Chapter II (3)

If La Bruyère had desired to learn the worst of mankind he could not have been trained in a better school than that which he found for himself. He had been one of the Accountants-General in the Bureau of Finance at Caen for a few years when M. le Prince--le Grand Condé--called him to Chantilly to be tutor--one of several--to his grandson the Duc de Bourbon. There, and at Versailles, he remained for the rest of his life, and at Versailles he died. Of Condé, of Henri-Jules, his terrible son, and of the grandson, “very considerably smaller than the smallest of men,” as Saint-Simon declares him, and very considerably more of a degenerate than most men, this learned, accurate, all-observant, deeply-meditating man was content to be the servant and the butt. When his pupil left his hands he stayed on as “gentleman” to the father, who was in his turn M. le Prince. Prince as he was, he was also, quite simply, a wild beast, biting mad; and his son was little better: a pervert and proud of it, crafty, malicious, tyrannical, and “extremely ferocious.” One does not know how life with such masters can have been tolerable. La Bruyère was both neglected and despised. He had nothing to do, for even as “gentleman” he was a supernumerary--yet he must be there. To understand it you must accept the _sang royal_ in its fullest implications. His book, which yielded eight editions in his lifetime, went for nothing at Chantilly, though the King himself had heard of it, and had his harangue at the Academy read to him at Marly. Yet one of the inmates of Chantilly (Valincourt), while admitting that “La Bruyère meditated profoundly and agreeably, two things which are rarely found together,” went on to say that “he was a good fellow at bottom, whom, however, the fear of seeming pedantic had thrown into its ridiculous opposite ... with the result that during all the time he spent in the household of M. le Duc, in which he died, he was always held for a figure of fun.” It seems that he tried to be sprightly, would dance, put on airs and graces, make jokes, and walk on his toes. We may regard all that as protective colouring, the instinct of the creature to hide his continual mortifications. Elsewhere--in Paris, naturally--he had made himself a personage. His book sold, if not to his profit, very much to his credit; he had made himself imposing enemies, and had the better of them at every turn; Bossuet was his friend, Pontchartrain, Racine and the like. He still held his sinecure office at Caen. Why, then, did he hang about Chantilly, and lodge in an attic at Versailles when M. le Prince was there? Who is to say? That particular prince was a human tiger--but in his service he lived on, and died. I think he ought to have put himself into his own book--and perhaps he did:

“I see a man surrounded, and followed--he is in office. I see
another man whom all the world salutes--he is in favour. Here is
one caressed and flattered, even by the great--he is rich. There
is another, observed curiously on all hands--he is learned. Here
is another whom nobody omits to greet--a dangerous man.”

At any rate, his experiences provided that one of the shrewdest sections of _Les Caractères_ is that headed “Of the Court.”

“The Court does not satisfy; it prevents you from satisfaction
anywhere else.

“It is like a house built of marble: I mean that it is made up of
men, very hard, but polished.

“One goes there very often in order to come away again and be
therefore respected by one’s country gentry, or the bishop.

“The most honourable reproach which can be made against a man is
to say of him that he knows nothing of the Court. In that one
remark there are no virtues unimputed to him.

“You speak well of a man at Court for two reasons: the first, that
he may learn that you have done so; the second that he may so
speak of you.

“It is as dangerous at Court to make advances as it is awkward not
to make them.”

The man who penned those caustic little sentences knew what he was talking of. Yet La Bruyère’s portrait of himself sets him forth as a creature apart, pointedly distinguishes him from _Clitiphon_, who has been too busy to heed him.

“O man of consequence and many affairs,” he says to _Clitiphon_,
“when you in your turn have need of my good offices, walk into
my lonely study. The philosopher is at your service, and will
not put you off to another day. You will find him there, deep
in Plato’s dialogues, dealing with the spiritual nature of the
soul, distinguishing its essence from that of the body; or, pen
in hand, calculating the distance from us of Jupiter or Saturn.
I am adoring God in those books of his, seeking by knowledge of
the truth to conduct my own spiritual part into better ways. Nay,
come in, the door is open; there is no ante-chamber in which to be
wearied while you wait. Come straight in, without announcement.
You are bringing me something more to be desired than gold and
silver if it is a chance of serving you. Speak then, what do you
desire me to do for you? Am I to leave my books, studies, work,
the very line which I am now penning? Happy interruption, which is
to make me of service to you!”

