If we had been in Paris on a summer's day in 1744 we might have seen emerge from a modest house in the ungenteel rue du Paon (Peacock Street) a young man of less than twenty-nine years of age. It is improbable that we should have been attracted to him without warning, for though his expression was very pleasant, he was not distinguished-looking, and though he was uncomplaining, his evident air of suffering was painful to witness. He had the gallant bearing of a soldier and a certain noble elegance, but a shade across his forehead testified to the failure of his eyesight, and he shambled along with difficulty on two lame legs. If we followed him he would probably take us slowly to the Garden of the Luxembourg, where it was very unlikely that any one would greet him.
He would presently turn out of the fashionable promenade, to contemplate the poor and the unfortunate. Sometimes he would stop those who seemed most wretched, and would try to share their sorrows, but sympathy on the part of a gentleman was strange, or else there was something in himself which failed to express his tenderness, for he complained that the unfortunate always turned away from him. If, at the moment of such a repulse, we had addressed him, and had respectfully offered him our sympathy, he would have struggled with his painful shyness, and would have told us that he felt no resentment against those who rejected his help. Nothing hardened his heart, and the lack of response merely doubled his pity. He would assure us, with the pale smile which was the charm of his anæmic countenance, that those who were vicious were so by their misfortune, not their fault, and that of the worst criminals he was persuaded that, if they could, they would "end their days in innocence." With an exquisite and simple politeness he would leave us wondering a little who this pathetic young man, with all the stigmata upon him of poverty and sickness bravely borne, might be; and there would be none to explain to us that it was the Marquis de Vauvenargues, come home a broken man from the wars in Bohemia.
This inconspicuous personage, who glided almost like a ghost through less than thirty-two years of pain and adversity, was not merely the greatest moralist that France produced in the course of the eighteenth century, but was of all the world's writers perhaps the one who has lifted highest the banner of hope and joy in heroism and virtue. 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 thepetite noblesse, the impoverished country gentlemen who dragged out a provincial existence in obscurity and ignorance, supported by their pride in a long pedigree. Luc de Clapiers, whose father was raised to the marquisate of Vauvenargues in 1722, was born seven years earlier than that, at Aix in Provence, where his father was mayor. It is a pleasant touch to be told that his father was the only magistrate who did not desert his post when Aix was swept by the plague in 1720. There seems a foreshadowing here of his famous son's high courage. But it seems also certain that there was no appreciation of scholarship or literature in the household. No atmosphere less benevolent to learning can be imagined. The future philosopher went to school at Aix for a little while, and then his weak health was made the excuse for cancelling what was perhaps looked upon as a needless expense. He was thrown upon himself, and what education he secured was the result of his own desultory reading.
Vauvenargues never acquired a knowledge of Greek or even Latin,[16] but when he was about sixteen years of age he came across a book which absolutely transfigured his outlook upon the world and decided the course of his aspirations. This was none less than a translation of the "Lives" of Plutarch, a work which has had a very remarkable moral effect on the Frenchmen of four centuries. We know not which this particular translation was, but it would be pleasant to think it was that made by Amyot in 1559. The effect it had on the temperament of Vauvenargues must be told in his own words. He says in a letter to Mirabeau (March 22, 1740)—
[Footnote 16: Suard is definite as to this: "Il est mort sans être en état de lire Horace et Tacite dans leur langue."]
"I wept for joy while I read these 'Lives' [of Plutarch]. No night went by but I had spent part of it in talking to Alcibiades, to Agesilas, or to others. I walked in the streets of Rome that I might argue with the Gracchi, and when stones were flung at Cato, there was I to defend him. You remember that when Cæsar wished to pass a law which was too much in favour of the populace, Cato tried to prevent his doing so, and put his hand on Cæsar's mouth to prevent his speaking? These modes of action, so unlike our fashions of to-day, made a deep impression on me."
He attributed to the teaching of Plutarch his introduction to the master-passions of his brief future existence, namely, his devotion to a sense of heroic duty and his determination to live up to the measure of his high calling. In the pages of Plutarch he says that he discovered "la vraie grandeur de notre âme"; here was exposed before him a scene of life illustrated by "virtue without limit, pleasure without infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity, and vices without baseness and without disguise." This boyish appreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains the future moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutshell. To our great regret, it is the only positive record which survives of the adolescence of this great mind, on whose development we should so gladly dwell if it were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrases Vauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man," In his own case those "earliest days" are hopelessly sunken into oblivion.[17]
[Footnote 17: We know, at least, that he taught himself to write on the "sedulous ape" system, by imitating Bossuet and Fénelon. He must have been in several respects very much like Robert Louis Stevenson. His modesty led him to distrust his own taste, and it is worthy of notice that the corrections he made to please Voltaire often reduce the vigour of his thought in its original expression. Voltaire— it is beyond conjecture why—cancelled the famous maxim, "Les feux de l'aurore".]
How harshly his tastes were condemned at home may be judged by an anecdote about his father which occurs in the "Essai sur quelques caractères":—
"Anselme was shocked that his son should show a taste for science. He burnt the young man's papers and books, and when he learned that he had gone to sup with certain men of letters, he threatened to banish him to the country if he persisted in keepingbad company. 'Since you are fond of reading,' he said to him, 'why don't you read the history of your own family? You will not find any savants there, but you will find men of the right sort. Do you wish to be the first pedant of your race?'"
