superiority of La Rochefoucauld, and one of the most important things
which we have to note is the advance in feeling which the later
moralist makes, in spite of his extremely unpretentious attitude. La
Bruyère attains to a reasoned tolerance which neither his immediate
predecessor nor Pascal nor Bossuet reached or had the least wish to
reach. In him we meet, not commonly nor prominently presented, but
quite plainly enough, the modern virtue of indulgence, of tolerance.
Here is a passage which could scarcely have been written by any other
moralist of the seventeenth century:--

"It is useless to fly into a passion with human beings because of
their harshness, their injustice, their pride, their self-love and
their forgetfulness of others. They are made so, it is their nature,
and to be angry about it is to be angry with the stone for falling or
with the flame for rising."

Here is the voice of the man who had lived and who was still living in
the house of that Prince de Condé of whom Saint Simon said that, "A
pernicious neighbour, he made everybody miserable with whom he had to
do." I like to imagine La Bruyère escaping from some dreadful scene
where Henry Jules had injured his dependants and insulted his
familiars, or had drawn out in public the worst qualities of his son,
"incapable of affection and only too capable of hatred." I imagine him
escaping from the violence and meanness of those intolerable tyrants
up into the asylum of his own hushed apartment at Versailles; there
flinging himself down for a moment in the alcove, on the painted
bedstead, then presently rising, with a smile on his lips and the
fright and anger gone out of his eyes, and advancing to the great
oaken bureau which displayed his faience and his guitar. He would
glance, for encouragement, at the framed portrait of Bossuet which was
the principal ornament of the wall above it, and then, listening a
moment to be sure that he was safe from disturbance, he would unlock
one of the three drawers, and take out the little portfolio in which
for years and years he had been storing up his observations upon
society and his consolations in affliction. Presently, with infinite
deliberation and most fastidious choice of the faultless phrase and
single available word, he would paint the Holbein portrait of one of
the prodigious creatures whom he had just seen in action, some
erratic, brilliant and hateful "ornament of society" such as the Duke
de Lauzun, and the picture of Straton would be added to his gallery:--

"Straton was born under two stars; unlucky, lucky in the same degree.
His life is a romance: no, for it lacks probability. He has had
beautiful dreams, he has bad ones: what am I saying? people don't
dream as he has lived. No one has ever extracted out of a destiny more
than he has. The preposterous and the commonplace are equally familiar
to him. He has shone, he has suffered, he has dragged along a humdrum
existence: nothing has escaped him.... He is an enigma, a riddle that
can probably be never solved."

La Bruyère aimed at the improvement of human nature. La Rochefoucauld
had said, "Don't be ridiculous--a blatant love of self is the only
spring of your being." Pascal, less haughty but more overwhelming, had
said, "Insect that you are, doomed to damnation, cease to strive
against your own miserable impotence." La Bruyère's teaching was not
so definite, partly because his intellect was not so systematic as
theirs, but partly because he was more human than either, human with
more than a touch of the modern democratic humanity. His attitude was
the easier one implied in the sense that "there is so much that's good
in the worst of us, and so much that's bad in the best of us" that
there is room, even among moralists, for an infinite indulgence. His
was, on the whole, and accounting for some fluttering of the nerves, a
very tranquil spirit. He is much less formal and mechanical than La
Rochefoucauld, and he seems to study men with less dependence on a
theory. His own statement should not be overlooked; he says, very
plainly, that he desired above all things to make men live better
lives.

Boileau said that the style of La Bruyère was "prophetic," and I do
not know that any one has attempted to explain this rather curious
phrase. But we may adopt it in the light of more than two centuries
which were unknown to Boileau. More than any other writer of the end
of the seventeenth century La Bruyère prophesied of a good time
coming. He did not speak out very plainly, but it is the privilege of
prophets to be obscure, and their predictions are commonly not
comprehensible until after the event. But we may claim for La Bruyère
the praise of being a great civilizer of French thought; more than
that, he widened human social intelligence throughout Europe. He is
the direct ancestor of the Frenchman of to-day who observes closely
and clearly, who has the power to define what he sees, and who retains
the colour and movement of it. To this day, as may be amply seen in
the records and episodes of the war, in the correspondence of officers
at the front, in the general intellectual conduct of the contest,
Frenchmen rarely experience a difficulty in finding the exact word
they want. These men who arrest for our pleasure an impression, who
rebuild before us the fabric of their experience, descend in direct
line from La Bruyère. 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. He is the
enemy of all those who shamble along in the supposition that an
inaccurate phrase will "do well enough," and that any slipshod
definition is excused by our saying, "Oh, you know what I mean!" His
own style is finished up to the highest point, and it is brightened
and varied with such skill that the author never ceases to hold the
attention of the reader. He reaches the very ideal of that elegant
wandering art of writing which the Latins called _sermo pedestris_.
Indeed, he gives so much attention to the perfect mode of saying
things that some critics have brought it as a charge against him that
he overdoes it, that in fact his style is more weighty than his
subject. 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. These examples gave him his great
chance, and he built them up, those exemplary "portraits" of his, with
infinite labour, accumulating details to make a type, and sometimes,
it is possible, accumulating too many. The result is that the
"Caractères" are sometimes a little laboured; I do not know any other
fault that can be laid to their charge.