Overwhelming invitation! The butter, you will agree, is spread too thick. On another page he quotes the saying of the Roman patriarch, that he had rather people should inquire why there was no statue to Cato, than why there was one. But it had perhaps not occurred to Cato as calculable that he might have to erect a statue to himself.

“Voilà de quoi vous attirer beaucoup de lecteurs, et beaucoup d’ennemis,” said M. de Malezieu to La Bruyère on perusing _Les Caractères_. There was no doubt about that. Although he set out with a translation of Theophrastus, in going on to be a Theophrastus himself the temptation to draw from nature was obvious, and not resisted. Theophrastus generalised; he wrote of abstractions, Stupidity, Brutality, Avarice and what not. If he had had instances in his head, nobody knew what they were, and nobody cared. But La Bruyère did not write of qualities: he wrote of things and of people--women, men, the Court, the sovereign; and by his treatment of them in examples, in short paragraphs, with italicised names, with anecdotes, snatches of dialogue and other aids to attention, provided the quidnuncs with a fascinating game. “Keys” sprang up like mushrooms in a night. The guess-work was dangerously unanimous. The instances he had chosen were recent: there could not be much doubt who were _Menalcas_ and _Pamphilius_, _Clitiphon_ and _Arténice_. Three editions were called for in 1688, a fourth in 1689, and then one a year until 1694. On the whole he came off very lightly. The _Mercure Galant_ and its supporters furiously raged together. But the King had been elaborately flattered, and no harm came to La Bruyère.

_Les Caractères_ is a book both provocative and diverting, written in the clear, sinewy, reasonable language of Pascal and Fénélon: by no means without malice, but with a malice robbed of its virus by the air of detachment which La Bruyère has been careful to give it. When he pleases to be severe he uses the dramatic method. The portraits interspersed with his judgments enable him to move more freely than La Rochefoucauld. He is better, because livelier, reading, and the effect is not so depressing. However, his debt cannot be denied. He would be an acute critic who knew which was which in these:

“A woman with but one lover believes that she is not a coquette:
she who has several that she is only that.

“A woman forgets of the man she no longer loves even the favours
he has had of her.

“In her first passion a woman loves her lover. In the others she
loves love.”

Here is La Rochefoucauld at his best: “Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue”; and here is La Bruyère when he chooses to sting: “There is wanting nothing to an old lover from the woman who claims him except the name of husband; but that is much. If it were not for that he would be a thousand times lost.” As a rule he is more of a moralist than the Duke, as here where his reflection flows from his axiom:

“A woman unfaithful, if the interested party knows it, is just
faithless; if he believes her true, she is false. This advantage
at least accrues from a woman’s falsity, that you are cured of
jealousy.”

The reflection flows, I say--but is it true? It is safe to say that the man who generalises about women is as often wrong as right. “Women,” he says, “are always in the extreme, better or worse than men”; and again, “The generality of women have no principles. Their hearts direct them; they depend for their conduct upon those they love.” I should say that there were as many exceptions to those rules as examples of them. Then, what of this: “It costs a woman very little to say something which she does not feel; and a man still less to say something which he does”? It needs La Bruyère himself to determine from that which of the sexes is the more sentimental; but he leaves it there. I like the following, and believe it to be entirely true:

“It is certain that a woman who writes with transport is carried
away, less so that she is touched. It would seem that a tender
passion would render her mournful and taciturn; and that the most
urgent need of a woman whose heart is engaged is less to persuade
that she loves than to be sure that she is loved.”

The second term of that aphorism is an enlargement of the first. A woman, he would say, really in love would hide it by instinct. Her need is rather to be loved.

Try him on another tack. Here is a parallel with La Rochefoucauld. The Duke says, “Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console themselves for being no longer able to set bad examples.” La Bruyère’s is equally sharp:

“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,

“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.”

And the last sentence in the book is this: “If these _Caractères_ of mine are not relished I shall be surprised; and if they are I shall be equally so.”