There were but two alternatives for a lad of his class who had to make a living, the Church and the Army. For Vauvenargues there could be no question, he was born to be a soldier. At the age of eighteen he entered the King's Regiment as a second-lieutenant, and he marched into Lombardy under the orders of that illustrious marshal-general, the Duke of Villars, now in his eighty-first year, but still the unquestioned summit of French military genius. The idea of "following Hannibal over the mountains" filled our young philosopher with an enthusiasm beyond his years. He took part in the victories of Parma and Guastalla, and he was probably with Villars at Turin when that indomitable octogenarian died in June 1734. The War of the Polish Succession presently sank into a mere armistice, and until 1736 we dimly perceive Vauvenargues sharing the idle and boring life of the officer who, too poor to retire to Paris, vegetates in some deplorable frontier-garrison of Burgundy or Franche Comté. We know that he was dissipated and idle, for he tells us so, but his confession is marred by no sort of priggishness, and it is very important to insist that this greatest of moralists never exaggerated the capacity of ordinary human virtue. He pretended to no exceptional loftiness in his own conduct; he demanded no excessive sacrifice on the part of others. Suard speaks of the "sweet indulgence" which marked his relations with those with whom he lived, and he tells us that Vauvenargues "gradually rose above the frivolous occupations of his time of life, without ever contracting, in the development of serious ideas, that austerity which commonly accompanies the virtues of youth…. Vauvenargues, thrown upon the world directly he ceased to be a child, learned to know men before it occurred to him to judge them. He saw their weaknesses before he had reflected on their duties; and virtue, when it entered his heart, found there all possible dispositions to indulgence."
"Dispositions to indulgence"—we linger on this phrase, which has an engaging beauty of its own. It distinguishes Vauvenargues at once from all the great French moralists who preceded him, from La Rochefoucauld with his savage cynicism, from Pascal with his contempt of the natural man. Vauvenargues rejected the idea which had so tormented the great spirits of the seventeenth century, that the noblest life was a life of mortification, and he made no demand on the soul to divorce itself from all human interests as being things naturally vile and ignominious. He was to come down to us waving an olive-branch, the most amiable of all idealists, an apostle of tolerance. He says that he "hated scorn of human things." To this we must presently return, but we may pause to note it here, as a faint light thrown over the obscurity of his adolescence.
The Marquis of Mirabeau was the cousin of Vauvenargues and almost exactly his coeval. The discovery of a packet of letters which passed between the young men from the summer of 1737 to that of 1740 has dissipated in some measure the otherwise total darkness which had gathered around the youth of our philosopher. Mirabeau (who was to be the father of the famous orator) was a man of talent, but violent, chimerical and lawless, "farouche," as he himself put it. Later he was the author of the redoubtable "Ami des Hommes." This prodigal uncle of the Revolution, this dangerous and violent "physiocrate" as he called himself, would seem divided, as pole from pole, from the gently-reasoning, the benevolently-meditative Vauvenargues. Nevertheless, they are seen in warm relation of friendship to each other, and the letters exhibit their characteristics. Mirabeau shamelessly pours out the catalogue of his shifting and venal loves, in confidences which Vauvenargues invariably receives with discretion, unupbraiding, but not volunteering any like confidence in his turn. A single example must be quoted: Mirabeau, wishing to get rid of a mistress of whom he is tired, but who is still devoted to him, writes her a letter of the most studied insolence, cleverly turned, and sends a copy of it, with infinite fatuity, to his friend. Vauvenargues replies that he has read out this letter at dinner to his fellow-officers, who have been greatly diverted by its wit. "But," said Vauvenargues, "we are sorry" (that is to say, of course, Vauvenargues is sorry) "for the poor girl, who shows intelligence, and who loves you." Could anything be a more indulgent, or at the same time a more definite reproof? The germ of theRéflexionsis found in this passing phrase, so unexpected in a soldier of that time and place.
An anecdote, preserved like a spark of light in the darkness of those early garrison years, takes us a step further. The sentiment of compassion was scarcely known to the early eighteenth century in France; it was certainly never extended to those unfortunate women who, as Vauvenargues puts it, "watch for young men as evening begins to darken." He was himself accosted on one occasion by a girl, whom he allowed to walk by his side while he gently questioned her. She easily told him of the wretched poverty which had driven her to vice, and Vauvenargues, after trying to revive in her some sentiment of modesty, left her with the gift of a little money. His fellow-officers of the regiment greeted the incident with shouts of mirth: such behaviour was unheard of. Vauvenargues replied: "My friends, you laugh too easily. I am sorry for these poor creatures, obliged to ply such a profession to earn their bread. The world is full of sorrows which wring my heart; if we are to be kind only to those who deserve it, we may never be called upon at all. We must be indulgent to the weak who have more need of support than the virtuous; and we must remember that the errors of the unfortunate are always caused by the harshness of the rich." M. Paléologue, in a very interesting passage, has remarked that we have to wait a hundred years before there is a repetition in French literature of this peculiar mansuétude.
Bearing in mind this capacity for indulgence, for pity, and remembering how little it was conceived in the age he lived in, we may look forward a moment to recognize that in his whole teaching Vauvenargues differs from other moralists, but particularly from his great predecessors in France, in that he has a constructive object. He wishes exceedingly to help the unfortunate to live happily, easily and profitably, and he regards almost the whole human race as more or less unhappy. His desire, therefore, is not, as that of the seventeenth-century moralists had been, to put human egotism in the pillory and to pelt it with rotten eggs, but so far as possible to encourage and affirm a decent, self-respecting egotism. Vauvenargues finds the lock of life to be rusty; he touches it with the oiled feather of his advice, so that the key may turn without resistance, and without noise. He does not profess to strive after perfection in conduct, but after improvement, and he is most careful never to recommend violent means or an excessive austerity; nor does he condemn or scold, even when his own humanity is most affronted, but he tries to induce every one to make the best of his relations with other men during the fugitive and frail duration of their common existence. If he hated anything—in his universal benignity—Vauvenargues hated a rigid puritanism. In one place he says, "We believe no longer in witches, and yet there are people who still believe in Calvin!"