One of the most important qualities of La Bruyère was that he prepared
the popular mind for liberty. He is democratic in many ways, in his
language, where he often borrows words from the _patois_ of the common
people; in his exposure of the errors of the _ancien régime_, its
tyranny, its selfishness, its want of humanity and imagination; in his
hatred of wealth, the scandalous triumph of which had already reached
a pitch which the next generation was to see outdone. In all this, as
cannot be too often insisted upon, it was essential for a reformer to
be prudent. The People had no voice, and that their interests should
be defended was inconceivable.[14] In the next century, after the reign
of Louis XV. was over and speech had, in a great measure, become free,
it was not understood how difficult it was under Louis XIV. to express
any criticism of the feudal order. For instance, there is a long
passage at the end of the chapter "De la Ville," which scandalized the
political reformers of the eighteenth century. It is that which
begins, "The emperors never triumphed in Rome so softly, so
conveniently, or even so successfully, against wind and rain, dust and
sunshine, as the citizen of Paris knows how to do as he crosses the
city to-day in every direction. How far have we advanced beyond the
mule of our ancestors!" La Bruyère was charged, and even by Voltaire,
with attacking the progress of civilization, and with preferring the
rude subterfuges of Carlovingian times to the comforts of 1688. But he
was really making an appeal for thrift and modesty of expenditure on
the part of those bourgeois who had suddenly become rich, as a
satirist of our own day might denounce the pomp of a too successful
shopkeeper, without being accused of denying the convenience of
motor-cars or desiring to stop the progress of scientific invention.

     [Footnote 14: Perhaps the earliest Frenchman to have his full
     attention called to the miseries of the poor, was Vauban,
     whose benevolence was an object of amazement to his own
     contemporaries. Saint-Simon notes that "Patriote comme il
     l'était, il avait toute sa vie été touché de la misère du
     peuple et de toutes les vexations qu'il souffrait." This
     would be particularly the case when Vauban was writing the
     "Projet d'une dixième royale," finished in 1698.]

La Bruyère was the first effective moralist who realized what a
monstrous disproportion existed between the fortune of the rich and of
the poor.[15] If we read the chapter "Des Biens de Fortune" we may be
astonished at his courage, and we may see in him a direct precursor of
the revolution which took a little more than a hundred years to gather
before it broke on France. He describes the great of the earth with a
savage serenity, and then he adds, "Such people are neither relatives,
nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even men. They
have money." There are many such maxims in the chapter "De l'homme"
which must have set people's thoughts running in channels which had
before been wholly dry. La Bruyère was not a political reformer, and
we must not exaggerate the influence of his charming book in this
particular direction. But, as a popular imaginative writer, he took a
long step in the democratic direction. Frenchmen were already touched
in their consciences and beginning to examine the state of their souls
with anxiety; but the teachers of the ascetic revival had been too
uncompromising. Ordinary mortals could not hope to reach the ascetic
ideal of Port Royal, they could only be discouraged by the savage
attacks on _amour-propre_, while in the "Caractères" they met with a
lay-preacher who was one of themselves, and who did not disdain to
encourage moral effort.

     [Footnote 15: The wonderful passage in which La Bruyère
     dwells on the condition of the French peasant of his day
     marks a crisis in the conscience of Europe. It occurs in the
     chapter "De l'Homme": "We see certain wild animals, male and
     female, scattered over the fields, black, livid and scorched
     by the sun, fastened to the soil which they delve and stir
     with an invincible obstinacy; they have a sort of articulate
     speech, and when they stand up upon their feet, they show a
     countenance that is human: and in short they are human
     beings. They creep back at nightfall into dens, where they
     live on black bread, water and roots. They spare the rest of
     mankind the trouble of sowing, ploughing and reaping what is
     required for food, and accordingly they seem to deserve that
     they should themselves not lack the bread which they have
     sown." And in "Des Biens de Fortune" he says: "There are
     sorrows in the world that grip the heart, there are men and
     women who have nothing, not even bread, who shudder at the
     approach of winter, who have learned the significance of
     life, while others eat fruit forced out of due season, and
     compel the soil and the seasons to indulge their
     fastidiousness."]

