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I would have given my soul to be in two places at once, but I had to risk our left and keep close to Masterton, who needed me most. The wood of La Bruyere was the maddest sight. Again and again the Boche was almost through it. You never knew where he was, and most of the fighting there was duels between machine-gun parties.
He wrote, "I warn everybody whom it may concern, in order that the world may be prepared and nobody be surprised, that if ever it should happen that one of the mighty of the earth should deem me worthy of his care, in other words if I should ever come into an immense fortune, there is a Godefroi de La Bruyère whom all the chroniclers place in the list of the greatest nobles of France who followed Godefroi de Bouillon to the conquest of the Holy Land.
Monsieur Bruyere says indeed, and likely it is, That Men have made no Laws, or put out any Edicts whereby Women are prohibited to open their Eyes; to Read; to Remember what they Read, and to make use thereof in their Conversation, or in composing of Works.
La Bruyère determined to be less exacting and yet more exact; he would sink to describing emotions less tremendous and to designing figures of more trifling value, but he would paint them with a vivid detail hitherto unsolicited.
His great claim to fame among posterity, which knows nothing of him but this, is the small volume of Characters, which served as a model for La Bruyere, and before him to the comic poets of antiquity, and which is full of wit and flavour, and to make use of a modern word exactly applicable to this ancient work "humour."
But what we miss completely in La Bruyère is that cordial recognition of women as the proper companions of men and the organizers of intelligent society which is so admirably sustained in the Spectator.
Valincourt says that "All the time La Bruyère lived in the House of Condé, everybody was always making fun of him." Possibly the fear of appearing pedantic among all these people of fashion and these tinselled flunkeys made him lend himself to ridicule.
With the great masters of the seventeenth century Pascal, Racine, La Fontaine, La Bruyère the two influences met, and achieved a perfect balance. In their work, the most penetrating realism is beautified and ennobled by all the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense.
Thus, though in the profundity of his judgement he falls so infinitely below La Bruyère, in his character-drawing he soars as high above him. His innumerable portraits are unsurpassed in literature. They spring into his pages bursting with life individual, convincing, complete, and as various as humanity itself.
In La Rochefoucauld we encountered a representative of the dominant class, the prince-dukes. La Bruyère was a typical bourgeois. In our third example of the moral energy of France we meet with a specimen of the petite noblesse, the impoverished country gentlemen who dragged out a provincial existence in obscurity and ignorance, supported by their pride in a long pedigree.
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