Vauvenargues was twenty-six years of age when the war of the Austrian Succession broke out, and swept him into military action. He was vegetating in garrison at Metz when the armies of Marshal de Belle-Isle, the gallant and thrice-unfortunate, streamed eastward into Germany and carried our philosopher with them. The Regiment of the King, of which Vauvenargues was an officer, reached Bohemia in July 1741. In a night attack of extraordinary rapidity and audacity Prague was captured, and Vauvenargues took a personal part in this adventure, which must have cast fuel on the fire of his rising military ambition. But the conduct of war is all composed of startling ups and downs, and at the height of the successes of the French, their luck abandoned them. Relieved by no reinforcements and pressed hard by famine, the army of Belle-Isle could no longer hold Prague, and on the night of December 16-17, 1742, began the retreat from Bohemia which is one of the most noted disasters of the eighteenth century. Nine days later, what remained of the French army arrived at Egra, but after a march through thick fog over frozen ground, without food, without shelter, in a chaotic frenzy of despair.
Vauvenargues was one of those who never recovered from the agony of the retreat from Prague. Both his legs were frost-bitten, so that for the remainder of his life he was lame; his eyesight was permanently impaired; and he appears to have sown the seeds of the pulmonary disease which was to carry him off five years later. But his tender heart endured what were still severer pangs from the sufferings and death of those of his companions for whom he had the greatest regard. Among these the first place was held by Hippolyte de Seyres, whose figure pervades the earliest developments of the genius of Vauvenargues. De Seyres was a lieutenant in the philosopher's regiment. He was only eighteen years of age, and Vauvenargues felt for him the interest of an elder brother and the affection of a devoted friend. We can trace the progress of the sentiment, in which are fully revealed for the first time the peculiar qualities of our author's mind. He does not conceal from himself the weaknesses of the character of De Seyres, he blames him for his lack of suppleness, of simplicity of manner, of self-confidence. He found in him a proud and delicate spirit which exaggerated its own frailties and shrank morbidly from their consequences. He was anxious that the spirit of the young man should not be debased by low associations; he did not think the slightly older officers who surrounded De Seyres to be wholesome companions for him. The lad displayed a lack of moral force; he hoped to succeed less by his own exertions than by the favour of others; he was in despair over his own faults without having the energy to correct them. It is in writing about De Seyres that Vauvenargues first defines his central axiom, that the only sources of success are virtue, genius and patience. He observed the lack of them all in De Seyres, and his incapacity for expansion made his case the more difficult to handle. "Son coeur est toujours serré," Vauvenargues exclaims. But he nourished a deep and ever-deepening affection for this sensitive lad, and became desirous, almost passionately desirous, to lead him up to better things from out of the mediocrity of his present associations.
It appears certain to me that it was the study expended on the character of Hippolyte de Seyres and the shock received by his dreadful death which gave the earliest expansion to the genius of Vauvenargues and left their definite mark on his writings. I do not know why this all-important episode seems to have attracted so little of the attention of those who have written about him. The "Conseils à un Jeune Homme," which was evidently finished in 1743, is the earliest complete work of Vauvenargues which we possess; it contains in embryo the whole of his teaching as a moralist, and it was written for the guidance of young De Seyres. On the other hand, I think that Gilbert and other editors are mistaken in attributing the "Discours sur la Gloire" to the same date and occasion; it seems to me much later in style, and addressed to a very different person. The note of the address to De Seyres is accurately given in the exquisite essay entitled "Love of the Noble Passions." But it appears that the edifice built up by the tender affection of Vauvenargues was rased to the ground in December 1742. The young friend so passionately guarded, so anxiously watched, died under his eyes in the course of the terrible retreat over the icy passes of Bohemia, a victim to the united agony of famine, cold and fatigue. Vauvenargues wrote an "Éloge" on his young friend, which betrays something of the hysterical agitation of his own soul. Here is a fragment of this strange document—
"Open, ye formidable sepulchres! Solitary phantoms, speak, speak! What unconquerable silence! O sad abandonment! O terror! What hand is it which holds all nature paralyzed beneath its pressure? O thou hidden and eternal Being, deign to dissipate the alarm in which my feeble soul is plunged. The secret of Thy judgments turns my timid heart to ice. Veiled in the recesses of Thy being, Thou dost forge fate and time, and life and death, and fear and joy, and deceitful and credulous hope. Thou dost reign over the elements and over hell in revolt. The smitten air shudders at Thy voice. Redoubtable judge of the dead, take pity upon my despair."
This is a voice we hear, so far as I remember, nowhere else in the French literature of the eighteenth century. There is a certain accent of Bossuet in it; it is still more like the note which a group of English poets were striking. It may really seem to us an extraordinary coincidence that the "Éloge" on Hippolyte de Seyres should belong to the very same year, 1743, which saw the publication of Blair's "Grave" and Young's "Night Thoughts."
The rhetorical turn of the sentences I have just read was not habitual with Vauvenargues; it was in this case the mask worn by the intensity of his feeling, but he confesses in an early letter, "I like sometimes to string big words together, and to lose myself in a period; I make a jest of it." But after this outburst of panic grief in 1743 we see no more trace of such a tendency to eloquence. He became more and more completely himself, that is to say, very simple intellectually, in a pedantic age. He adopted, indeed, a certain gravity at which we may now smile; he did not approve of fairy-tales and fables, on the ground that anything which came between direct truth and the receptive mind of man was a disadvantage. "The disease of our age is to want to make jokes about everything," he complains.