It was a great advantage to La Bruyère, and a sign of his genius, that
he was able to descend from the pulpit, and walk about among his
readers with a smile, recognizing them as reasonable beings. He is
persuasive; his forerunners had been denunciatory. He may be harsh and
sometimes unjust, but he is never contemptuous to human nature. He
feels that he is addressing a wide public of intelligent men and
women, whom he would fortify against the moral tyranny of the violent
and the rich. For this purpose, though he would tell them their
faults, he would not shut the gates of mercy in their faces. But how
admirably he himself puts it in his chapter "Des Jugements":--

"A man of talent and reputation, if he allows himself to be peevish
and censorious, scares young people, makes them think evil of virtue,
and frightens them with the idea of an excessive reform and a tiresome
strictness of conduct. If, on the other hand, he proves easy to get on
with, he sets a practical lesson before them, since he proves to them
that a man can live gaily and yet laboriously, and can hold serious
views without renouncing honest pleasures; so he becomes an example
which they find it possible to follow."

When we look round for an author of high importance on whom the
influence of La Bruyère was direct, we find the most obvious to be an
Englishman, and our own enchanting "Mr. Spectator." Addison was born
when La Bruyère was twenty-seven; when the "Caractères" was published
he was an undergraduate at Queen's College, Oxford, walking in
meditation under the elms beside the Cherwell. 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. I do not think this fact has
been noted, but surely it is almost certain that in their talks about
literature Phélippeaux must have described La Bruyère to Addison?
Another contributor to the _Spectator_, Eustace Budgell, translated
Theophrastus and knew La Bruyère's book. Dr. Johnson mentions that the
French moralist is the source of Addison's effort, but English
critical opinion then, and since, has held that La Bruyère wrote
without any of the earnestness of the moral reformer. I have
indicated, I hope, the hasty error contained in such a judgment.

There is one point, however, on which it must be admitted that Addison
shows himself much in advance of his French precursor, or rather
perhaps we should consider it a proof of the advantage of English
society under Anne over French society under Louis XIV. The delicacy
and sympathy with which women are treated in the _Spectator_ has no
parallel in the "Caractères." In that volume, the chapter "Des Femmes"
is perhaps the least agreeable to a sensible reader of to-day. It is
crowded with types of pretentious and abnormal womanhood, which it
caricatures very effectively. Addison had manifestly studied it, for
here we see the origin of his coquettes and prudes, with their
"brocade petticoat which rises out of the mines of Peru, and the
diamond necklace out of the bowels of Indostan." 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_. It was Addison,
and not La Bruyère, who broke down once for all, and finally, the
monkish conception of women as the betrayers of the human species,
which had lingered on so detestably from the Middle Ages.

The influence of La Bruyère on Steele is apparent, and may have
preceded that on Addison. We may observe that Steele says, in the
general preface to the _Tatler,_ "the elegance, purity and correctness
which appeared in [Mr. Addison's] writings were not so much to my
purpose as... to rally all those singularities of human life, through
the different professions and _characters_ in it, which obstruct
anything that is truly good and great," The similarity of expression
here is certainly not accidental; La Bruyère stood before Steele as a
model when he wrote, for instance, in 1709, Mr. 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."

The ladies may hold it to be an excuse for our French moralist that he
was a confirmed and impenitent bachelor. He thought that marriage
enchained a philosopher, and would have said, in the words of Rudyard
Kipling, "He rideth the faster who rideth alone," Boileau, after a
visit from La Bruyère, remarked that nature had not consented to make
him so agreeable as he wished to be. It seems that he was shy and
gauche, and that he strove to conceal these defects by occasional
outbursts of a dreadful playfulness. There are stories about his
behaviour in the House of Condé, which if they are true seem to carry
eccentricity beyond the bounds of what is permitted even to a
philosopher. Nevertheless, contemporaries report that, in spite of his
plain features and his "look of a common soldier" (a dreadful thing to
say in the seventeenth century), the ladies ran after him. I am afraid
that when they did so, he repulsed them. He says about love none of
the charming things which he says about friendship, such as "To be
with those we are fond of, that is enough; to dream, to speak to them,
to say nothing to them, to think about them, to think of indifferent
things, but in their presence,--all is equally pleasant." Or this:
"Pure friendship has a flavour which is beyond the taste of those who
are born mediocre." Or again. "There ought to be, deep down in the
heart, inexhaustible wells of sorrow in readiness for certain losses."
The tenderness of such thoughts as these may surely outweigh the
dryness of the portraits of Corinne and Clarice.

The career of our moralist, after the publication of his single book,
was a short one. His startling success as a writer irresistibly
pointed him out as a candidate for election to the French Academy, but
here he was met by the barbed wire of jealousy and exasperated vanity.
He had laughed at too many pretentious mandarins to hope to escape
their resentment. At last, in 1693, but alas! at the expense of a vast
deal of intrigue on the part of his illustrious protectors, he stormed
that reluctant fortress. In his Reception Discourse, he revenged
himself on his enemies by firing volley after volley of irony into
their ranks, and the august body was beside itself with rage. 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. He then retired again to
his independence as a crafty old bachelor, and Saint Simon gives us a
pleasant snapshot of him in these latest years, "a very
straightforward man, capital company, simple, with nothing of the
pedant about him, and entirely disinterested."

