nay, accept it complacently, hugging themselves for their own penetration—as taught in the “Maxims” of La Rochefoucauld.
Jean de La Bruyère is personally almost as little known as if he were an ancient of the Greek or Roman world surviving, like Juvenal, only in his literary production. Bossuet got him employed to teach history to a great duke, who became his patron, and settled a life-long annuity upon him. He published his one book, the “Characters,” in 1687, was made member of the French Academy in 1693, and died in 1696. That, in short, is La Bruyère’s biography.
His book is universally considered one of the most finished products of the human mind. It is not a great work—it lacks the unity and the majesty of design necessary for that. It consists simply of detached thoughts and observations on a variety of subjects. It shows the author to have been a man of deep and wise reflection, but especially a consummate master of style. The book is one to read in, rather than to read. It is full of food to thought. The very beginning exhibits a self-consciousness on the writer’s part very different from that spontaneous simplicity in which truly great books originate. La Bruyère begins:
Every thing has been said; and one comes too late, after more than seven thousand years that there have been men, and men who have thought.
La Bruyère has something to say, and that to length unusual for him, of pulpit eloquence. We select a few specimen sentences:
Christian eloquence has become a spectacle. That gospel sadness, which is its soul, is no longer to be observed in it; its place is supplied by advantages of facial expression, by inflections of the voice, by regularity of gesticulation, by choice of words, and by long categories. The sacred word is no longer listened to seriously; it is a kind of amusement, one among many; it is a game in which there is rivalry, and in which there are those who lay wagers.