To poor Vauvenargues life was not a laughing matter. His health had been completely ruined by the disastrous campaigns in Austria, and by the hardships of garrison life; and he was feeling more and more sharply that pinch of genteel poverty which is the hardest of all to bear. But if he never laughed, this martyr of the soul never ceased to smile. His perpetual sufferings did not affect his gentle sobriety of conversation. Those whose privilege it was to see Vauvenargues during these last years of his brief existence are united in their report of his magnanimity. Voltaire wrote, "I have always found him the most unfortunate of human beings and the most tranquil." He was notable for his "indulgent goodness," his "constant peace," his "justice of heart," his "rectitude of soul." His conversation, so Marmontel reports to us, had something more animated, more delicate, than even his divine writings. The same acute observer noted that in the heart of Vauvenargues, when he reflected upon the misery of mankind, pity took the place of indignation and hatred. Sensitive, serene, compassionate, affable, he tried to conceal from his friends as much as possible his own pain, and even when it was evident that he suffered most, no one dared to be melancholy in his presence.
In the fleeting and impoverished life of Vauvenargues his friendships were the main adventure. We have mentioned a name which is too frequently the object of malignity on English lips, the name of Voltaire. No one would pretend that the multiform energy of this giant of literature did not take some unseemly directions and several unlovely shapes. But the qualities of Voltaire must, in the eyes of any unbiassed observer, vastly overtop his defects. If, however, we wish to see Voltaire at his best, we must contemplate him in relation to our soldier-philosopher. As soon as his health had recovered a little from the horror of the Bohemian campaign, Vauvenargues took the step of writing to Voltaire, then a stranger, for his opinion on that crying question, the relative greatness of Corneille and of Racine, a question to all Frenchmen like that between predestination and free-will to Milton's rebel angels. This was towards the end of 1743, when Voltaire, who had reached his fiftieth year, was recognised as the first living historian and critic in France, and had been recalled to court through the good offices of Mme du Châtelet. It was, no doubt, at a happy moment that Vauvenargues' random letter arrived, Voltaire responded with ardour; Vauvenargues quickly became to him, as Marmontel says, what Plato was to Socrates, and nothing in the long life of Voltaire shows him in a more charming light than does his devotion to the young friend whom he called "the sweet hope of the remainder of my days." After the death of the philosopher, Voltaire wrote a brief, but invaluable, account of their relations, which had lasted, without a cloud, until the death of Vauvenargues.
He reminded Voltaire of Pascal, whose "incurable disease was consoled by study," but the elder friend noted a striking distinction; the eloquence of Pascal was fiery and imperious, that of Vauvenargues was "insinuating." The powerful physical force of Voltaire was softened by the suffering of his young companion, for whom "nature had poured out large draughts of hemlock," and who, "while all his body sank into dissolution, preserved in spirit that perfect tranquillity which the pure alone enjoy." Although Vauvenargues was twenty years younger than his friend, Voltaire succumbed to the gravity of his demeanour; like the fellow-officers at Arras or at Metz, we smile to find him addressing Vauvenargues asmon père. One of the philosopher's maxims is, "Great thoughts proceed from the heart," and Voltaire in a note has added, "In writing this, though he knew it not, he painted his own portrait." He found in Vauvenargues "the simplicity of a timid child," and it seems that he had a difficulty in overcoming his modesty so far as to make him write down those Reflections which are now placed for ever among the masterpieces of French literature. It is to Voltaire that we owe the fact that Vauvenargues found resolution enough to become an author.
A typical instance of the mixture of courage and tact in the young author is to be found in the attitude which he took up towards Voltaire with regard to the Marquise de Pompadour, without in the least offending his tempestuous friend. That remarkable young lady, then still known as la petite Étoile, had succeeded in catching the King's eye, and was soaring into the political heavens like a rocket, carrying, among other incongruous objects, the genius of Voltaire in her glittering train. Voltaire must have boasted to his young friend that his fortune was made. Vauvenargues surprisingly expresses in his reply the evil which must be done by great authors who flatter vice and think to conceal its corruption by heaping flowers over a lie. The incident is important for us, because it led Vauvenargues, thus disappointed in Voltaire as he had been disappointed in Mirabeau, to examine into the sources of the low moral condition of the age. He attributed it to "le mépris de la gloire," and he set himself to define this quality and to impress it, with all the force of repetition, on the dulled consciences of his contemporaries.
It is extremely difficult, it is well-nigh impossible, to find an equivalent in English for the word "gloire." It is a French conception, and one to which our language does not readily, or gracefully, lend itself. In the mind of Vauvenargues the idea of "gloire" took the central place, and we may form an intelligent conception of the meaning he stamped upon the word, by repeating some of his axioms.
He says: "The flush of dawn is not so lovely as the earliest experiences ofgloire.Gloiremakes heroes beautiful." Again: "Nothing is so essential as renown, and nothing so surely gives renown as merit; these are things that reason itself has united, and why should we distinguish truegloirefrom merit, which is the source of it, and of which it is the proof?" This moral union of merit, glory and renown, in triple splendour revolving round each other, was the main object of Vauvenargues' contemplation, and he admits that the central passion of his life was "l'amour de la gloire." What, then, is the exact meaning of "la Gloire," which the dictionaries superficially translate by "glory,"—a very different thing?