He remained the man of one book until nearly the close of his life. It
is thought that Bossuet, who had always been his great exemplar, urged
him to undertake a reply to the heresies of Mme de Guyon and Fénelon,
and that so he was dragged into that very painful quarrel. At all
events, he started a series of "Dialogues on Quietism," in which all
the extreme doctrines of Molinos and his disciples were examined and
ridiculed. On May 8, 1696, La Bruyère dined with Antoine Bossuet, the
bishop's elder brother; after dinner he took out the MSS. from his
pocket, and read extracts to his host. Two days afterwards, after
walking in the garden at Versailles, he had a stroke, and two days
after that he died. He had had no premonition of illness, and the
rumour went round that the Quietists had poisoned him. His body was
exhumed, but of course no trace of poison was to be found. The
"Dialogues," revised and completed by the Abbé Elliès du Pin, were
published the next year. Their authenticity has been obstinately
contested, but, as I confess it seems to me, without excuse. Both
external and internal evidence go to prove, I think, that they are
substantially the work of La Bruyère, and for those who are not
alarmed at theological discussions conducted in rather a profane
spirit, they make very good reading.

One last word about our amiable author. His great book remains
eminently alive, and wields after two centuries and a half a permanent
influence. When you refer to it, you must not expect a logical
development of philosophical theory. We do not look to find a system
in a book of maxims and portraits. La Bruyère was a moralist, pure and
simple; he awakened sensibility, he encouraged refinement, and he
exposed the vicious difference which existed around him--and which no
one else had seemed to notice--that the possession of more or fewer
pieces of money made between human beings otherwise equal. He had a
democratic philosophy which is sometimes that of Mr. Micawber,
"Celui-là est riche qui reçoit plus qu'il ne consume; celui-là est
pauvre dont la dépense excède la recette," But he is seldom so prosy
as this. Let us think of him as one who wished to turn his talent as a
painter of still life to the benefit of his nation, and who succeeded
in a degree far beyond his own modest hopes.

                              VAUVENARGUES

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 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. 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 keeping _bad 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 the _Réflexions_ is 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 as _mon 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 of _gloire_. _Gloire_ makes 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 true _gloire_ from 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 the _amour-propre_ of
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 the
_amour-propre_ of 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 of _gloire_ is 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--

"MONSEIGNEUR.

"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
by _truth_, 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 but _gloire_. 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 of _kultur_.

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 get _gloire_ is 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 for _la 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, a _panache_, 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 GALLANTRY OF FRANCE

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 their _képi_
adorned with the _casoar_, 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 his _casoar_ and 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 an _alerte_ at 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 the _Revue
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.

Many writers have asked, and M. Maurice Barrès prominently among them,
what is the reason of the fact that intelligence has taken a front
place in this war? What has been the source of the spirit of
self-immolation which has driven the intellectual and imaginative section
of French youth to hold out both hands to catch the full downpour of
the rain of death? There is no precedent for it in French history, and
we may observe for ourselves how new a thing it was, and how
unexpected, by comparing with the ardent and radiant letters and poems
of the youngest generation the most patriotic expressions of their
elders. A single example may suffice. No man of letters has given a
nobler witness to the truth of his patriotism than Colonel Patrice
Mahon, known in letters as Art Roë. His novels, which dealt largely
with modern Russian life, in relation with the French army, were
virile and elevated productions, but he was a man of fifty at the time
of his heroic death at the head of his troops, in the battle of
Wisembach (August 22, 1914), and his tone was not that of such young
men as Camille Violand and Marcel Drouet. To read again the "Pingot et
moi" of Art Roë is to return to a book of the utmost sincerity and
valour, but it was published in 1893, and there is no touch of the
splendour of 1914 about it.

A figure which stands midway between the generation of Art Roë and
that of the adolescent comrades of a new Sophocles of whom we shall
presently speak, is Captain E.J. Détanger, who seems to be
transitional, and to share the qualities of both. This name has, even
now, scarcely grown familiar to the eye and ear, but it proves to have
been the real name of Émile Nolly, whose romances of modern life in
the Extreme East had been widely read just before the war. Nolly's
earliest books, "Hien le Maboul" and "La Barque Annamite" (but
particularly the latter), gave promise of a new Pierre Loti or a new
Rudyard Kipling, but totally distinct in manner from both. Détanger
was just thirty-four when the war broke out, and he was one of its
early victims, dying at Blainville-sur-l'Eau on September 5. He
greatly distinguished himself by his personal bravery, and the cross
of the Legion of Honour was pinned to his blood-stained uniform on his
last battle-field. The tribute of a fellow-officer to this devoted man
of letters may be quoted here. It is an example of the sudden and
complete transformation which turned artists into soldiers at the
first sound of the bugle:--

"Émile Nolly proved a magnificent soldier. He had a youthful, blithe,
fervent and resolute soul; he had the soul of a hero completely
prepared to sacrifice himself with joy for his country. After having
served valiantly and brilliantly in Indo-China, and then in Morocco,
it was with a radiant hope that he set out for the frontier of
Lorraine. 'What does the life of any one of us matter?' he said to me
just before he left. 'All that is essential is that France should
live, that she should be victorious.'"

