Part 4 (2/2)
A typical instance of the mixture of courage and tact in the young author is to be found in the att.i.tude which he took up towards Voltaire with regard to the Marquise de Pompadour, without in the least offending his tempestuous friend. That remarkable young lady, then still known as la pet.i.te etoile, had succeeded in catching the King's eye, and was soaring into the political heavens like a rocket, carrying, among other incongruous objects, the genius of Voltaire in her glittering train. Voltaire must have boasted to his young friend that his fortune was made. Vauvenargues surprisingly expresses in his reply the evil which must be done by great authors who flatter vice and think to conceal its corruption by heaping flowers over a lie. The incident is important for us, because it led Vauvenargues, thus disappointed in Voltaire as he had been disappointed in Mirabeau, to examine into the sources of the low moral condition of the age. He attributed it to ”le mepris de la gloire,” and he set himself to define this quality and to impress it, with all the force of repet.i.tion, on the dulled consciences of his contemporaries.
It is extremely difficult, it is well-nigh impossible, to find an equivalent in English for the word ”gloire.” It is a French conception, and one to which our language does not readily, or gracefully, lend itself. In the mind of Vauvenargues the idea of ”gloire” took the central place, and we may form an intelligent conception of the meaning he stamped upon the word, by repeating some of his axioms.
He says: ”The flush of dawn is not so lovely as the earliest experiences of _gloire_. _Gloire_ makes heroes beautiful.” Again: ”Nothing is so essential as renown, and nothing so surely gives renown as merit; these are things that reason itself has united, and why should we distinguish true _gloire_ from merit, which is the source of it, and of which it is the proof?” This moral union of merit, glory and renown, in triple splendour revolving round each other, was the main object of Vauvenargues' contemplation, and he admits that the central pa.s.sion of his life was ”l'amour de la gloire.” What, then, is the exact meaning of ”la Gloire,” which the dictionaries superficially translate by ”glory,”--a very different thing?
Vauvenargues starts a new conception of the value of self-esteem, or rather of the desire of being esteemed by others. The seventeenth century had poured its vials of contempt over the _amour-propre_ of mankind, and no doubt that had led to a corresponding decline in the energy of the nation. Pascal had severely ridiculed the vanity which he says is anch.o.r.ed in the heart of man, and he actually mocks at the idea of a desire for renown; expressing his astonishment that even philosophers have the fatuity to wish for fame. Vauvenargues is probably thinking of Pascal when he says that those who dilate upon the inevitable nothingness of human glory would feel vexation if they had to endure the open contempt of a single individual. Men are proud of little things--of dancing well or even of skating gracefully, or of still meaner accomplishments, yet those very persons despise real renown. ”But us,” he says in one of his n.o.ble outbursts, ”but us it excites to labour and virtue.” We note, then, at once that the _amour-propre_ of the seventeenth century, the sentiment against which we saw the most burning arrows of La Rochefoucauld directed, was not the source of Vauvenargues' desire of glory; that with him renown was not a matter of egotistic satisfaction, but of altruistic stimulus, awakening in others, by a happy rivalry, sentiments of generosity and self-sacrifice which might redeem society and the dying world of France. And this may perhaps at this point be observed as the centre of his action, namely the discovery that a wholesome desire for fame proceeds not from our self-satisfaction, but from our profound sense of emptiness, of imperfection.
How needful the lesson was, no one who examines the social history of the first half of the eighteenth century can doubt. Without falling into errors of a Puritanic kind, we cannot fail to see that opinion and action alike had become soft, irresolute, superficial; that strong views of duty and piety and justice were half indulged in, half sneered at, and not at all acted upon. The great theologians who surrounded Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux, had died one by one, and had left successors who were partly pagan, partly atheist. Art and literature tripped after the flowered skirts of the emanc.i.p.ated d.u.c.h.ess of Maine. Looking round the world of France in 1746, Vauvenargues could but cry, like a preacher in the wilderness, ”we have fallen into decadence, into moral desuetude,” but he cried without anger, remembering that ”still the love of _gloire_ is the invisible soul of all those who are capable of any virtue.”
It was a critical moment in the history of France. After the long and painful wars of Louis XIV. the army had become unpopular; it was the fas.h.i.+on to sneer at it. The common soldiers were considered, and often were, the offscourings of the community. The officers, who had left their homes too soon, in most cases, to acquire the rudiments of education, were bored with garrison life, and regretted Paris, which they made every excuse to regain. They affected to have no curiosity about military science, and to talk ”army shop” was the worst of bad form. Those who were poor lived and grumbled in their squalor; those who were rich gave themselves up to sinful extravagance. There was no instinctive patriotism in any section of the troops. What pleasure can a man have in being a soldier if he possesses neither talent for war, nor the esteem of his men, nor a taste for glory? It is Vauvenargues himself, who had seen all cla.s.ses of officers, who asks that question.
From his ”Reflexions” of 1746 a chapter on ”Our Armies at the Present Moment” was omitted, and not published in its proper sequence until long after his death. No doubt its searching exposure of the rot in the military state of France was the cause of this suppression.
