Bernard Le Bouyer de La Bruyère

“ We find him pursuing almost beyond the bounds of good taste the search for variety of manner. He has strange sudden turns of thought, startling addresses, inversions which we should blame as violent, if they were not so eminently successful that we adopt them at once, as we do Shakespeare's. La Bruyère passes from mysterious ironies to bold and coarse invective, from ornate and sublime reflections to phrases of a roguish simplicity. ”

“ Everyone knows La Bruyère's picture of the wild-looking peasantry of France, their faces blackened by want and toil and sun, the slaves of the soil, at which they laboured with such unconquerable patience, who 'seemed just capable of speech, and when they stood erect displayed the lineaments of men.' Their dwellings were often windowless cabins, their clothing a rough woollen covering, their food buckwheat and chestnuts and the coarsest bread. ”

“ More earnest and less bitter than La Rochefoucauld, and as brilliant and as firm as Cardinal de Retz, La Bruyere was a more sincere believer than either. “I feel that there is a God, and I do not feel that there is none; that is enough for me; the reasoning of the world is useless to me. I conclude that God exists. ”

“ Compare La Bruyère:
“Entre toutes les differentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une seule de nos pensées il n’y en a qu’une qui soit la bonne; on ne la rencontre pas toujours en parlant ou en écrivant: il est vray néanmoins qu’elle existe, que tout ce qui ne l’est point est foible, et ne satisfait point un homme d’esprit qui veut se faire entendre.” ”

“ On the whole, the only reasons for not ranking La Bruyère’s criticism very high indeed are that there is so little of it, and that it is obviously the work of a man to whom it is more a casual pastime than a business—who has not thought himself out all along the line in it, but has emitted a few observations. ”

“ We do not look to find a system in a book of maxims and portraits. La Bruyère was a moralist, pure and simple; he awakened sensibility, he encouraged refinement, and he exposed the vicious difference which existed around him—and which no one else had seemed to notice—that the possession of more or fewer pieces of money made between human beings otherwise equal. ”

“ La Bruyère points out on the one side a man recognised by the world at large as a master-mind, honoured and sought after by eager admirers, but at home, of no account at all; petit dans son domestique et aux yeux de ses proches: on the other hand, a man who is a prophet in his own house and country, who enjoys a vogue that is confined to his immediate surroundings, and who s’applaudit d’un mérite rare et singulier qui lui est accordé par la famille dont il est l’idole. But exceptions to a rule are commonly taken in confirmation of it ”

“ No one but La Bruyère seems, in that day, to have noticed the "swarthy livid animal, crouched over the soil, which he digs and turns with invincible obstinacy, but who, when he rises to his feet, shows a human countenance"— certainly he could not be visible, toiling so far below, from that proud terrace of the Adhémar which makes the church its footstool. ”

“ It was he who taught their nation to seize the attitude and to photograph the gesture.
La Bruyère's express aim is to clarify our minds, to make us think lucidly and in consequence speak with precision. We have already seen what value he sets on the right word in the right place. He is the enemy of all those who shamble along in the supposition that an inaccurate phrase will "do well enough," and that any slipshod definition is excused by our saying, "Oh, you know what I mean!" ”

“ In La Bruyère, the French Theophrastus, who has tempered his maxims with “portraits,” I think that the Rhadamanthus-attitude is deliberate. La Bruyère is indignant, and takes it for righteousness. You cannot call him cynical; he is a censor morum. He combines the methods of La Rochefoucauld and Tallemant des Réaux, but is more human than the first because he condescends to scold his victims, and much less so than the other because he cannot bring himself to consider them as of the same clay with himself. La Bruyère, you may say, never takes off his wig and gown; Tallemant never puts his on. ”

“ Jean de la Bruyère was born in Paris, in August, 1645. He studied law and became a barrister, but at the age of twenty-eight gave up that profession, which did not agree with his tendencies to meditation and his scrupulous mind. In 1673, he bought the office of Treasurer of the Finances, and led an independent and studious life. In 1684, he became a tutor to the Duc de Bourbon, grandson of the great Condé, and continued to reside in the Condé household until his death in 1696. In the "Caractères," which first appeared in 1688, La Bruyère has recorded his impressions of men. ”

“ La Bruyère, though a shrewd observer, has the daring of an innovator, but always remains very guarded in his language. When now and then his feelings get the better of him, he expresses his opinions 17like a man, and attacks the vices of his age with a boldness which none of his contemporaries has surpassed. Nearly the whole of his chapter “Of the Gifts of Fortune” is an attack on the financiers; in the chapter “Of the Great,” he certainly does not flatter the courtiers, whilst he himself never pretends to be anything else but “a plebeian,”10 and almost always sides with his own class. ”

“ The surface of La Bruyère's writing is crisp and parched, but it is easy by careful reading to crack it, and to discover the coolness, the softness, the salutary humidity which lie beneath the satirical crust of his irony. He is primarily a satirist, dealing as he says with the vices of the human mind and the subterfuges of human self-deception. He lays bare "the sentiments and the movements of men, exposing the principles which actuate their malice and their frailty" ”

“ As one contemplates these courtly sumptuosities, La Bruyère's famous picture recurs to the mind, of far other scenes in the same gay land. 'We see certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burnt by the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet, they show a human face; in fact they are men.' That these violent and humiliating contrasts are eternal and inevitable, is the last word of the dominant philosophy of society ”