There is a pose in that; but it is a literary pose.

He did not live long to enjoy his academic dignity. He made but one appearance at the table, and then supported the candidature of somebody whose name was not before the assembly. His proposal was of Dacier the classic, but he owned that he should prefer to see Madame Dacier chosen. On the 10th of May 1696, just a month after Madame de Sévigné, he died of apoplexy at Versailles. He had rooms in the Chateau opening on to the leads--bedroom, book-closet, and dressing-room. The inventory of his effects shows him to have been possessed of some three hundred books. Very few of his letters exist: one to Ménage about Theophrastus, one to Bussy, thanking him for his vote and sending him the sixth edition of _Les Caractères_, others to Condé, of earlier date, about the progress of his grandson. Two letters to him from Jérôme Phélypeaux, the son of Pontchartrain, survive, which hint at a happy relationship between the scholar and the young blade. Phélypeaux, who was just one-and-twenty, chaffs the philosopher; calls him a “fort joli garçon,” suspects him of being “un des plus rudes joueurs de lansquenet qui soit au monde.” La Bruyère’s solitary letter to his young friend is in a light-hearted vein too, chiefly about the weather.

It is so hot, he says, that yesterday he cooked a cake on his leads, and an excellent cake. To-day it has rained a little. Then he plays the fool very pleasantly. “Whether it will rain to-morrow, or whether it won’t, is a thing, sir, which I could not pronounce if the health of all Europe depended upon it. All the same, I believe, morally speaking, that there will be a little rain; that when that rain shall have ceased it will leave off raining, unless indeed it should begin to rain again.” It is evidence of a sound heart that a learned man can write so to a young friend; and as it is much better to love a man than not, I close upon that frivolous, but happy note. La Bruyère was to live a year more in his attic on the leads. Let us hope that he baked some more cakes and wrote many more letters to young M. Phélypeaux.

COULEUR DE ROSE

Sainte-Beuve, in one of his early _Lundis_, tells a touching story of Madame de Pompadour, the frail and pretty lady who was forced by circumstances rather than native bent into becoming a Minister of State, and one, at that, who had to measure swords with the great Frederick of Prussia. At one stage of her career she had hopes of a match between a daughter of her married state and a natural son of Louis. There seemed to be the makings of a Duc du Maine in the lad, of a Duchess consequently for her family. And that was the simple objective of those of her faction who favoured the scheme. But her own was simpler still. She spoke her real mind about it to Madame de Hausset, her lady-in-waiting, from whose Mémoires Sainte-Beuve quotes it.

“Un brevet de duc pour mon fils,” she said, “c’est bien peu; et c’est à cause que c’est son fils que je le préfère, ma bonne, à tous les petits ducs de la Cour. Mes petits enfants participeraient en ressemblance du grand-père et de la grand’-mère, et ce mélange que j’ai l’espoir de voir ferait mon bonheur un jour.”

Interesting revelation. “Les larmes lui vinrent aux yeux,” says Madame de Hausset. She was bourgeoise, you see, this poor Pompadour, with the homely instincts, the longing for the snug interior, the home, the family life which characterise the plainly-born. She had been a Mademoiselle Poisson. Poisson indeed! What had a Mademoiselle Poisson to do with a Fils de Saint-Louis, or in a Parc aux Cerfs? Nothing whatever in first intention, at least; rather she was all for love and the world well lost. She had had her dreams, wherein Louis was to be her “jo,” and they were to climb the hill together. The ideal remained with her, for ever unrealised, always, it seemed, just realisable; and her foreign and military adventures, the certain ruin of her country, were so many shifts to arrive--she and Louis together, hand in hand--at some Island of the Blest. No beautiful end will justify means so unbeautiful, but to some extent it excuses them.

Exactly on a level with that tale is one which I read somewhere lately: also a French tale. It was about the exorbitantly-loved mistress of some officer, who craved the rights of a wife, and worried him until she had them--with the result that she obtained also the wrongs. She in fact became what the man’s wife was at the moment: in her turn she was _trompée_. And what were the rights for which she risked, and indeed lost, everything she had? To preside at his breakfast-table, to dine _vis-à-vis_ at home instead of at a restaurant, to sleep with her head on his shoulder. That was all. And when she had it, her pride and joy became his ineffable weariness. He carried his vice elsewhere. There is the whole difference between two classes there--between Louis le Désiré and his Poisson; between two instincts--Sentiment and Curiosity; between two ideals--Distraction and Fulfilment. There is very nearly all the essential difference that exists between men and women, the active and the passive principle in human nature.

