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There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a writer who can say that 'La Bruyère, animated with nearly the same genius, painted the crookedness of men with as much truth and as much force as Molière; but I believe that there is more eloquence and more elevation to be found in La Bruyère's images. Without at all undervaluing La Bruyère, one of the acutest and finest of writers, we may say that this is a truly disastrous piece of criticism.
Remember that very true maxim of La Bruyere's, 'Qu'on ne vaut dans se monde que ce qu'on veut valoir'. The knowledge of the world will teach you to what degree you ought to show 'que vous valez'. One must by no means, on one hand, be indifferent about it; as, on the other, one must not display it with affectation, and in an overbearing manner, but, of the two, it is better to show too much than too little.
Addison was not in France until La Bruyère had been some months dead; there can have been no personal intercourse between them; but he stayed at Blois for over twelve months in 1699 and 1700, and during that time he was much in company with the Abbé Phélippeaux, member of that family of friends who had so efficiently supported La Bruyère's candidature to the French Academy only six years before.
So the fools and fops of La Bruyère's time thought or pretended to think that he was seriously claiming to be of noble birth. Nothing was further from his intention; no La Bruyère had taken part in the Crusades, any more than any member of Charles Lamb's family had been Pope of Rome.
Do you remember La Bruyère's famous description of the peasants under Louis XIV.? "One occasionally meets with certain wild animals, both male and female, scattered over the country; black, livid and parched by the sun, bound to the soil which they scratch and dig up with desperate obstinacy. They have something which sounds like speech, and when they raise themselves up they show a human face.
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.
La Bruyère, in the darkness of his pessimism, sometimes suggests Swift, especially in his sarcastically serious treatment of detail; but he was without the virulent bitterness of the great Dean. In fact his indictment owes much of its impressiveness to the sobriety with which it is presented. There is no rage, no strain, no over-emphasis; one feels as one reads that this is an impartial judge. And, more than that, one feels that the judge is not only a judge, but also a human being. It is the human quality in La Bruyère's mind which gives his book its rare flavour, so that one seems to hear, in these printed words, across the lapse of centuries, the voice of a friend. At times he forgets his gloom and his misanthropy, and speaks with a strange depth of feeling on friendship or on love. 'Un beau visage, he murmurs, 'est le plus beau de tous les spectacles, et l'harmonie la plus douce est le son de voix de celle que l'on aime. And then 'Être avec les gens qu'on aime, cela suffit; rever, leur parler, ne leur parler point, penser
The consequence was that the public instantly responded to his appeal, and we have continued to contemplate with reverence Bossuet's huge historical outlines, but to turn for sheer pleasure to La Bruyère's finished etchings of the tulipomaniac and the collector of engravings. Everyone who approaches an analysis of the "Caractères" is obliged to pause to commend the style of La Bruyère.
The Englishman who said of the opera, 'At the first act I was enchanted; the second I could just bear; and at the third I ran away', is a fair illustration of an attitude common in the eighteenth century; and in France things were not much better, even in days when stage magnificence reached a point hardly surpassed in history. La Bruyère's 'Je ne sais comment l'opéra avec une musique si parfaite, et une dépense toute royale, a pu réussir
Few people at the court, and in La Bruyere's day, would have thought about the sufferings of the country folks, and conceived the idea of contrasting them with the sketch of a court-ninny. "Gold glitters," say you, "upon the clothes of Philemon; it glitters as well as the tradesman's. He is dressed in the finest stuffs; are they a whit the less so when displayed in the shops and by the piece?
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