Marcel Drouet, who has just been mentioned, was much younger. He was a
native of the invaded department of the Ardennes, and had not
completed his twenty-sixth year when he was killed in the trenches of
Consenvoye, in the Woëvre, when he was taking part in the outer
defence of Verdun. He seems to have been distinguished by a refinement
of spirit, which is referred to, in different terms, by every one who
has described him. He leaves behind him a volume of poems, "L'Ombre
qui tourne," and various essays and fragments. The journal of the last
days of his life has been edited by M. Maurice Barrès, and is a record
of singular delicacy and courage. We see him facing the dreadful
circumstances of the war, made the more dreadful to him because the
horrors are committed in the midst of the familiar scenes of his own
home, and we find him patiently waiting for the signal to lead his men
into action while he holds a volume of Chateaubriand open upon his
knee. The reflections of Marcel Drouët differ in some respects from
those of his most enthusiastic companions. There is a note of
tenderness in them which is unusual, and which is very pathetic. At
the very close of his brief and heroic life, the thoughts of Drouët
reverted to the historic town in which he was born, to Sedan which
still shuddered in his infancy at the recollection of the horrors of
1870. He thought of the dead who fell on that melancholy field; and
then his thoughts turned to those dear faces which he had so recently
left behind. The following passage, in its simplicity, in its
sweetness, deserves to live in the memorial literature of the war:--

"Je pense à vous, mes chers vivants, aux mains des barbares en ce
moment sans doute, mais en le coeur de qui j'ai foi, tant je connais
votre dévouement aux choses sublimes.

"Mais aussi je pense à vous, mon Dieu, qui avez voulu toutes ces
choses pour votre plus grand gloire et pour l'établissement de votre
justice. Tous ces malheurs, ces tristesses, tout ce sang répandu sont
imposés par vous, mon Dieu, en manière de rédemption. Mais votre
soleil glorieux éclairera bientôt, j'en suis absolument certain, la
victoire du bon droit qui attend depuis près d'un demi-siècle. J'y
coopère de toutes mes forces, de toute mon âme. Et si vous me retirez
de ce monde, ô Dieu de bonté, permettez que ce soit pour me joindre à
ceux qui m'out précédé dans votre séjour, et dont l'affection
terrestre me fut précieuse. C'est toute la prière ardente que je fais
devant le soleil levant, ce jour de Toussaint que sillonnent déjà les
obus semeurs de mort, en cette année 1914 qui verra rétablir la paix
du monde, par l'anéantissement du peuple barbare, et la régénérescence
de la nation française."

In most cases there rests an obscurity over the brief lives of these
gallant young officer-authors, whose nature was little observed until
the flash of battle illuminated them for one last brilliant moment. We
feel a strong desire, which cannot be gratified, to follow them from
their childhood to their adolescence, and to see for ourselves what
impulses directed them into the path of heroism. It is rarely that we
can do this, but one of these poets has left behind him two friends
who have recaptured the faint and shrouded impressions of his early
life. The piety of M. Henri Albert Besnard, who was his intimate
companion, and of that practised narrator M. Henri Bordeaux, who is
his biographer, enable us to form a clearer and fuller conception of
Camille Violand than of any of his compeers. Born in 1891, he was
typical of that latest generation of which we have spoken, in whom all
seemed to be unconsciously preparing for the great and critical
sacrifice. He was born at Lyons, but was brought up in the Quercy,
that wild and tortured district just north of the Pyrenees, where
nature seems to gather together all that she possesses of the
grotesque and violent in landscape; but he was educated at Alençon,
and trained at Vouziers, in the midst of the orchards of Normandy.
Thus both sides of France, the Midi and the Manche, were equally known
to him, but the ceaseless peregrinations which he underwent, so far
from enlarging his horizon, seem to have plunged his soul in
melancholy. At the age of twenty he struck M. Bordeaux as being the
typical _déraciné._

The letters of Camille Violand and the memories of his friends present
to us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite early
to exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. He
was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters--for he wrote with
abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to
keep his letters--are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He
was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of
romantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as he
passed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the principal moral quality
we perceive is a peevish irritation at the slow development of life.
He was just twenty-one when the death of his mother, to whom he was
passionately attached, woke him out of this paralyzed condition, and
it is remarkable that, in breaking, like a moth from a chrysalis, out
of his network of futile and sterile sophisms, it was immediately on
the contingency of war that he fixed his thoughts. The news of his
mother's death, by a strange and rapid connexion of ideas, reminded
him of his future responsibility as an officer in the coming struggle.
He wrote, in 1913, "Je m'effraie en pensant à cette responsabilité qui
pèsera certainement un jour sur moi, car je considère la guerre comme
à peu près certaine à bref délai."