Behind the sentimental there is always a moral reality. It may not be all the sentimentalists believe it; they may mistake appearance of the thing for the thing itself; but there is a reality. To preside over a man’s tea-cups is symbolic; to be his wife is more than symbolic, for a symbol may be a sacrament--and that is a reality. The wedding-ring is a sacrament for those who seek fulfilment of their being. To those who seek distraction of it, it simply puts a point to their need. To the seekers of distraction there is neither end, nor symbol, nor sacrament. Mr. Hardy once wrote a parable upon the theme--the Pursuit of the Well-Beloved it was called; and after his manner he gave a mocking twist to it. In it a nympholept, a sort of Louis XV, pursued successively a woman, her daughter and her grand-daughter, and having caught them one after another, found that there was nothing in it. Last of all, the man died also, but not without feeling pretty sure that if he could have waited for the great-grand-daughter all would have been well with him. Such shadows we are, pursuing shadows. But women are realists. They can see detail and fulfil themselves with that, failing the great thing. That is a strength which is also a weakness, fatal to them in many cases. Only, even so, it is not always easy to decide which it is. Was it strength or weakness in Romney’s wife? She nursed him through a fever, herself then a young girl, and he married her for her pains. He lived with her for five years, gave her a family, and left her. He hardly saw her again for forty years, when he returned, broken and old, to Kendal, where he had left her, to be nursed once more out of illness. So far as we know, she had no reproaches for him. He died in her arms. What reality she may have found to support her constancy one can hardly say; but at least she had more than the nympholept had ever found in his forty years in the wilderness. Enough indeed to give her fulfilment at the last.

I have touched a thing there, or I am the more deceived, which Mr. Lucas has entirely overlooked in a recent book of his. By so doing he has turned what might have been a touching piece of sentiment into something which, luckily for us, exists mainly in club arm-chairs. We have had _Science from an Easy-Chair_, and none the worse for being so delivered. But arm-chair ethics is another matter. In Mr. Lucas’s _Rose and Rose_ a doctor, with a good cook (an important factor) and an Epicurean friend, who has the knack of making cynicisms sound true, by using a genial manner, becomes guardian of a child, who grows up into a nice girl, and in due course falls in love. She chooses a man whom the doctor dislikes, whom she, however, prefers to several other candidates, against whom there are really only nods and winks from the doctor and the Epicurean on the sofa. She marries, and isn’t happy. Her husband, without being a prig--he had not enough colour for that--was a precisian, careful of his money, who did his own housekeeping. He had not such a good cook as the doctor had, and may have felt that Rose’s education in housewifery had been neglected. Probably it had. A good cook will coddle her clients, but not impart her mystery. I daresay the husband was trying; but he seems to have been good-tempered and honourable; he paid his way, and he gave Rose I a Rose II. That at least should have been an asset on his side of the account. But not at all. After a time, not clearly illuminated, in which nothing particular seems to have happened--except one thing--Rose I ups and elopes with the one thing, leaving her husband and Rose II in the lurch. She had known her lover before marriage. He had very white teeth, and she had nursed him through an illness. Well, when she found him again, his teeth were still quite white, and he had another illness. So there you were. She went off with him, I think to Singapore, and did not reappear until the last chapter, by which time her ailing lover had cleaned his teeth for the last time. The doctor, who still had the good cook, and had adopted and brought up Rose II to the marriage-point, then received back with a beating heart his Rose I.

A doctor of seventy, with a good cook and digestion, an arm-chair and a rather good cellar of port, fortified also by the caustic wit of an epicurean patient, is capable of much. He might think (as Mr. Lucas’s did) that it was all right. He would be for the line of least resistance, and that would certainly be the baby. He happened to like them--which put him in a strong position. But his Rose I went much further than even Jean-Jacques had gone. He took his superfluous children to the _Enfants Trouvés_. Rose simply dropped hers. “De Charon pas un mot!” And so far as I can find out not a word afterwards, until she came home in the last chapter, as if nothing had happened. Then, if you please, Rose II takes the prodigal mother to her bosom, and they all lived happily ever after. Life is not so simple as all that. It could not be while women were women.

