Part 1 (2/2)
The result of this habit of ruthless criticism is to concentrate the Frenchman's attention, even to excess, on the motives of conduct, and to bring him more and more inevitably to regard self-love, self-preservation, personal vanity in its various forms, as the source of all our apparent virtues. Even when we appear to be most disinterested, even when we are most clearly actuated by unselfish devotion, by _honour_, we are really the prey, as Lintier saw it, of the wish to save our lives and to preserve the good opinion of others.
Underneath the transports of patriotism, underneath the sincerity of religious fervour, the Frenchman digs down and finds _amour-propre_ at the root of everything.
This att.i.tude or habit of mind is particularly shocking to all those who live in a state of illusion, and there is probably no aspect of French character which is more difficult for the average Englishman to appreciate than this tendency towards sceptical dissection of the motives of conduct. Yet it is quite certain that it is widely disseminated among those of our neighbours who are most prompt and effective in action, and whose vigour is in no degree paralysed by the clairvoyance with which they seek for exact truth even in the most romantic and illusive spiritual circ.u.mstances. To throw light on this aspect of French character, I propose to call attention to a little book, which is probably well-known to my readers already, but which may be regarded from a point of view, as I venture to think, more instructive than that which is usually chosen.
In the year 1665 there appeared anonymously in Paris, in all the circ.u.mstances of well-advertised secrecy, a thin volume of ”Maximes,”
which were understood to have exercised for years past the best thoughts of a certain ill.u.s.trious n.o.bleman. Mme de Sable, who was not foreign to the facts, immediately wrote a review, intended for the _Journal des Scavants_, in the course of which she said that the new book was ”a treatise on movements of the human heart which may be said to have remained until now unrecognized.” The book, as every one knows, was the work of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, and the subject of it was an unmasking of ”the veritable condition of man.”
It would be idle not to admit that La Rochefoucauld has been almost exclusively regarded as the chief exponent of egotism among the great writers of Europe. He has become--he became during his own lifetime-- the bye-word for bitterness. He is represented as believing that egotism is the _primum mobile_ of all human action, and that man is wholly the victim of his pa.s.sions, which lead him whither they will.
He denies all spirituality and sees a physical cause for everything we do. His own words are quoted against him. It is true that he says, ”All the pa.s.sions are nothing but divers degrees of heat or cold in the blood.” It is true that he says, ”All men naturally hate one another,” and again, ”Our virtues are mostly vices in disguise.” Yet again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms which seem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterested instincts of the human soul, for he says ”_Amour-propre_ is the love of one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men into their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the opportunity, makes them the tyrants of others.... It exists in all states of life and in all conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it lives on nothing.” He does not admit that Christianity itself is immune from the ravages of this essential cankerworm, which adopts all disguises and slips from one Protean shape into another. ”The refinements of self-love surpa.s.s those of chemistry,” and the purpose of La Rochefoucauld is to resolve all our virtues in a crucible and to show that nothing remains but a poisonous deposit of egotism.
No wonder that La Rochefoucauld has been generally regarded as a scourge of the human race, a sterile critic of mankind without sympathy or pity. It is true that his obstinate insistence on the universality of egotism produces a depressing and sometimes a fatiguing impression on the reader, who is apt to think of him as Shakespeare's Apemantus, ”that few things loves better than to abhor himself.” But when the First Lord goes on to add ”He's opposite to humanity,” we feel that no phrase could less apply to La Rochefoucauld. We have, therefore, immediately to revise our opinion of this severe dissector of the human heart, and to endeavour to find out what lay underneath the bitterness of his ”Maximes.” It is a complete mistake to look upon La Rochefoucauld as a monster, or even as a Timon. Without insisting, at all events for the moment, on the plain effect of his career on his intellect, but yet accepting the evidence that much of his bitterness was the result of bad health, sense of failure, shyness, foiled ambition, we have to ask ourselves what he gave to French thought in exchange for the illusions which he so rudely tore away. In dealing with any savage moralist, we are obliged to turn from the abstract question: Why did he say these things? to the realistic one. What did he hope to effect by what he said? Perhaps we can start no better on this inquiry than to quote the d.u.c.h.ess of Schomberg's exclamation when she turned over the pages of the first edition--namely that ”this book contains a vast number of truths which I should have remained ignorant of all my life if it had not taught me to perceive them.” This may be applied to French energy, and we may begin to see what has been the active value of La Rochefoucauld's apparently negative and repugnant aphorisms.