”Courage,” he says in this deleted chapter of his book, ”courage, which our ancestors admired as the first of virtues, is now generally regarded as a popular error.” Those few officers who still desire to see their country glorious, are forced to retire into civil life because they cannot endure a condition in which there is no reward but shame for a man of courage and ambition.
These were prominent among the considerations which filled the mind of Vauvenargues when, at the age of twenty-nine, he saw himself driven out of military life by the rapid aggravation of ill-health. His thoughts turned to diplomacy. He greatly admired the writings of Sir William Temple, on whom he may have partly modelled his own style as an essayist; he dreamed of becoming an amba.s.sador of the same cla.s.s, known, as Temple was, ”by their writings no less than by their immortal actions.” But his inexorable bad luck followed him in this design. A pathetic letter to the King remained unanswered, and so did another to Amelot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
After waiting a long time he wrote again to Amelot, and this second letter is highly characteristic of the temper and condition of Vauvenargues--
”MONSEIGNEUR.
”I am painfully distressed that the letter which I had the honour of writing to you, as well as that which I took the liberty of asking you to forward to the King, have not been able to arrest your attention.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that a minister so fully occupied as you are should not find time to examine such letters; but, Monseigneur, will you permit me to point out to you that it is precisely this moral impossibility for a gentleman, who has no claim but zeal, to reach his master, which leads to that discouragement that is noticeable in all the country n.o.bility, and which extinguishes all emulation?
”I have pa.s.sed, Monseigneur, my youth far from all worldly distractions, in order to prepare myself for the species of employment for which it was my belief that my temperament designed me; and I was bold enough to think that so concentrated an effort would place me at least on a level with those who depend for all their fortune upon their intrigues and upon their pleasures. It overwhelms me, Monseigneur, to discover that the confidence which I had based mainly on the love of my duty, should be so disappointed. My health no longer permitting me to continue my services in the war, I have written to M.
the Duke de Biron to beg him to appoint my successor. I could not, in a situation so piteous, refrain from informing you of my despair.
Pardon me, Monseigneur, if it has led me into any extravagance of expression.
”I am, etc.”
To this last appeal the Minister for Foreign Affairs did respond in a brief and perfunctory note, promising to find an occasion of bringing the talents of Vauvenargues to the notice of the King, but nothing resulted. Vauvenargues had been living in a dream of military glory, and had been thirsting to serve his country in the loftiest and most responsible capacities. His very physical appearance now completed the bankruptcy of his wishes, for he was attacked with the smallpox, which disfigured him so badly that, to use his own expression, ”it prevented his soul from appearing in his features.” Thus without fortune, or profession, without hope for the future, half-blind, with gangrened limbs that tottered under his feeble body, Vauvenargues started on the steadily downward path which was to lead in less than four years to his grave. History presents to us no more dolorous figure of physical and social failure, nor a more radiant example of moral success.
The alternative now presented itself of a wretched solitude in the castle of his Provencal ancestors, or a garret, perhaps even more wretched, but certainly far less solitary, in Paris. In either case it would be necessary to relinquish all the luxuries, all the comforts of life. He chose to finish his suffering years in Paris, and in humble furnished rooms in the street of the Peac.o.c.k, where he was consoled by the visits of Voltaire and Marmontel. We find him settled there in May 1745, and seven months later there crept into circulation an anonymous volume of moral essays, which was absolutely ignored by the literary world of France. We do not appreciate to the full the Calvary which Vauvenargues so meekly mounted, unless we realize that to all his other failures was added a complete disregard of his ideas by the literary public of his own day. He died unknown, save by two or three friends, having never experienced anything but languor, disappointment and obscurity. Under the pseudonym of Clazomene, just before his death, he drew a picture of his own fortune and character which proves that he had no illusion about himself, and which yet contains not a murmur against the injustice of fate nor a breath of petulance or resentment. ”Let no one imagine,” this portrait closes, ”that Clazomene would exchange his wretchedness for the prosperity of weak men; fortune may sport with the wisdom of brave souls, but it has no power to subdue their courage.”
It is time, however, to examine the actual compositions of our author.[18] Until his friends.h.i.+p with Voltaire began, Vauvenargues had not given much attention to verse, but he now began a series of critical essays on the poets. He says, in the course of these ”Reflexions,” that what little he knew of poetry he owed to M. de Voltaire. His remarks on this subject, however, are more independent than he would give us to suppose, and they are always worthy of attention because they ill.u.s.trate the moral att.i.tude of Vauvenargues himself. He was not embarra.s.sed by tradition in advancing along his road through the masterpieces of literature. He was always an amateur, never a man in bondage to the ”authorities;” he seems, indeed, to have avowed a dislike for general reading: ”Pascal avait peu lu, ainsi que Malebranche,” was his excuse. In the case of Pascal, we may question the fact, but it is recorded that when at last Malebranche was persuaded to read Descartes' ”Traite de l'homme,” it excited him so violently as to bring on palpitation of the heart. Such are the dangers of a r.e.t.a.r.ded study of the cla.s.sics. Vauvenargues was no less inflammable. He met with the tragedies of Racine at a moment when the reputation of that poet had sunk to its lowest point, and, totally indifferent to the censure of the academical sanhedrim, he extolled him as a master-anatomist of the human heart.