The poor “unfortunate females” with whom I began this article are against it. Mrs. Romney is against it. To the best of my belief the middle-class, to which the Roses belong, is still against it. Many marriages are unhappy, and many children left to shift; but not yet in the middle-class to any dangerous extent. A doctor in an easy-chair, with a good cook and cellar, does not count. His cook has unclassed him.

ART AND HEART

GEORGE SAND AND FLAUBERT

Flaubert is, or was, the fashion in high-art circles; George Sand was never that, and to-day is little more than a name in any circle. Yet in the familiar letters, lately published in translation, translated by Aimée McKenzie, between a pair so ill-assorted in temperament, so far apart in the pigeon-holes of memory, it is she who proves herself the better man.

Gustave Flaubert will live for times to come less by what he did than by his gesture in doing it. He was, before all, the explicit artist, the art-for-art’s-sake, neck-or-nothing artist; and as such he will stand in history when these strange creatures come up for review. He made the enormous assumption of an aristocracy of intelligence. As, once upon a time, Venice, and later on we British, claimed to hold the gorgeous East in fee, so Flaubert, and the handful of poets, novelists and playwrights whom he admitted as his equals, looked upon the world at large with its hordes of busy people as so much stuff for the workshop. Bourgeois all, Philistines all. They were the quarry; upon them as they went about their affairs he would peep and botanise. He would lay bare their hearts in action, their scheming brains, their secret longings, dreams, agonies of remorse, desire, fear. All this as a god might do it, a being apart, and for the diversion of a select Olympus. It was useless to write for the rest, for they could not even begin to understand you. More, it was an unworthy condescension. It exposed you either to infamy, as when they prosecuted you for an outrage against morals, or to ridicule, as when they asked you what your novel “proved.” Write for ever, wear yourself to a thread, hunting word or _nuance_; but write for the Olympians, not for the many. Such was the doctrine of Flaubert, gigantic, bald, cavern-eyed, with the moustaches of a Viking, and the voice of a bull; and so Anatole France saw him in 1873:

“I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour
hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand
bourgeois with their throats cut. Striding to and fro, the
honest giant ground under his heels the brains of the municipal
councillors of Rouen.”

That was the sort of man who, in 1863, struck up a friendship with George Sand.

And she, the overflowing, mannish, brown old woman, his antithesis; her vast heart still smouldering like a sleepy volcano; she who had kicked over all the traces, sown all the wild oats, made spillikins of the Ten Commandments, played leapfrog with the frying-pan and the fire; written a hundred novels, as many plays, a thousand reviews, ten thousand love-letters; grandmother now at Nohant, with a son whom she adored, a little Aurore whom she idolised; still enormously busy, writing a novel with each hand, a play with each foot, and reviews (perhaps) with her nose; she of _Elle et Lui_, of _Consuelo_ and _Valentine_ and _François le Champi_--how on earth came she to cope with the Berserk of Croisset, who hated every other person in the world, took four years to write a novel, and read through a whole library for the purpose? The answer is easy. She made herself his grandmother, took him to her capacious bosom, and handled him as he had never been handled before. Affectionately--to him she was “cher maitre,” to her he was her “pauvre enfant” or her “cher vieux”--but she could poke fun at him too. She used to send him letters from imaginary bourgeois, injured by his attacks, or stimulated by them, as might be. One was signed, “Victoire Potelet, called Marengo Lirondelle, Veuve Dodin”:

“I have read your distinguished works, notably Madame Bavarie,
of which I think I am capable of being a model to you.... I am
well preserved for my advanced age and if you have a repugnance
for an artist in misfortune I should be content with your ideal
sentiments. You can then count on my heart not being able to
dispose of my person being married to a man of light character who
squandered my wax cabinet wherein were all figures of celebrities,
Kings, Emperors ancient and modern and celebrated crimes....”