Vauvenargues starts a new conception of the value of self-esteem, or rather of the desire of being esteemed by others. The seventeenth century had poured its vials of contempt over theamour-propreof mankind, and no doubt that had led to a corresponding decline in the energy of the nation. Pascal had severely ridiculed the vanity which he says is anchored in the heart of man, and he actually mocks at the idea of a desire for renown; expressing his astonishment that even philosophers have the fatuity to wish for fame. Vauvenargues is probably thinking of Pascal when he says that those who dilate upon the inevitable nothingness of human glory would feel vexation if they had to endure the open contempt of a single individual. Men are proud of little things—of dancing well or even of skating gracefully, or of still meaner accomplishments, yet those very persons despise real renown. "But us," he says in one of his noble outbursts, "but us it excites to labour and virtue." We note, then, at once that theamour-propreof the seventeenth century, the sentiment against which we saw the most burning arrows of La Rochefoucauld directed, was not the source of Vauvenargues' desire of glory; that with him renown was not a matter of egotistic satisfaction, but of altruistic stimulus, awakening in others, by a happy rivalry, sentiments of generosity and self-sacrifice which might redeem society and the dying world of France. And this may perhaps at this point be observed as the centre of his action, namely the discovery that a wholesome desire for fame proceeds not from our self-satisfaction, but from our profound sense of emptiness, of imperfection.
How needful the lesson was, no one who examines the social history of the first half of the eighteenth century can doubt. Without falling into errors of a Puritanic kind, we cannot fail to see that opinion and action alike had become soft, irresolute, superficial; that strong views of duty and piety and justice were half indulged in, half sneered at, and not at all acted upon. The great theologians who surrounded Bossuet, the Eagle of Meaux, had died one by one, and had left successors who were partly pagan, partly atheist. Art and literature tripped after the flowered skirts of the emancipated Duchess of Maine. Looking round the world of France in 1746, Vauvenargues could but cry, like a preacher in the wilderness, "we have fallen into decadence, into moral desuetude," but he cried without anger, remembering that "still the love ofgloireis the invisible soul of all those who are capable of any virtue."
It was a critical moment in the history of France. After the long and painful wars of Louis XIV. the army had become unpopular; it was the fashion to sneer at it. The common soldiers were considered, and often were, the offscourings of the community. The officers, who had left their homes too soon, in most cases, to acquire the rudiments of education, were bored with garrison life, and regretted Paris, which they made every excuse to regain. They affected to have no curiosity about military science, and to talk "army shop" was the worst of bad form. Those who were poor lived and grumbled in their squalor; those who were rich gave themselves up to sinful extravagance. There was no instinctive patriotism in any section of the troops. What pleasure can a man have in being a soldier if he possesses neither talent for war, nor the esteem of his men, nor a taste for glory? It is Vauvenargues himself, who had seen all classes of officers, who asks that question. From his "Réflexions" of 1746 a chapter on "Our Armies at the Present Moment" was omitted, and not published in its proper sequence until long after his death. No doubt its searching exposure of the rot in the military state of France was the cause of this suppression.
"Courage," he says in this deleted chapter of his book, "courage, which our ancestors admired as the first of virtues, is now generally regarded as a popular error." Those few officers who still desire to see their country glorious, are forced to retire into civil life because they cannot endure a condition in which there is no reward but shame for a man of courage and ambition.
These were prominent among the considerations which filled the mind of Vauvenargues when, at the age of twenty-nine, he saw himself driven out of military life by the rapid aggravation of ill-health. His thoughts turned to diplomacy. He greatly admired the writings of Sir William Temple, on whom he may have partly modelled his own style as an essayist; he dreamed of becoming an ambassador of the same class, known, as Temple was, "by their writings no less than by their immortal actions." But his inexorable bad luck followed him in this design. A pathetic letter to the King remained unanswered, and so did another to Amelot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
After waiting a long time he wrote again to Amelot, and this second letter is highly characteristic of the temper and condition of Vauvenargues—
"I am painfully distressed that the letter which I had the honour of writing to you, as well as that which I took the liberty of asking you to forward to the King, have not been able to arrest your attention. It is not, perhaps, surprising that a minister so fully occupied as you are should not find time to examine such letters; but, Monseigneur, will you permit me to point out to you that it is precisely this moral impossibility for a gentleman, who has no claim but zeal, to reach his master, which leads to that discouragement that is noticeable in all the country nobility, and which extinguishes all emulation?
"I have passed, Monseigneur, my youth far from all worldly distractions, in order to prepare myself for the species of employment for which it was my belief that my temperament designed me; and I was bold enough to think that so concentrated an effort would place me at least on a level with those who depend for all their fortune upon their intrigues and upon their pleasures. It overwhelms me, Monseigneur, to discover that the confidence which I had based mainly on the love of my duty, should be so disappointed. My health no longer permitting me to continue my services in the war, I have written to M. the Duke de Biron to beg him to appoint my successor. I could not, in a situation so piteous, refrain from informing you of my despair. Pardon me, Monseigneur, if it has led me into any extravagance of expression.
"I am, etc."
To this last appeal the Minister for Foreign Affairs did respond in a brief and perfunctory note, promising to find an occasion of bringing the talents of Vauvenargues to the notice of the King, but nothing resulted. Vauvenargues had been living in a dream of military glory, and had been thirsting to serve his country in the loftiest and most responsible capacities. His very physical appearance now completed the bankruptcy of his wishes, for he was attacked with the smallpox, which disfigured him so badly that, to use his own expression, "it prevented his soul from appearing in his features." Thus without fortune, or profession, without hope for the future, half-blind, with gangrened limbs that tottered under his feeble body, Vauvenargues started on the steadily downward path which was to lead in less than four years to his grave. History presents to us no more dolorous figure of physical and social failure, nor a more radiant example of moral success.