[Footnote 18: The writings of Vauvenargues exist in a confusion which is not likely to be ever remedied, for the bulk of his MSS. were burned during the Commune in May 1871.
But much grat.i.tude is owing to Suard (1806) and Gilbert (1857) for their pious labours. A variorum edition might even yet be attempted, and although not complete, might at least be final.]
In considering the observations of Vauvenargues with regard to poets, we must bear in mind that he and his contemporaries did not seek from poetry what we require in the twentieth century. The critics of the early eighteenth century in France talked about Homer and Virgil, but what they really admired were Ariosto and Pope. Voltaire, the greatest of them, considered the ”epopee hero-comique” the top-stone of modern practical effort; we know what astonis.h.i.+ng feats he was himself guilty of in that species of architecture. But his whole teaching and practice tended towards an ident.i.ty of speech between prose and verse, the prosodical pattern or ornament being the sole feature which distinguished the latter from the former. His own poetry, when it was not fugitive or satiric, was mainly philosophical, that is to say, it did not stray beyond the confines of logic and wit. At the same time, Voltaire was an energetic protagonist for verse, and he did very much to prevent the abandonment of this instrument at a time when prose, in such hands as those of Montesquieu and Buffon, was manifestly in the ascendant. He earnestly recommended the cultivation of a form in which precision of thought and elegance of language were indispensable, and he employed it in tragedies which we find it impossible to read, but which enchanted the ear and fancy of Vauvenargues.
The taste of the age of Louis XV. affected to admire Corneille to the disadvantage of all other rivals, and Voltaire was not far from blaming Vauvenargues for his ”extreme predilection” for Racine. But Vauvenargues, with unexpected vivacity, took up the cudgels, and accused the divine Corneille of ”painting only the austere, stern, inflexible virtues,” and of falling into the affectation of mistaking bravado for n.o.bility, and declamation for eloquence. He is extremely severe on the faults of the favourite tragedian, and he blames Corneille for preferring the gigantic to the human, and for ignoring the tender and touching simplicity of the Greeks. It is from the point of view of the moralist that these strictures are now important; they show us that Vauvenargues in his reiterated recommendation of virtue and military glory did not regard those qualities from the Cornelian point of view, which he looked upon as fostering a pompous and falsely ”fastueux” conception of life. He blamed Corneille's theatrical ferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the pa.s.sage ”a detestable piece of criticism” and ran his blue pencil through it. No doubt the fact is that Vauvenargues saw in the rhetoric of Corneille a parody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade.
The publications of Vauvenargues during his lifetime come under two categories. His ”Introduction a la Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain” is a short book, and it is also a fragment. The author had begun to collect notes for it during his Bohemian campaign, in 1741; but ”those pa.s.sions which are inseparable from youth, and ceaseless physical infirmity, brought on by the war, interrupted my studies,” he says.
Voltaire has expressed his amazement that under such piteous conditions, Vauvenargues had the fort.i.tude to pursue them at all.
There seems to be a change apparent in the object he put before him; he set out, like Locke, to write an essay on the Human Understanding, but he ended by putting together a chain of maxims. He quoted Pascal, who had said, ”All good maxims are in the world; we have only got to apply them,” but though Vauvenargues takes this dictum as his text he refutes it. He says that maxims originally ”good,” in Pascal's sense, may have grown sleepy in popular use, and may have ceased to act, so that we ought to rid ourselves of conventional prejudice and go to the fountain-head, to try all spirits, in fact, and find out what spirits really are of G.o.d. When Vauvenargues began to reflect, he was astonished at the inexact.i.tude and even self-contradiction of the philosophical language of his day. He was not, and probably never would have become, what we understand now as a philosopher. He was a moralist, pure and simple, and had no more relation with men like Descartes or Berkeley than a rousing revivalist preacher has with a regius professor of Theology.
The only thing which really interested Vauvenargues was the social duty of man, and to discover what that is he attempted to define morals, politics and religion. He had an intense desire for clear guidance, and he waited for the heavenly spark to fall. He said to himself, before he made it plain to others, that if we are not guided by _truth_, we fall into the pit. There was a certain childishness in his att.i.tude in this matter, for he was inclined to regard abstract truth as the only one worthy of pursuit. That he was advancing in breadth of view is shown by the fact that he cancelled in the second edition of his book a whimsical pa.s.sage in which he urged people who were studying conchology, to throw away their sh.e.l.ls, asking them to consider ”whether glory is but a name, virtue all a mistake, and law nothing else than a phantom.” The ”Introduction” is all written in this spirit; it is a pa.s.sionate appeal to the French nation to leave mean and trivial pursuits, and to live for pure and pa.s.sionate ideals, for glory gained by merit, and as the reward of solid and strenuous effort.
<script>