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This was not quite the opinion formed by Boileau of La Bruyere. "Maximilian came to see me at Auteuil," writes Boileau to Racine on the 19th of May, 1687, the very year in which the Caracteres was published; "he read me some of his Theophrastus. However, he has wit, learning, and merit." Amidst his many and various portraits, La Bruyere has drawn his own with an amiable pride.
On peut le voir, dit on, a minuit, dans sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir, et ayant a sa main un crayon de charbon. Le lendemain on trouve des caracteres inconnus sur les bords du journal. Ce qui prouve que le spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professeurs de Cambridge sont des imbeciles qui ne savent rien du tout, du tout.
But if we wish to see how far behind the best French writers our own best still were, we need but compare the exquisite speed and elasticity of the "Caractères" with the comparative heaviness and slowness of a famous Theophrastian essay published in the same year, 1688, namely the "Character of a Trimmer."
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.
No pompous Academician, for instance, likes to hear, in the solemn conclave of his colleagues, that he is so Christian and so charitable that "writing well may be said to be among the least of his qualities." La Bruyère summed up his attacks in a preface to the eighth edition of the "Caractères" in 1694.
It could only be from La Rochefoucauld that the author of "Les Caractères" derived that sad disillusionment, lighted up by flashes of savage wit, with which he expresses his sense of the defects of human character. It may often be noted that when La Bruyère speaks of egotism, of the prevalence of amour-propre, his pungent phrases have the very sound of those of his precursor.
The love of ease that luxury brings along with it, the selfish and compromising spirit, in which the members of a polished society countenance each other, and which reverses the principle of patriotism, by sacrificing public interests to private ones, the substitution of intellectual for moral excitement, and the repression of enthusiasm by fastidiousness and ridicule, these are among the causes that undermine a people, that corrupt in the very act of enlightening them; till they become, what a French writer calls "esprits exigeans et caracteres complaisans," and the period in which their rights are best understood may be that in which they most easily surrender them.
There were portraits of every grade of excellence and every variety of people, until they culminated, some years later in "Les Caracteres" of La Bruyere, who dropped personalities and gave them the form of permanent types.
But there is not a careless phrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in the range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the "Caractères." It started, probably, with the jotting down of social remarks at long intervals.
Isaac Bickerstaffs "portraits" of Chloe and Clarissa, or the "lucubration" on Deference to Public Opinion. When La Bruyère died, Steele was already an author, and what is more, a moralist. It is impossible not to believe that he had been reading the "Caractères" when it occurred to him that he might procure himself "a most exquisite pleasure," by framing "Characters of Domestic Life."
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