The alternative now presented itself of a wretched solitude in the castle of his Provençal ancestors, or a garret, perhaps even more wretched, but certainly far less solitary, in Paris. In either case it would be necessary to relinquish all the luxuries, all the comforts of life. He chose to finish his suffering years in Paris, and in humble furnished rooms in the street of the Peacock, where he was consoled by the visits of Voltaire and Marmontel. We find him settled there in May 1745, and seven months later there crept into circulation an anonymous volume of moral essays, which was absolutely ignored by the literary world of France. We do not appreciate to the full the Calvary which Vauvenargues so meekly mounted, unless we realize that to all his other failures was added a complete disregard of his ideas by the literary public of his own day. He died unknown, save by two or three friends, having never experienced anything but languor, disappointment and obscurity. Under the pseudonym of Clazomène, just before his death, he drew a picture of his own fortune and character which proves that he had no illusion about himself, and which yet contains not a murmur against the injustice of fate nor a breath of petulance or resentment. "Let no one imagine," this portrait closes, "that Clazomène would exchange his wretchedness for the prosperity of weak men; fortune may sport with the wisdom of brave souls, but it has no power to subdue their courage."
It is time, however, to examine the actual compositions of our author.[18] Until his friendship with Voltaire began, Vauvenargues had not given much attention to verse, but he now began a series of critical essays on the poets. He says, in the course of these "Réflexions," that what little he knew of poetry he owed to M. de Voltaire. His remarks on this subject, however, are more independent than he would give us to suppose, and they are always worthy of attention because they illustrate the moral attitude of Vauvenargues himself. He was not embarrassed by tradition in advancing along his road through the masterpieces of literature. He was always an amateur, never a man in bondage to the "authorities;" he seems, indeed, to have avowed a dislike for general reading: "Pascal avait peu lu, ainsi que Malebranche," was his excuse. In the case of Pascal, we may question the fact, but it is recorded that when at last Malebranche was persuaded to read Descartes' "Traité de l'homme," it excited him so violently as to bring on palpitation of the heart. Such are the dangers of a retarded study of the classics. Vauvenargues was no less inflammable. He met with the tragedies of Racine at a moment when the reputation of that poet had sunk to its lowest point, and, totally indifferent to the censure of the academical sanhedrim, he extolled him as a master-anatomist of the human heart.
[Footnote 18: The writings of Vauvenargues exist in a confusion which is not likely to be ever remedied, for the bulk of his MSS. were burned during the Commune in May 1871. But much gratitude is owing to Suard (1806) and Gilbert (1857) for their pious labours. A variorum edition might even yet be attempted, and although not complete, might at least be final.]
In considering the observations of Vauvenargues with regard to poets, we must bear in mind that he and his contemporaries did not seek from poetry what we require in the twentieth century. The critics of the early eighteenth century in France talked about Homer and Virgil, but what they really admired were Ariosto and Pope. Voltaire, the greatest of them, considered the "épopée héroï-comique" the top-stone of modern practical effort; we know what astonishing feats he was himself guilty of in that species of architecture. But his whole teaching and practice tended towards an identity of speech between prose and verse, the prosodical pattern or ornament being the sole feature which distinguished the latter from the former. His own poetry, when it was not fugitive or satiric, was mainly philosophical, that is to say, it did not stray beyond the confines of logic and wit. At the same time, Voltaire was an energetic protagonist for verse, and he did very much to prevent the abandonment of this instrument at a time when prose, in such hands as those of Montesquieu and Buffon, was manifestly in the ascendant. He earnestly recommended the cultivation of a form in which precision of thought and elegance of language were indispensable, and he employed it in tragedies which we find it impossible to read, but which enchanted the ear and fancy of Vauvenargues.
The taste of the age of Louis XV. affected to admire Corneille to the disadvantage of all other rivals, and Voltaire was not far from blaming Vauvenargues for his "extreme predilection" for Racine. But Vauvenargues, with unexpected vivacity, took up the cudgels, and accused the divine Corneille of "painting only the austere, stern, inflexible virtues," and of falling into the affectation of mistaking bravado for nobility, and declamation for eloquence. He is extremely severe on the faults of the favourite tragedian, and he blames Corneille for preferring the gigantic to the human, and for ignoring the tender and touching simplicity of the Greeks. It is from the point of view of the moralist that these strictures are now important; they show us that Vauvenargues in his reiterated recommendation of virtue and military glory did not regard those qualities from the Cornelian point of view, which he looked upon as fostering a pompous and falsely "fastueux" conception of life. He blamed Corneille's theatrical ferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the passage "a detestable piece of criticism" and ran his blue pencil through it. No doubt the fact is that Vauvenargues saw in the rhetoric of Corneille a parody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade.
The publications of Vauvenargues during his lifetime come under two categories. His "Introduction à la Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain" is a short book, and it is also a fragment. The author had begun to collect notes for it during his Bohemian campaign, in 1741; but "those passions which are inseparable from youth, and ceaseless physical infirmity, brought on by the war, interrupted my studies," he says. Voltaire has expressed his amazement that under such piteous conditions, Vauvenargues had the fortitude to pursue them at all. There seems to be a change apparent in the object he put before him; he set out, like Locke, to write an essay on the Human Understanding, but he ended by putting together a chain of maxims. He quoted Pascal, who had said, "All good maxims are in the world; we have only got to apply them," but though Vauvenargues takes this dictum as his text he refutes it. He says that maxims originally "good," in Pascal's sense, may have grown sleepy in popular use, and may have ceased to act, so that we ought to rid ourselves of conventional prejudice and go to the fountain-head, to try all spirits, in fact, and find out what spirits really are of God. When Vauvenargues began to reflect, he was astonished at the inexactitude and even self-contradiction of the philosophical language of his day. He was not, and probably never would have become, what we understand now as a philosopher. He was a moralist, pure and simple, and had no more relation with men like Descartes or Berkeley than a rousing revivalist preacher has with a regius professor of Theology.