Having once formed this conviction, a complete revolution affected the
character of the young Violand. His melancholy ceased; his uncertainty
fell from him; it seemed as though his soul threw off her fetters.
From the close of 1913, when the chancelleries of Europe were still
profoundly unconscious of the tremendous upheaval which was in store
for them, this young man, hitherto so timorous and irresolute, is seen
to be filled with a species of prophetic ecstasy:--

     _"The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness!
     The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
     .........the animation of delight
     Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
     And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind"_

This remarkable change of character was encouraged by the military
discipline which now regulated his life, and which he accepted with
rapture and devotion. His mother's one aim had been to make of Camille
a soldier and a Christian, and he became the very type of that
combination.

To use a striking phrase of M. Henri Bordeaux, the war found Camille
Violand in a state of preparedness. He saw it arrive, not with anxiety
or trepidation, but with solemn joy. His father was placed in command
of a brigade of dragoons, and he himself, at another part of the
frontier line, was given the rank of second lieutenant and a command
which filled him with the pride of responsibility. Three weeks later
he was wounded in the head at the battle of Virton, but not until he
had seen the Germans, after a hard fight, retire before the attack of
his men. "Il a connu l'ivresse de la victoire: il a vu fuir
l'ennemi"--so a friend announced it. He was taken back to the hospital
at Limoges, but the victory of the Marne intoxicated him, and it was
found impossible to hold him back. With a head still bandaged, he made
his appearance once more in his beloved regiment, which was now
fighting in the forest of the Argonne, but on the first occasion on
which he led his men, Violand was wounded again, now in the shoulder.
He was sent far back, into Brittany, to Quimper, where, a second time,
by a subterfuge he contrived to escape from the hospital before his
wound was properly healed. He was absolutely intractable in his
determination to get back promptly to the fighting line: "il était
comme ça, avec son air délicat et tranquille!" Again brought back, he
was set to training men at Quimper. But he could not endure the
restraint, and his nerves broke down.

It was found impossible to hold him back, and on October 8 the
military authorities consented to his return to his regiment, and with
the permission was combined the news that he had been nominated for
the cross of the Legion of Honour. The letter in which he announces
that fact to the ladies at home--"mes chères Grand'mère et Tante"--is
charming in its simplicity. "La croix gagnée sur un champ de bataille,
c'est à mes yeux le plus beau rêve qu'un jeune Français pût faire; je
regrette seulement de ne pas l'avoir méritée davantage; mais l'avenir
me permettra, j'espère, de justifier cette récompense, que je
considère comme anticipée." The official notification specifies the
wounds which he had received and the fact that, by the testimony of
all who saw him under fire, the young lieutenant gave evidence of very
great courage and of indomitable energy. That he was, by what he calls
a queer coincidence, the youngest officer of his regiment and its only
member of the Legion of Honour, afforded him an unaffected
satisfaction.

From this time--the end of October 1914--the letters of Camile Violand
testify to the rapid development of his mind and character. He loses a
certain childishness which had hitherto clung to him, and he expresses
himself with a more virile sobriety. Nothing could exceed the pathos
of his pictures of the terrible life in the Argonne, and we are made
to feel how rapidly the suffering and the responsibility of his
military life were bringing out all the deepest and most serious
elements in his character. There is a remarkable letter of January 7,
1915, describing an engagement in which he lost several of his best
men, and in particular an experienced corporal in whose skill he much
confided. The briefest fragment broken from this pathetic description,
addressed to his father, will give a notion of the tone of it:--

"J'étais absorbé par les blessés dans mon poste de commandement et
quand je pus me rendre dans la tranchée où il était, il tombait dans
le coma. Ses derniers mots avaient été: 'Adieu, ma Patrie!' Pourtant,
il me reconnut à la voix, me répondit faiblement. Je l'assistai dans
ses derniers moments. Ce fut bien rapide, bien simple et bien beau.
_J'étais pour lui le chef, ce qui est plus que le Père et le Prêtre
réunis_. Je l'ai bien senti là; quand ce fut presque fini, je
l'embrassai et le quittai pour retourner aux soucis que nous donne
l'ennemi."