The La Rochefoucauld whom we know belongs to a polite and modern age.
He is instinct with the spirit of society, ”la bonne compagnie,” as it was called in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a crowd of refined and well-trained pens competed to make of the delicate language of France a vehicle which could transfer from brain to brain the subtlest ingenuities of psychology. He is a typical specimen of the Frenchman of letters at the moment when literature had become the ally of political power and the instrument of social influence. Into this new world, before it had completely developed, the future author of the ”Maximes” was introduced at a very early age. He was presented to the wits and _precieuses_ of the Hotel Rambouillet at the age of eighteen. It is amusing to think that he may have seen Voiture, in the Blue Room, seize his lute and sing a Spanish song, or have volunteered as a paladin in the train of Hector, King of Georgia. But the pedantries and affectations of this wonderful society seem to have made no immediate impression upon La Rochefoucauld, whose early years were those of the young n.o.bleman devoid of all apparent intellectual curiosity. It is true that he says of himself that directly he came back from Italy (this was in 1629, when he was only sixteen), ”I began to notice with some attention whatever I saw,” but this was, no doubt, external; he does not exhibit in his writings, and in all probability did not feel, the slightest interest in the pedantic literature of the end of Louis XIII.'s reign. He represented, through his youth, the purely military and aristocratic element in the society of that age.
If he had died when he was thirty, or at the close of the career of Richelieu, nothing would have distinguished him from the mob of violent n.o.blemen who made the streets of Paris a pandemonium.
To understand the influence of La Rochefoucauld it is even more needful than in most similar cases to form a clear idea of his character, and this can only be obtained by an outline of his remarkable career. Francois VI. Duke of La Rochefoucauld, as a typical Parisian, was born in the ducal palace in the rue des Pet.i.ts-Champs, on September 15, 1613. The family was one of the most n.o.ble not merely in France but in Europe, and we do not begin to understand the author until we realize his excessive pride of birth. In a letter he wrote to Cardinal Mazarin in 1648 he says, ”I am in a position to prove that for three hundred years the monarchs [of France] have not disdained to treat us as members of their family.” This arrogance of race inspired the early part of his life to the exclusion, so far as we can perceive, of any other stimulus to action. He was content to be the violent and fantastic swashbuckler of the half-rebellious court of Louis XIII. In late life, he crystallized his past into a maxim, ”Youth is a protracted intoxication; it is the fever of the soul.”
Fighting and love-making, petty politics and scuffle upon counter-scuffle--such was the life of the young French n.o.bleman of whom La Rochefoucauld reveals himself and is revealed by others as the type and specimen.
La Rochefoucauld is the author, not merely of the ”Maximes,” but of a second book which is much less often read. This is his ”Memoires,” a very intelligent and rather solemn contribution to the fragmentary history of France in the seventeenth century. It is hardly necessary to point out that not one of the numerous memoirs of this period must be taken as covering the whole field of which they treat. Each book is like a piece of a dissected map, or of a series of such maps cut to a different scale. All are incomplete and most of them overlap, but they make up, when carefully collated, an invaluable picture of the times.
No other country of Europe produced anything to compare with these authentic fragments of the social and political history of France under Richelieu and Mazarin. These Memoirs had a very remarkable influence on the general literature of France. They turned out of favour the chronicles of ”ill.u.s.trious lives,” the pompous and false travesties of history, which the sixteenth century had delighted in, and in this way they served to prepare for the purification of French taste. The note of the best of them was a happy sincerity even in egotism, a simplicity even in describing the most monstrous and grotesque events. Among this group of writers, Cardinal de Retz seems to me to be beyond question the greatest, but La Rochefoucauld is not to be despised in his capacity as the arranger of personal recollections.
