Part 5 (1/2)
Vauvenargues' att.i.tude to the English moralists has not been sufficiently examined. So far as is known he never visited this country, although he desired to do so. In one of his letters he speaks of intending to consult a famous oculist in London, but this project was not carried out; his poverty doubtless prevented it. Whether he knew English is not certain, but he appears to have read Temple and Locke, possibly in the original, and a reference to a remarkable English contemporary appears to have hitherto escaped observation. In the ”Introduction a la connaissance de l'esprit humain,” he speaks of a writer who has argued that private vices are public benefits, and he attempts to show that this is a fallacy. He returns, less definitely, to the same line of thought in the ”Discours sur la gloire,” where he denies that vice has any part in stimulating social action. It is strange that no one, so far as I know, has observed this proof that Vauvenargues was acquainted with the celebrated paradox of Bernard Mandeville, whose ”Fable of the Bees” was in 1747 continuing to cause so scandalous a sensation, and was still so completely misunderstood.
There seems, occasionally, a trace of the idealism of Shaftesbury in the colour of Vauvenargues' phrase, but on this it would be dangerous to insist.
His own views, however, were more emphatically defined, and more directly urged, in the other contribution to literature published by Vauvenargues in his lifetime, the ”Reflexions sur divers sujets.” Here he abandons the attempt at forming a philosophical system, and admits that his sole object is ”to form the hearts and the manners” of his readers. Perhaps the most penetrating of all his sentences is that in which he says: ”If you possess any pa.s.sion which you feel to be n.o.ble and generous, be sure you foster it.” This was diametrically opposed to all the teaching of the seventeenth-century moralists who had preceded him, and also had taught us that we should mistrust our pa.s.sions and disdain our enthusiasms. To see how completely Vauvenargues rejected the Christian doctrine of the utter decrepitude and hopeless inherent badness of the human mind, we have but to gather some of his spa.r.s.e thoughts together. He says, in defiance of Pascal and the Jansenists, ”Mankind is the only source of our happiness, outside that there is nothing.” Again, ”As it is the heart, in most people, that doubts, so when once the heart is converted, all is done; it leads them along the path to virtue.” He deprecated the constant checking and blaming of children which was part of the system of education then in vogue; he declared that it sapped the confidence of the young, their inherent sense of virtue; and he exclaimed, ”Why does no one dream of training children to be original, bold and independent?”
Those who knew Vauvenargues recognized in the purity and sweetness and severity of his teaching the record of his own conduct. Marmontel speaks of the ”tender veneration” with which all the more serious of his early comrades in the army regarded him. In his works we trace the result of a curious thing, experience superseding, taking the place of, education. ”He observed the weaknesses of mankind before he had time to reflect upon their duties,” says a contemporary. His mind, although a.s.saulted by such a crowd of disadvantages, remained calm, and free from prejudice; remained gently indulgent to human weakness on the one hand, rigid in allegiance to his ideal pursuit of ”la gloire” on the other. The n.o.ble movements of his mind were native, not acquired, and he had not been hardened or exasperated by the pressure of a mortifying theology. He does not take so exalted or so pitiless an att.i.tude as the cla.s.sic seventeenth-century moralist. Pascal scourges the ma.s.s of humanity down a steep place into the sea; Vauvenargues takes each wanderer by the hand, and leads him along the primrose path.
A singular charm in the French character lies in its gift for composite action. Frenchmen prefer marching towards victory in a body to a scattered effort of individual energy. It was part of the constructive genius of Vauvenargues to find the aim and joy of life in a combination of sentiment and action, in a community of rivals amiably striving for the crown with fellowmen of like instincts and of like experience. He was of all moralists the least solitary; he had spent his life as a soldier among soldiers, among those who did their best, in the midst of hards.h.i.+ps, to live a life of pleasure without reflection. He was no prig, but he had formed the habit of giving fatherly counsel which was much beyond his years. He observes that ”the advice of old men is like winter suns.h.i.+ne that gives out light without warmth,” but that the words of a wise and genial young man may radiate heat and glow. His own advice, given first to his fellow-officers, then to a circle of literary friends, then to France so long as her cla.s.sic literature finds readers, was identical. He hated conscientious subterfuges which equalize good and evil. He looked upon ”gloire” and ”vertu” as the two great motive forces of a sane and beneficent life. In this he was unique; Voltaire notes that Vauvenargues soared, in an age of mediocrities, _un siecle des pet.i.tesses_, by his refusal to adopt the spirit of the world. He was a puritan of the intelligence, and for the ideal of Sully or Villars he put up the ideal of Oliver Cromwell.
The moral grandeur and spiritual force of Vauvenargues' philosophy demanded in the disciple a constant exercise of energy and will. Faith inspired by effort was to be pursued through sacrifice to the utmost limits of endurance, and with no ultimate reward but _gloire_. This was, however, modified, as it is in the most strenuous direction of character in the Frenchmen of to-day, by an illuminating humanity.