Thus was this lad of three-and-twenty fortified and ripened by the
arduous warfare in the Argonne. He was now spending what leisure the
fighting gave him in a careful study of Homer. We gather that he had
just finished re-reading the "Iliad" when the end came. On March 4,
1915, at Mesnil-les-Hurlus, a ball pierced his heart, splintering in
its passage the cross of the Legion of Honour of which he was so
proud. In his pocket was found his last letter, still unposted, in
which he told his father of a fresh distinction for valour which he
had just received, and in the course of which, with a manifest
presentiment of his approaching end, he wrote, "Je mourrai, si Dieu
veut, en bon chrétien et en bon Français."

It is not to be denied that ordinary observers were not in any degree
prepared for the heroic devotion displayed by such young officers as
these at the beginning of the war. The general opinion in peace time
was expressed by M. Maurice Maeterlinck when he laid it down that
"courage, moral and physical endurance (if not abnegation,
forgetfulness of self, renunciation of all comfort, the faculty of
sacrifice, the power to face death) belong exclusively to the most
primitive, the least happy, the least intelligent of peoples, those
which are least capable of reasoning, of taking danger into account."
It was the common hypothesis among moralists that, as men's nerves
grew more sensitive and the means of destruction more cruel and
irresistible, no human being would be able to support the strain of
actual fighting. It seemed inevitable that soldiers would rapidly
become demoralized, when exposed to the multifarious horrors of modern
mechanical battle. Nothing, therefore, could have been more surprising
than the temper shown by thousands of young men, suddenly called up
from sedentary and safe pursuits, and confronted by the terrors of
shrapnel and liquid fire and mines and gas, and all the other horrible
ingenuities of an unseen enemy for killing and mutilating. Their
imaginations were unaccustomed to these terrors, it is true, but the
higher faculties of the human mind asserted themselves, and in the
vague collective battle of the trenches these young French officers;
despite the refinement and the security in which they had always been
acustomed to exist, instantly reverted to the chivalrous attitude
which their remote ancestors had adopted in a warfare that was
romantic and personal in its individualism.

No doubt a not inconsiderable part of the serenity, which is so
remarkably evident in the letters and journals of these young men, was
due to the fact that they had arrived, for the first time, at a
comprehension of the unity of life. There is no tedious alternative of
choice in the active military career. All is regulated, all is
arranged in accordance with a hierarchical discipline, and war becomes
what dogmatic religion is to a weak soul that has been tossed about by
the waves of doubt. It must be also borne in mind that the incessant
dread of invasion, especially in the neighbourhood of the eastern
frontier, had kept the spirits of those who knew that responsibility
would fall upon them, in a state of unceasing agitation. It is a
paralyzing thing to exist under a perpetual menace which nothing can
precipitate and yet nothing can avert. Captain Belmont, in his
admirable letters, speaks much of the "romanticism" which attracted
many of his companions, and of the natural satisfaction which the
declaration of war gave to their restless faculties. The two
sentiments were probably one and the same, and to a poetical
temperament that might well seem "romantic" which filled a less vivid
mind with restlessness and languor.

It is noticeable, too, that when once the sickening suspense was
removed, and the path of pain and glory lay clear before these
youthful spirits, they grew very rapidly in intellectual stature. They
had found their equilibrium, and no more time and force were wasted in
useless oscillations. Each of them had, at last, the occasion, and
therefore the power, to fill out the lines of his proper
individuality. As M. Henri Bordeaux excellently says, "L'esprit
inquiet ne se contente de rien, le coeur inapaisé se croit incompris."
But now these men knew their vocation, and a precocious experience of
life developed in them a temper of meditation. It is extraordinary
what an intelligent philosophy, what a delicate study of nature, were
revealed at once in the writings of these heroic boys of twenty.
Lieutenant Belmont, who fought in Alsace, had spent his infancy and
adolescence in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, and his memory was full
of the rich Dauphiné valley, with its great river and its eastern
horizon of the Alps. In the misery of the September nights of 1914, in
the harshness of misty mornings among the Alsatian pines, his thoughts
return to the luminous twilights of his old home under the great oaks
of the Isère, and he expresses his nostalgia in terms of the most
exquisite and the most unstudied grace. Here is a fragment of one of
his letters home (October 1914):--

"Les journées sont exquises, tristes et pâles, également différentes
des crudités de nos idées et des ténèbres de l'hiver. L'imagination a
vite fait de s'envoler, à travers cette lumière adoucie, vers tous les
horizons familiers de la petite patrie, vers la vallée de Grenoble,
paresseusement allongée dans ce bain de léger soleil, au pied des
Alpes déjà engourdies, vers les terres rousses de Lonnes longées par
les futaies jaunissantes où s'abritent les gibiers, tranquilles cette
année."