The only thing which really interested Vauvenargues was the social duty of man, and to discover what that is he attempted to define morals, politics and religion. He had an intense desire for clear guidance, and he waited for the heavenly spark to fall. He said to himself, before he made it plain to others, that if we are not guided bytruth, we fall into the pit. There was a certain childishness in his attitude in this matter, for he was inclined to regard abstract truth as the only one worthy of pursuit. That he was advancing in breadth of view is shown by the fact that he cancelled in the second edition of his book a whimsical passage in which he urged people who were studying conchology, to throw away their shells, asking them to consider "whether glory is but a name, virtue all a mistake, and law nothing else than a phantom." The "Introduction" is all written in this spirit; it is a passionate appeal to the French nation to leave mean and trivial pursuits, and to live for pure and passionate ideals, for glory gained by merit, and as the reward of solid and strenuous effort.
Vauvenargues' attitude 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 à 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 "Réflexions 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 passion which you feel to be noble 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 passions 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 sparse 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 assaulted 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 noble 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 attitude as the classic seventeenth-century moralist. Pascal scourges the mass 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 hardships, 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 sunshine 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 classic 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 siècle des petitesses, 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 butgloire. 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 compassion. 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 ofkultur.
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,mérite,vertu,gloire, Vauvenargues pursued his painful life in the Street of the Peacock. He knew his feebleness, but he refused to let it depress him; "labour to getgloireis 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 passion for the very soil of France, "la terre sainte, la douce France," which inspired the noble "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 forla 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, apanache, 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 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 passionate attachment of the heroes to the soil of France; "ils étaient poussés par l'amour de la patrie, de l'empereur français 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 attitude 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 Méeus). 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 passion which was simultaneously evoked all over France; it is really a lesser "Marseillaise." 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 class.
It is not, however, so much by his writings, which are now collected in two, or perhaps three, little volumes, that Allard-Méeus strikes the imagination of a foreign spectator, as by his remarkable attitude. 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 noble, that Germany has forced upon the world, this attitude 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 God—
"Pur ses pecchiez deu puroftrid son guant."
Allard-Méeus at St. Cyr made all the young officers swear that they would not go into battle except in white gloves and with theirképiadorned with thecasoar, the red and white dress-plume. "Ce serment, bien français, est aussi élégant que téméraire," 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 hiscasoarand 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 Société des Gens de Lettres in Paris held a solemn assembly 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 Léo 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 Léo 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 illustrates 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, "God 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 God and the orders of the chief. In the letters of the three noble brothers Belmont, who fell in rapid succession, this apprenticeship to sacrifice is remarkable, but it recurs in all the records. "God 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 class. Quartermaster Lintier died on March 15, 1916, struck by a shell, 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 class 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 aptitude for trade, he dallied with legal studies at Lyons, and "commenced author" by publishing 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 circumstances 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 Pièce," 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 Pièce," as distinguishing it from other works of its class, 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 exactitude 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 analysis of certain pages in "Ma Pièce," for instance, the wonderful description of analerteat 2 A.M. above the village of Tailly-sur-Meuse (pp. 131, 132). With the vigorous picturesqueness of these sentences we may compare the pensive quality and the solidity of touch which combine to form such a passage as the following account of a watch at Azannes (August 14, 1914):—"La nuit est claire, rayée par les feux des projecteurs de Verdun qui font des barres d'or dans le ciel; merveilleuse nuit de mi-août, infiniment constellée, égayée d'étoiles filantes qui laissent après elles de longues phosphorescences.
"La lune s'est levée. Elle perce mal les feuillages denses des pruniers et le cantonnement immobile reste sombre. Çà et là, seulement, elle fait des taches jaunes sur l'herbe et sur les croupes des chevaux qui dorment debout. Le camarade avec qui je partage cette nuit de garde est étendu dans son manteau au pied d'un grand poirier. Devant moi, la lune illumine la plaine. Les prairies sont voilées de gaze blanche. Les deux armées, tous feux éteints, dorment ou se guettent."
Lintier has no disposition to make things out better than they were. His account of the defeat at Virton, on August 22, is grave and calm in its sad stoicism, it is even harsh in its refusal to overlook any of the distressing features of the affair. But hope rises in his heart like clear water in a troubled well, and it is just after this melancholy set-back that the noble French spirit most vividly asserts itself. In the very forefront of physical and moral misery, "quelle émouvante compréhension de la Patrie s'est révélée à nous!" An army which is instantly and completely victorious can never experience the depth of this sentiment. It is necessary to have fought, to have suffered, to have feared (if only for a moment) that all was lost, in order to comprehend with passion what the mother-country means to a man. Lying in the fog, soaked with rain, at the edge of the copses from which the German guns had ejected them, it was at that wretched moment that the full apprehension came to Paul Lintier that France comprised for him all the charm of life, all the affections, all the joys of the eyes and the heart and the brain. "Alors, on préfère tomber, mourir là, parce qu'on sent que la France perdue, ce serait pire que la mort." This is a feeling which animates the darkest pages of his book—and many of them perforce are gloomy; through all the confusion and doubt, the disquietude, the physical dejection, the sense of a kind of blind-man's buff intolerably wearisome and fatiguing—through all this, which the young author does not seek to conceal, there runs the ceaseless bright thread of hope sustained by love.