Lofty as was the aim of Vauvenargues, nothing could have been more tender than his practice. We are told that the expression in the eyes of a sick animal, the moan of a wounded deer in the forest, moved him to compa.s.sion. He carried this tolerance into human affairs, for he was pre-eminently a human being; ”the least of citizens has a right to the honours of his country.” He set a high moral value on courtesy, and exposed, as a fallacy, the pretence that to be polite is to lack sincerity. His disposition was easy-going, although his intellect was such a high-flyer; in pagan times he would have believed in ridiculous divinities rather than set himself up as an atheist. He did not believe that excess of knowledge gives firmness to the judgment, and he remarks that the opulence of learned men often leads to more errors than the poverty of those who depend on the native virtues of instinct and experience. He has phrases which seem meant to condemn the mechanical emptiness of the modern German system of _kultur_.
Full of ardour for all that is beautiful and good, tortured by disease and pinched by poverty, but never allowing his personal misfortunes to affect his view of life, or to cloud his vision of the trinity of heavenly lights, _merite_, _vertu_, _gloire_, Vauvenargues pursued his painful life in the Street of the Peac.o.c.k. He knew his feebleness, but he refused to let it depress him; ”labour to get _gloire_ is not lost,” he said, ”if it tends to make us worthy of it.” In his curious mixture of simplicity and acuteness, in his gravity and ardour, he was morally just like the best types which this great war has produced, he is like Paul Lintier in France, like Julian Grenfell among ourselves, meeting the worst blows of fate with serenity and almost with ecstasy, with no shadow of indignation or rebellion. Some posthumous reflections have let us into the secret that, as the shadows darkened around him, he occasionally gave way, if not to despair, yet to depression, and permitted himself to wonder whether all his effort in the cause of manliness and virtue had been useless. He had not awakened the sleepers in France; he doubted that his voice would ever reach them; he asked himself whether all his effort had not been in vain. This was the natural inner weakness consequent on his physical state; he gave no outward sign of it. Marmontel, who watched his last hours with enthusiastic affection, says that, ”In his company we learned how to live,--and how to die.” He lay like Socrates, surrounded by his friends, talking and listening to the last; he astonished them by the eloquence and gravity of his discourse. His latest recorded utterance was, ”Fortune may sport with the wisdom of those who are courageous, but it has no power to bend their courage.”
Gently but firmly refusing the importunities of the Church, Vauvenargues was released from his life-in-death on May 28, 1747, in his thirty-second year.
You will not find in the pages of Vauvenargues a distinct revival of that pa.s.sion for the very soil of France, ”la terre sainte, la douce France,” which inspired the n.o.ble ”Chanson de Roland” and has been so strongly accentuated in the recent struggle for Alsace-Lorraine. But he recalled to the memory of a generation which had grown densely material the forgotten ideal of France as the champion of chivalry. We must not forget that we possess in the writings of Vauvenargues merely the commencements of reflection, the first fruit of a life which was broken before its summer was complete. But we find in his teaching, and in that of no other moralist of the early eighteenth century, the insistence on spiritual courage as the necessary opposite to brutal force and mere materialism. He connected that high ambition, that craving for _la gloire_, with all pure and elevated things, with the art and literature, with the intelligence and beauty of the French creative mind. He recommended, in that gray hour of European dulness, a fresh ornament to life, a scarlet feather, a _panache_, as our French friends say. And the gay note that he blew from his battered clarion was still sounding last year in the heroic resistance of the forts of Verdun.
THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE
The spirit displayed by the young French officers in this war deserves to be compared in many essential respects with that which is blazoned in the glorious ”Chanson de Roland.” It is interesting to remember that during the long years in which the direct influence of that greatest of medieval epics was obscured, it was chiefly known through the paraphrase of it executed in German by the monk Konrad in the twelfth century. Many years ago, Gaston Paris pointed out the curious fact that Konrad completely modified the character of the ”Chanson de Roland” by omitting all expressions of warlike devotion to ”la douce France,” and by concentrating the emotion of the poem on its religious sentiment. But the real theme of the ”Chanson de Roland,” as we know now, was the pa.s.sionate attachment of the heroes to the soil of France; ”ils etaient pousses par l'amour de la patrie, de l'empereur francais leur seigneur, de leur famille, et surtout de la gloire.”
It is a remarkable instance of German ”penetration” that in the paraphrase of the ”Chanson de Roland” which Germany so long foisted upon Europe, these elements were successfully effaced. There was a sort of poetical revenge, therefore, in the att.i.tude of those who answered the challenge of Germany in the true spirit of Roland and Oliver.
