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It was he who taught their nation to seize the attitude and to photograph the gesture. La Bruyère's express aim is to clarify our minds, to make us think lucidly and in consequence speak with precision. We have already seen what value he sets on the right word in the right place.
Let us see what part of La Bruyere's description may be set down to rhetoric, and to the astonishment of the scholar who looks hard at a countryman for the first time. Undoubtedly the peasant is sunburnt; unquestionably he is dirty. His speech falls roughly on a town-bred ear; his features have been made coarse by exposure. His hut is far less comfortable than a city house.
Les Caractères is the title of La Bruyère's book; but its sub-title 'Les Moeurs de ce Siècle' gives a juster notion of its contents. The whole of society, as it appeared to the subtle and penetrating gaze of La Bruyère, flows through its pages. In them, Versailles rises before us, less in its outward form than in its spiritual content its secret, essential self.
In the characteristics of a lively prose artist, we shall have to confess La Bruyère nearer to Robert Louis Stevenson than to his own immediate contemporary, Lord Halifax. The surface of La Bruyère's writing is crisp and parched, but it is easy by careful reading to crack it, and to discover the coolness, the softness, the salutary humidity which lie beneath the satirical crust of his irony.
The first word in La Bruyére's famous work "Tout est dit" "Everything has been said," is true of gambling against the bank's system, which is to take a positive advantage which must win in the long run. Not only has everything been said, but everything has been done to beat the bank.
The truth is that a strong new book is not read by a young man whose genius is prepared for its teaching, without its image being stamped upon his mind. La Bruyère's own experience had already offered to him a banquet of the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil when he met with the "Maximes" of 1665.
Hence La Bruyère's remark is, unhappily, as true as it is neat. Après l'esprit de discernement, he says, ce qu'il y a au monde de plus rare, ce sont les diamans et les perles. The spirit of discernment! the critical faculty! it is these that are lacking.
The traditional figure of the Grand Condé, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyère's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he calls him, en souquenille.
Since I knew you, I worship you more and more every day; this proves the falsity of La Bruyere's maxim, which says that love springs up all at once. Every thing in nature has its growth in different degrees.
Celimene, in Moliere, bears the whole frais of the conversation; and this female La Bruyere's tedious and solitary dissections of character would be as little borne on the English stage, as the quick and dazzling movement of so many lancets of wit as operate in the School for Scandal would be tolerated on that of the French. It is frequently said that Mr.
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