For us English the book has a curious interest in its unlikeness to anything which an English lad of twenty would have dreamed of writing. It strikes an English reader, in comparison with the equally gallant and hardly less picturesque records which some of our own young officers have produced, as extraordinarily "grown up." The new generation which France sent into the war of defence was more simple and more ardent at the outset than our own analogous generation was. It was less dilettante and more intellectual. The evidences of thought, of reasoned reflection carried out to its full extent, of an adequate realization of the problems presented by life, are manifest, though in various degree, in all these records of French officers killed in the months which preceded Christmas 1914. These Frenchmen did not go out light-heartedly, nor with a pathetic inability to fathom the purpose for which they so generously went, but they had given the matter a study which seemed beyond their years. They marched to the blood-baths of Belgium and Lorraine with solemnity, as though to a sacrament.
It must be remarked as an interesting point that this generation had recovered a sense of the spirituality of a war of national defence. In simpler words, it had recovered that honest pride which France, in certain of its manifestations since the war of 1870, seemed to have lamentably lost. Posterity will compare the serene simplicity of Péguy and Lintier with the restlessness and bitter disenchantment of the 1880 generation, which arrived at manhood just when France was most deeply conscious of her humiliation. If we seek for the sources of this recovery of self-respect, which so beautifully characterized French character at the immediate crisis of 1914, we have to find it, of course, in the essential elasticity of the trained French mind. The Frenchman likes the heroic attitude, which is unwelcome to us, and he adopts it instinctively, with none of our national shyness and false modesty. But, if we seek for a starting-point of influence, we may probably find it in the writings of a soldier whose name is scarcely known in England, but whose "Études sur le Combat," first published in 1880, have been the text-book of the young French officer, and were never being so much read as just before the outbreak of the war.
The author of these "Études sur le Combat" was Colonel Ardent du Picq, who fell at the battle of Longeville-les-Metz, on August 15, 1870. He had predicted the calamity of that war, which he attributed to the mental decadence of the French army, and to the absence of any adequate General Staff organization. Ardent du Picq had received no encouragement from within or from without, and the reforms which he never ceased to advocate were treated as the dreams of an eccentric idealist. He died, unrecognized, without having lived to see carried out one of the reforms which he had so persistently advocated. His tongue was rough and his pen was dipped in acid; the military critic who ridiculed the "buffooneries" of his generals and charged his fellow-officers with trying to get through their day's work with as little trouble to themselves as possible, was not likely to carry much weight at the close of the Second Empire. But the scattered papers of the forgotten Colonel Ardent du Picq were preserved, and ten years after his death a portion of them was published. Every scrap which could be found of the work of so fruitful a military thinker was presently called for, and at the moment of the outbreak of the present war the "Études sur le Combat" had become the text-book of every punctilious young officer. It is still unknown how much of the magnificent effort of 1914 was not due to the shade of Ardent du Picq. Although the name of that author does not occur in the pages of "Ma Pièce," we are constrained to believe that Lintier had been, like so many young men of his class, an infatuated student of the "Études." He had comprehended the essence of military vitality and the secret of military grandeur. He had perceived the paramount importance of moral force in contending with formidable hostile organizations. Ardent du Picq, who possessed the skill of his nation in the manufacture of maxims, laid it down that "Vaincre, c'est d'être sûr de la victoire." He assented to the statement that it was a spiritual and not a mechanical ascendancy which had gained battles in the past and must gain them in the future. Very interesting it is to note, in the delicately scrupulous record of the mind and conscience of Paul Lintier, how, side by side with this uplifted patriotic confidence, the weakness of the flesh makes itself felt. At Tailly, full of the hope of coming battle, waiting in the moonlit forest for the sound of approaching German guns, suddenly the heroism drops from him, and he murmurs the plaintive verses of the old poet Joachim du Bellay to the echo of "Et je mourrai peut-être demain!" The delicate sureness with which he notes these changes of mood is admirable; and quickly the depression passes: "vite notre extraordinaire insouciance l'emporte, et puis, jamais heure a-t-elle été plus favorable à la revanche?"
In defining the particular principles which have actuated the magnificent French General Staff in the present crisis, Lord Haldane has dwelt on the fact that the French have displayed throughout "that moral effect which comes from certainty of purpose and which only concentrated thought can give." The value which the higher authority sets on the cultivation of moral enthusiasm is exemplified by the fact that the French Ministry of War has encouraged the publication of those personal records, from which we have here made a selection, on the ground that they carry throughout the army a contagion of energy and courage. We are far here from the obscure jealousy of thought which made a military representative of the British War Office the other day lay down the brilliant axiom "A hairdresser is of more value to the country at war than a librarian!" Such a man could not exist in a French community, where, at the very height of hostilities, so prominent a military authority as Colonel Émile Manceau could pause to say, "Let us read, let us give much time to reading!" It is a curious reflection that the present struggle has been, for the French, the most literary of all wars, the one in which the ordered expression of clear thought in language has been most carefully and consciously cultivated.
This was very far from being the case with the war of 1870, when the absence of literature was strongly felt during and after the crisis. The old satirist of the "Iambes," Auguste Barbier, wrote, immediately after the declaration of peace, a poem in which he rehearsed the incidents of the war, and commented on the absence from the list of its victims of a single distinguished writer. He said—
"La Muse n'a pas vu tomber un seul poète,"
and it was out of any one's power to refute the sinister and prosaic verse. The contrast with 1914 is painful and striking. In the existing war the holocaust of victims, poets and historians, painters and sculptors, musicians and architects, has been heartrending, and it can never in future years be pretended that the Muses have this time spared us their most poignant sacrifices. A year ago theRevue Critique, one of the most serious and original of the learned journals of Paris, announced the losses it had endured. It was conducted by a staff of forty scholars; by the summer of 1916 this number was reduced by twenty-seven; thirteen had been killed, eleven severely wounded, three had disappeared.