We must not expect from these seventeenth-century autobiographers the sort of details which we demand from memoir-writers to-day. La Rochefoucauld, although he begins in the first person, has nothing which he chooses to tell us about his own childhood and education. He was married, at the age of fifteen, to a high-born lady, Andree de Vivonne, but her he scarcely mentions. By the side of those glittering amatory escapades of his on the grand scale, with which Europe rang, he seems to have pursued a sober married existence, without upbraidings from his own conscience, or curtain-lectures from his meek d.u.c.h.ess, who bore him eight children. La Rochefoucauld's ”Memoires”
open abruptly with these words:--”I spent the last years of the Cardinal's administration in indolence,” and then he begins to discourse on the audacities of the Duke of Buckingham (pleasingly spelled Bouquinquant) and his attacks on the heart of the Queen of France. We gather that although the English envoy can have had no personal influence on the future moralist--since Buckingham was murdered at Portsmouth in 1628, while La Rochefoucauld did not come to court till 1630--yet the young Frenchman so immensely admired what he heard of the Englishman, and so deliberately set himself to take him as a model, that our own knowledge of Buckingham may be of help to us in reproducing an impression of La Rochefoucauld, or rather of the Prince de Marcillac, as he was styled until his father died.
After describing the court as the youth of seventeen had found it, he skips five years to tell us how the Queen asked him to run away with her to Brussels in 1637. History has not known quite what to make of this amazing story, of which La Rochefoucauld had the complacency to write more than twenty years afterwards--
”However difficult and perilous this adventure might seem to me, I may say that never in all my life have I enjoyed anything so much. I was at an age (24) at which one loves to do extravagant and startling things, and I felt that nothing could be more startling or more extravagant than to s.n.a.t.c.h at the same time the Queen from the King her husband, and from the Cardinal de Richelieu who was jealous, and Mlle d'Hautefort from the King who was in love with her.”
He tells the story with inimitable gusto. But he tells it just as an episode, and he hurries on to the death of Richelieu in 1642, as though he were conscious that up to his thirtieth year his own life had not been of much consequence.
Even in that age of turbulent extravagance, the Prince of Marcillac was known, where he was known at all, merely as a hare-brained youth who carried the intolerance and insolence of amatory youth past the confines of absurdity, and it is amusing to find Balzac, who was twenty years his senior, and who was buried in the country, describing him--surely by repute--as the type of--
”These gentlemen who chatter so much about the empire and about the sovereignty of ladies, and have their heads so stuffed with tales and strange adventures, that they grow to believe that they can do all that was done under the reign of Amadis, and that the least of their duties is to reply to a supplicating lady, I, who am only a man, how should I resist the prayer of her to whom the G.o.ds themselves can refuse nothing?”
We seem far from the sombre and mordant author of the ”Maximes,” but a complete apprehension of the character of La Rochefoucauld requires the story of his adventures to be at least briefly indicated. A chasm divides his early from his late history, and this chasm is bridged over in a very shadowy way by such records as we possess of his retirement after the Fronde.
Between the death of Richelieu and this retirement there lies a period of ten years, during which the future author of the ”Maximes” is swallowed up in the hurly-burly of the worst moment in the whole history of France. It is difficult from any point of view to form what it would be mere waste of time for us to attempt in this connection, a clear conception of the chaos into which that country was plunged by the weakness of Anne of Austria and the criminality of Mazarin. The senseless intrigues of the Fronde affect the bewildered student of those times as though
_this frame Of Heav'n were falling and these elements In mutiny had from her axle torn The steadfast earth._
At first La Rochefoucauld seems to have meant to support the cause of the court, expecting to be rewarded for what he had done, or been prepared to do for the Queen. He says in his ”Memoires” that after the death of Louis XIII. the Queen-Mother ”gave me many marks of friends.h.i.+p and confidence; she a.s.sured me several times that her honour was involved in my being pleased with her, and that nothing in the kingdom was large enough to reward me for what I had done in her service.” That sounds very well, but what it really ill.u.s.trates is the extraordinary violence of aristocratic frivolity, the fierce levity and insatiable frenzied vanity of the n.o.ble families. The aims of La Rochefoucauld, in support of which he was ready to sacrifice his country, were of a cla.s.s that must seem to us now petty in the extreme. He wanted the _tabouret_, the footstool, for his d.u.c.h.ess, in other words the right to be seated in presence of the members of the royal family. He wanted the privilege of driving into the courtyard of the Louvre without having to descend from his coach outside and walk in. He demanded these honours because they were already possessed by the families of Rohan and of Bouillon. It is extraordinary to consider what powerful effects such trumpery causes could have, but it is a fact that the desolating and cruel wars of the Fronde largely depended upon jealousies of the _carrosse_ and the _tabouret_. La Rochefoucauld's support of the rebellion frankly and openly was based upon it.
La Rochefoucauld brings the first part of his ”Memoires” down to 1649.
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