We have seen that Vauvenargues--to whose memory the mind incessantly reverts in contemplation of the heroes of this war--says in one of his ”Maximes”--written nearly two centuries ago--”The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man.” No figure of 1914 exemplifies this quality of grace more surprisingly than Jean Allard (who called himself in literature Meeus). He was only twenty-one and a half when he was killed at Pierrepont, at the very beginning of the war, but he was already one of the promising figures of his generation. Allard was looked upon as an incipient Admirable Crichton; he was a brilliant scholar, an adroit and multiform athlete, the soul of wit and laughter, the centre of a group of adoring admirers. This sparkling poet was suddenly transformed by the declaration of war into the sternest of soldiers. His poem, called ”Demain,” created, or rather expressed, the patriotic pa.s.sion which was simultaneously evoked all over France; it is really a lesser ”Ma.r.s.eillaise.” Not less popular, but more elaborate and academic, is Allard's aviation poem, ”Plus haut toujours!”--an extraordinary vision of the flight and ecstasy and tragic death of a solitary airman. We may notice that in this, and many other verses describing recent inventions of science, the young French poets contrive to be very lucid and simple in their language, and to avoid that display of technical verbiage which deforms too many English experiments in the same cla.s.s.
It is not, however, so much by his writings, which are now collected in two, or perhaps three, little volumes, that Allard-Meeus strikes the imagination of a foreign spectator, as by his remarkable att.i.tude.
From the first, this lad of twenty-one exemplified and taught the value of a chivalrous behaviour. In the face of events, in that corruption of all which could make the martial spirit seem n.o.ble, that Germany has forced upon the world, this att.i.tude of young French officers at the very opening of the war is pathetic, and might even lend itself, if we were disposed for mirth, to an ironic smile. But it should be recorded and not forgotten. It was Allard who revived the etiquette of going to battle dressed as sprucely as for a wedding. We shall do well to recollect the symbolic value which the glove holds in legends of medieval prowess. When the dying Roland, under the pine-trees, turns to the frontier of Spain, he offers, as a dying soldier, his glove to G.o.d--
”_Pur ses pecchiez deu puroftrid son guant_.”
Allard-Meeus at St. Cyr made all the young officers swear that they would not go into battle except in white gloves and with their _kepi_ adorned with the _casoar_, the red and white dress-plume. ”Ce serment, bien francais, est aussi elegant que temeraire,” he said, and the rest followed him with acclamation. He was one of the first French officers to fall in battle, at the head of his infantry, and his mother was presented by the regiment with his _casoar_ and his gloves, worn at the moment of his death, on August 22, 1914, and stained with his blood. Allard offers a fugitive but typical specimen of the splendour of French sentiment in the first flush of its enthusiasm.
On March 26, 1917, the Societe des Gens de Lettres in Paris held a solemn a.s.sembly under the presidency of M. Pierre Decourcelle to commemorate those authors who, during the present war, have fallen in the service of France. Touching and grave in the extreme was the scene, when, before a crowded and throbbing audience, the secretary read the name of one young writer after another, pausing for the president to respond by the words ”Mort au champ d'honneur!” In each case there followed a brief silence more agitating in its emotion than any eloquence could be.
The great number of young men of high intellectual promise who were killed early in this war is a matter for grave and painful reflection.
Especially in the first months of the autumn of 1914 the holocaust was terrible. There was no restraining the ardour of the young, who sought their death in a spirit of delirious chivalry, each proud to be the Iphigenia or the Jephtha's Daughter of a France set free. It has been noted since that the young generation, born about 1890, had been prepared for the crisis in a very significant way. The spiritual condition of these grave and magnificent lads resembled nothing that had been seen before, since the sorrows of 1870. They gave the impression of being dedicated. As we now read their letters, their journals, their poems, we are astonished at the high level of moral sentiment which actuated them all. There is often even a species of rapturous detachment which seems to lift them into a higher sphere than that of vain mortality. Examples might be given by the sheaf, but it suffices here to quote a letter from the youthful Leo Lantil, who was killed early in 1915, in one of the obscure battles of Champagne.
He says, in writing to his parents, shortly before his death, ”All our sacrifice will be of sweet savour if it leads to a really glorious victory and brings more light to human souls.” It was this Leo Lantil, dying in his twenty-fifth year, whose last words were ”Priez pour la France, travaillez pour la France, haussez-la!”