“ If one seeks to measure how far removed the great classic moralists are from thinness, let him turn from La Bruyère to the inane subtleties and meaningless conundrums, not worth answering, that do duty for analysis of character in some modern American literature. We feel that La Bruyère, though retiring, studious, meditative, and self-contained, has complied with the essential condition of looking at life and men themselves, and with his own eyes. ”

“ He is the kindest soul alive. He has not the slightest wish to oppress his tenants. He has only forgotten them! “And is not all this a presage for the future?” breaks off La Bruyère.
Again and again he reiterates his warning, finding something unnatural and shocking in the complete divorce between town and country. Scarce a man at court could tell a flax plant from hemp, or wheat from barley—don’t speak to them of fallow fields or aftermath, of laying down a vine or of marking a young tree fit for the axe: “provignage” and “baliveau” are no longer French, it seems. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But tho’ Mr. de la Bruyere might have very good prudential Reasons for not making his Characters too particular, yet those Reasons cannot be urg’d, as a just Plea for his transgressing the Bounds of Characteristic-Justice, by making his Images unnatural.
In every Kind of Writing there is something of an establish’d Nature which is essential to it. To deviate from this, is to deviate from Nature it self. Mr. de la Bruyere is not the only French Man who is guilty in this Point. ”

“ The criticism of Charpentier, who received La Bruyère at the Academy, and who was of the opposite faction, is in fact fully justified as far as it goes. La Bruyère literally “est [trop] descendu dans le particulier.” He has neither, like Molière, embodied abstract peculiarities in a single life-like type, nor has he, like Shakespeare, made the individual pass sub speciem aeternitatis, and serve as a type while retaining his individuality. He is a photographer rather than an artist in his portraiture. ”

“ The author of the "Maximes" was the head of one of the great princely houses of France. The author of the "Caractères" was the type of the plebeian citizen of Paris. If La Rochefoucauld offers us the quintessence of aristocracy, La Bruyère is not less a specimen of the middle class. His reputation as an honest man long suffered from his own joke about his ancestry. ”

“ La Bruyère was the first effective moralist who realized what a monstrous disproportion existed between the fortune of the rich and of the poor. [15] If we read the chapter "Des Biens de Fortune" we may be astonished at his courage, and we may see in him a direct precursor of the revolution which took a little more than a hundred years to gather before it broke on France. He describes the great of the earth with a savage serenity, and then he adds, "Such people are neither relatives, nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even men. They have money." ”

“ Whether he perceived it or not—and I for one am convinced that he did perceive it—La Bruyère introduced a new thing into French literature; he opened out, we may almost say, a new world. The classical attitude of the great age had produced splendid manifestations of thought and form. However revolutionary it pleases us of 1918 to be, we cannot get away from the perfection of the age of Bossuet and Racine and La Fontaine and Fénelon. ”

“ It was a great advantage to La Bruyère, and a sign of his genius, that he was able to descend from the pulpit, and walk about among his readers with a smile, recognizing them as reasonable beings. He is persuasive; his forerunners had been denunciatory. He may be harsh and sometimes unjust, but he is never contemptuous to human nature. He feels that he is addressing a wide public of intelligent men and women, whom he would fortify against the moral tyranny of the violent and the rich. ”

“ In imitation of such preachers at second-hand, I shall transcribe from Bruyère one of the most elegant pieces of raillery and satire which I have ever read. He describes the French, as if speaking of a people not yet discovered, in the air and style of a traveller.
"I have heard talk of a country where the old men are gallant, polite and civil: the young men, on the contrary, stubborn, wild, without either manners or civility. They are free from passion for women, at the age when in other [Pg 60] countries they begin to feel it ”

“ The almost universal presence of this practical and reforming spirit makes it not by any means so easy to subdivide the branches of literature, as is the case in the seventeenth century. La Bruyère had said, in the days of acquiescence in absolutism, that to a Frenchman 'Les grands sujets sont défendus,' meaning thereby theology and politics. The general spirit of the eighteenth century was a vigorous denial of this, and an eager investigation into these 'grands sujets.' This spirit made its appearance in the most unexpected quarters, and in the strangest forms. ”

“ He is much less formal and mechanical than La Rochefoucauld, and he seems to study men with less dependence on a theory. His own statement should not be overlooked; he says, very plainly, that he desired above all things to make men live better lives.
Boileau said that the style of La Bruyère was "prophetic," and I do not know that any one has attempted to explain this rather curious phrase. ”

“ There is one more kind of art and curio collector, perhaps the most numerous of all. They have been well defined by La Bruyère more than two hundred years ago. This particular type of art lover is on the look out not for what he really loves but for that which affords him gratifications other than those art is intended to give. ”

“ This, I think, is a very hasty judgment, founded a little, no doubt, upon a certain dread on La Bruyère's part of being commonplace. He was dealing, as every moralist is bound to deal, with ideas of a more or less primitive character, to which sparkle and force must be given by illustrative examples. These examples gave him his great chance, and he built them up, those exemplary "portraits" of his, with infinite labour, accumulating details to make a type, and sometimes, it is possible, accumulating too many. The result is that the "Caractères" are sometimes a little laboured ”

“ 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. ”