A delicious letter to write and to receive.

With all that, in spite of her impulse to love, to admire, to fall at his feet, she saw what was the matter with her “pauvre enfant.” _Madame Bovary_ hurt her because it was heartless. She understood the prosecution of that dreadful book; she saw that the passionless analysis of passion may be exceedingly indecent. She is guarded in her references to it, but she saw quite well that the book was condemned, not because it was indecent (though it was indecent), but because it was cruel. She thought _L’Education Sentimentale_ a failure; ugly without being reasonable:

“All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing,
except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached
with ... when people do not understand us it is always our
fault.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M.
Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his
thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the
highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one
attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim
with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his
work, you neglect it, or you give it up.”

Not a doubt but she was right. You cannot with impunity leave your heart out of your affair. I will not say that a good book cannot be written with the intellect and the will; but I am convinced that a great book was never yet so written. The greatest books in the world’s history are those which the world at large knows to be good; and to the making of such books goes the heart of a man as well as his brain.

But eighteen-seventy was at hand. Isidore, as they called him, was diddled into war. Everything went badly. French armies blew away like smoke, France was invaded, the Prussians were at Rouen, and there was no time to theorise about art. Sedan; the Prussians in Paris; then the senseless rage of the Commune. Flaubert took it all _à sa manière_:

“I shall not tell you all I have suffered since September. Why
didn’t I die from it?... And I cannot get over it! I am not
consoled! I have no hope!”

And in another letter:

“Ah! dear and good master, _if you could only hate!_ That is what
you lack--hate.... Come now. Cry out! Thunder! Take your lyre and
touch the brazen string; the monsters will flee.”

Poor wretch, with the only remedy of the arrogant! But the fine old priestess of another heaven and earth did as he bid her; cried out, thundered, in a noble letter, which should be engraved on gold plates and hung up on the Quai d’Orsay:

“What then, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that
I have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible,
hateful, that it has always been and will always be so?...
You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the
priest always a hypocrite, the bourgeois a coward, the soldier
a brigand, the peasant a beast?... The people, you say? The
people is yourself and myself.... Whoever denies the people
cheapens himself, and gives the world the shameful spectacle of
apostasy....”

That is plain speaking; but she goes on to be prophetic. It would seem as if she had foreseen a war and its aftermath infinitely more terrible than that of 1870:

“We shall have to pity the German nation for its victories as much
as ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its
moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun.... It
will move very quickly.... _Well, the moral abasement of Germany
is not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to
return to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will
not give us back her life._”

Is not that nobly said? And then her great cry:

“Frenchmen, let us love one another ... let us love one another or
we are lost.”

She was but five years off her death-bed when she wrote that. In a sense it was her swan-song. Had she never loved so blindly, she might have been a better woman it may be. But she loved kindly, too, and will be forgiven no doubt because she loved much. Love at any rate inspired her to better purpose than Flaubert’s hate could have done. The world is not to be advantaged by intellectual arrogance; nor does it appear from these letters that poor Flaubert was at all advantaged either. It served him but ill in literature and not at all in the adventure of life. One must be a man before one can be an artist. Whether George Sand was an artist or not, she neither knew nor cared. There is no doubt at all, though, of her manliness.

A NOVEL AND A CLASSIC

LA PRINCESS DE CLÈVES

The first novelist in the world as we know it (I say nothing of the Greeks and Romans) was, I believe, a Pope--Pius II. It is not what we have come to expect from the Vatican; but his novel, I ought to add, was “only a little one.” The second, if I don’t mistake, was Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who did the thing on a large scale. _Artamène, ou Le Grand Cyrus_ is in twenty volumes; and though men be so strong (some of them) as to have read it, it is not unkind to say that, for the general, it is as dead as King Pandion. “Works,” then, won’t secure more for an author than his name in a dictionary. You must have quality to do that. The little _Princesse de Clèves_, written by a contemporary of Mademoiselle’s, all compact in a small octavo of 170 pp., has quality. First published in 1678, at this hour, says Mr. Ashton, in his study of its author,[2] “there are preparing simultaneously an art edition, a critical edition, and an édition de luxe, to say nothing of the popular edition, which has just appeared.” Here is “that eternity of fame,” or something like it, hoped for by the poet. I suppose the nearest we can approach to that would be _Robinson Crusoe_.