A story is told by M. Henri Bordeaux which ill.u.s.trates the impression made by these young soldiers. A peasant of Savoy, while ploughing his fields in the autumn of 1914, saw his wife crossing to him with the local postman, who had a letter in his hands. He took it from them, and put on his spectacles, and read that his two sons had been killed in an engagement in the Vosges. He said quietly, ”G.o.d has found them ready,” and then, slowly, ”My poor wife!” and he returned to his yoke of oxen. It would seem that the French accepted, without reserve and without difficulty, an inward discipline for which the world had formed little conception of their readiness. There is no question now, since all the private letters and diaries prove it, that the generation which had just left college, and had hardly yet gone out into the world, had formed, unsuspected by their elders, a conception of life which might have been called fatalistic if it had not been so rigorously regulated by a sense of duty. They were singularly calm under a constant presentiment of death. When the war came, they accepted the fiery trial not merely with resignation, but even with relief. Their athletic stoicism took what fortune offered them, instead of attempting to rebel against it. Their sentiment was that a difficulty had been settled. Life had been producing upon their consciences a sense of complication, a tangle of too many problems.
Now they might, and did, cheerfully relinquish the effort to solve them. One of the most extraordinary features of the moral history of the young French officers in this war has been the abandonment of their will to the grace of G.o.d and the orders of the chief. In the letters of the three n.o.ble brothers Belmont, who fell in rapid succession, this apprentices.h.i.+p to sacrifice is remarkable, but it recurs in all the records. ”G.o.d found them ready!”
When all is of so inspired an order of feeling, it is difficult, it is even invidious, to select. But the figure of Paul Lintier, whose journals have been piously collected by M. Edmond Haraucourt, stands out before us with at least as much saliency as any other. We may take him as a peculiarly lucent example of his illuminated cla.s.s.
Quartermaster Lintier died on March 15, 1916, struck by a sh.e.l.l, on the Lorraine frontier, at a place called Jeandelincourt. He had not yet completed his twenty-third year, for he was born at Mayenne on May 13, 1893. In considering the cases of many of these brilliant and sympathetic young French officers, who had already published or have left behind them works in verse and prose, there may be a disposition, in the wonderful light of their experience, to exaggerate the positive value of their productions. Not all of them, of course, have contributed, or would have contributed, durable additions to the store of the literature of France. We see them, excusably, in the rose-light of their sunset. But, for this very reason, we are inclined to give the closer attention to Paul Lintier, who not only promised well but adequately fulfilled that promise. It seems hardly too much to say that the revelation of a prose-writer of the first cla.s.s was brought to the world by the news of his death.
His early training predicted nothing of romance. He was intended for a career in commerce, but, showing no apt.i.tude for trade, he dallied with legal studies at Lyons, and ”commenced author” by publis.h.i.+ng some essays in that city. At the age of twenty he joined a regiment of artillery, and seems to have perceived, a year before the war, that the only profession he was fitted for was soldiering. Towards the close of September 1914, in circ.u.mstances which he recounts in his book, he was severely wounded; he went back to the front in July 1915, and, as we have said, fell fighting eight months later. This is the history of a young man who will doubtless live in the annals of French literature; and brief as it seems, it is really briefer still, since all we know of Paul Lintier, or are likely ever to know, is what he tells us himself in describing what he saw and practised and endured between August 1 and September 22, 1914. This wonderful book, ”Ma Piece,” was written by the young gunner, night after night, on his knee, during seven weeks of inconceivable intensity of emotion, and it is by this revelation of his genius that his memory will be preserved.
The style of Paul Lintier is one of the miracles of art. There is no evidence that this youth had studied much or had devoted himself to any of the training which adequate expression commonly demands. We know nothing about him until he suddenly bursts upon us, in the turmoil of mobilization, as a finished author. What strikes a critical reader of ”Ma Piece,” as distinguis.h.i.+ng it from other works of its cla.s.s, is a certain intellectual firmness most remarkable in a lad of Lintier's age, suddenly confronted by such a frenzy of public action.
There is no pessimism, and no rhetoric, and no touch of humour, but an obsession for the truth. This is displayed by another and an extremely popular recent publication, ”En Campagne,” by M. Marcel Dupont, which exhibits exactly the same determination to exaggerate nothing and to reduce nothing, but to report exactly what the author saw with his own eyes, in that little corner of the prodigious battle-field in which his own regiment was fighting. Truth, the simple unvarnished truth, has been the object of these various writers in setting down their impressions, but the result exemplifies the difference between what is, and what is not, durable as literature. For this purpose, it is well to turn from Lintier's pages to those of the honest writers of whom Dupont is the type, and then back again to Lintier. All evoke, through intense emotion, most moving and most tragic sensations, but Lintier, gifted with some inscrutable magic, evokes them in the atmosphere of beauty.
A quality of the mind of Paul Lintier which marked him out for a place above his fellows was the prodigious exact.i.tude of his memory. This was not merely visual, but emotional as well. Not only did it retain, with the precision of a photograph, all the little fleeting details of the confused and hurried hours in which the war began, but it kept a minute record of the oscillation of feeling. Those readers who take a pleasure in the technical parts of writing may enjoy an a.n.a.lysis of certain pages in ”Ma Piece,” for instance, the wonderful description of an _alerte_ at 2 A.M. above the village of Tailly-sur-Meuse (pp.