The authoress of the little classic was Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, who was born in 1634. She was of _petite noblesse_ on both sides, but her mother’s remarriage to the Chevalier Renaud de Sévigné lifted her into high society, and brought her acquainted with the incomparable Marquise. If it had done nothing else for her, in doing that it served two delightful women, and the world ever after. But it did more. It procured for Mlle. de La Vergne her entry to the Hôtel de Rambouillet; it gave her the wits for her masters; it gave her the companionship of La Rochefoucauld; and it gave _us_ the Princesse de Clèves. She married, or was married to, a provincial seigneur of so little importance that everybody thought he was separated from his wife some twenty years before he was. When separation did come, it was only that insisted on by death; and through Mr. Ashton’s diligence we now know when he died. Nothing about him, however, seems to matter much, except the bare possibility that the relations between him, his wife, and La Rochefoucauld, which may have been difficult and must have been delicate, may also have given Madame de Lafayette the theme of her novels.

She wrote three novels altogether, and it is a curious thing about them that they all deal with the same subject--namely, jealousy. Love, of course, the everlasting French triangular love, is at the bottom of them: inclination and duty contend for the heroine. But the jealousy which consumes husband and lover alike is the real theme. Only in the _Princesse de Clèves_ is the treatment fresh, the subject deeply plumbed, the _dénoument_ original and unexpected. Those valuable considerations, and the eloquence with which they are brought to bear, may account for its instant popularity. It has another quality which recommends it to readers of to-day--psychology. To a surprising extent, considering its epoch, it does consider of men and women from within outwards--not as clothes-props to be decked with rhetoric, but as reasonable souls in human bodies, and sometimes as unreasonable souls.

Here’s the story. Mademoiselle de Chartres, a high-born young beauty of the Court of Henri II--is there any other novel in the world the name of whose heroine is never revealed?--is married by her mother in the opening pages to the Prince de Clèves, without inclination of her own, or any marked distaste. The prince, we are told, is “parfaitement bien fait,” brave, splendid, “with a prudence which is not at all consistent with youth.” I do not learn that he was, in fact, a youth. All goes well, nevertheless, until the return to Court of a certain Duc de Nemours, a renowned breaker of hearts, more brave, more splendid, more “bien fait,” and much less prudent, certainly, than the Prince de Clèves. He arrives during a ball at the Louvre; Madame de Clèves nearly steps into his arms by accident; their eyes meet; his are dazzled, hers troubled, and the seed is sown. For a space of time she does not know that she loves, or guess that _he_ does: the necessary discoveries are provided for by some very good inventions. An accident to Nemours in a tournament, in the trouble which it causes her, reveals him the truth; his stealing of her picture, which she happens to witness, reveals it to her.

Discovery of the state of affairs, naturally, spurs the young man; but it terrifies the lady. Greatly agitated, she prevails upon her unsuspecting lord to take her into the country. Nemours follows them, as she presently learns. Then, when her husband insists on her return with him to Paris and the daily intercourse with the person she dreads, driven into a corner, she confesses that she dare not obey him, since her heart is not her own. Nothing will induce her to say more; and the prince, disturbed as he is, is greatly touched by the nobility and candour of her avowal. Unfortunately, he is not the only one to be touched; for Nemours, who had been on the point of paying a visit to his enchantress, stands in the ante-room and overhears the whole conversation. He knew it all before, no doubt--but wait a moment. He is so exalted by the sense of his mistress’s virtue that, on his way back to Paris, he casts the whole story into a tale of “a friend” of his, but with such a spirit of conviction thrilling in his tones, that it is quite easy for him who receives it to be certain that “the friend” was Nemours himself. That is really excellent invention, quite unforced, and as simple as kissing. Naturally the tale is repeated, and puts husband and wife at cross-purposes, since it makes either suspect the other of having betrayed the secret. More, it tells the husband the name of his wife’s lover. Further misunderstandings ensue, and last of all, the husband dies of it. I confess that that seems to me rather stiff. Men have died and worms have eaten them--but not the worms of jealousy.