No doubt, the reason why this war has been, for France, so peculiarly
a literary war, is that the mechanical life in the trenches,
alternately so violent and so sedentary, has greatly enforced the
habit of sustained contemplation based on a vivid and tragic
experience. This has encouraged, and in many instances positively
created, a craving for literary expression, which has found abundant
opportunity for its exercise in letters, journals, and poems; and what
it has particularly developed is a form of literary art in which
Frenchmen above all other races have always excelled, that analysis of
feeling which has been defined as "le travail de ciselure morale."
This moral carved-work, or chasing, as of a precious metal, revealing
the rarity and value of spiritual surfaces, is characteristic of the
journals of Paul Lintier, of the beauty of which we have already
spoken. His art expends itself in the effect of outward things on the
soul. He speaks of mysterious sights, half-witnessed in the gloaming,
of sinister noises which have to be left unexplained. He does not
shrink from a record of unlovely things, of those evil thoughts which
attend upon the rancour of defeat, of the suspicion of treason which
comes to dejected armies like a breath of poison-gas. That portion of
his "Souvenirs" which deals with the days of the retreat on Paris is
written in a spasm of savage anger; a whole new temper is instantly
revealed when once the tide turns at Nanteuil. Nature herself thus
endorses his new mood, as he writes "There are still clouds heaped up
to the west, but the blue, that cheers us, is chasing them all away."

Among the noble young poets whose pathetic and admirable fragments the
piety of surviving friends has preserved, it is difficult to select
one name rather than another. But in the rank of these Rupert Brookes
and Julian Grenfells and Charles Listers of France, we may perhaps
pause before the ardent figure of Jacques de Choudens. He was a
Breton, and was trained for the law on the other side of France, at
Lille. He found that the call of the sea was irresistible, and after
two years at a desk in that dreary and dusty city, he suddenly flung
up his cap and would have no more of such drudgery. To the despair of
his family, he started on the high seas, and explored the wonderland
of Haiti. After various adventures, he was about to return to France,
when the sea again took him by the throat, and he vanished, like
Robert Louis Stevenson, in the Pacific. Having sailed twice round the
world, "beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars," a
tired Ulysses under thirty, Jacques de Choudens had just come back to
France when the war seized him with a fresh and deep enchantment. He
entered into it with a profound ardour, and proved himself to possess
exceptional military qualities. He was severely wounded on the second
day of the battle of Charleroi, but slowly recovered, only to be
killed in an engagement on June 13, 1915. His poems, written since war
broke out, have been carefully collected and published by his friend,
M. Charles Torquet. They are few, and they suffer from a certain
hardness of touch; Jacques de Choudens had, as yet, a deeper
acquaintance with life than with literature; but they breathe a spirit
of high and romantic heroism. Let the sonnet called "Autre Prière" be
offered as an example:--

     "_Terres, fleuves, forêts, ô puissances occultes,
     C'est votre âme qui bat au bleu de nos poignets;
     Notre orgueil s'est enfin cabré sous les insultes
     Dont, depuis quarante ans, ô France, tu saignais.

     Dans le livre où s'apprend le plus hautain des cultes,
     Marque la page avec nos sabres pour signets;
     Ceins la couronne d'or qu'en l'An deux tu ceignais,
     Car c'est dans notre chair à nous que tu la sculptes.

     France! France! Bénis chaque arme et chaque front;
     C'est d'ardeur, non de peur, que tremble l'éperon.
     Nous sommes tes martyrs volontaires, superbes,

     Sous l'auréole d'or des galons du képi....
     Nous allons préparer aux faucilles des gerbes,
     Puisqu'où tombe un soldat pousse un nouvel épi._"

The poet, shortly before he fell, wrote to a friend "Nous
travaillerons mieux après la victoire, ce que nous ferons ayant été
mûri par la fatigue et les angoisses. La vie est bonne et belle et la
guerre est une chose bien amusante." This is the type of Frenchman who
fights for the love of fighting, who puts above all other happiness
the prize of military honour and glory won in a good cause. We meet
with it in the lyrical effusion of an adventurous poet like Jacques de
Choudens and in the straightforward evidence of a practised soldier
like Captain Hassler, whose "Ma Campagne" is a record extraordinary
alike for its courage, for its vivacity, and for its modesty.

The peculiar spirit of ardent gallantry to which we have dedicated
these few pages is illustrated, as will be observed, by examples taken
without exception from the first months of the war. It would be rash
to say, without a careful sifting of evidence, how much of this
sentiment survived the days which preceded the battle of the Marne.
France has, in the succession of her attacks up to the present hour,
continued and confirmed the magnificent tradition of her courage. But
it is impossible to overlook the elements which have taken the
romantic colour out of the struggle. No chivalry could survive close
experience of the vile and bestial cruelty of German methods. The sad
and squalid aspects of a war of resistance, fought in the very
bleeding flesh of the beloved mother-country, were bound to be fatal
to "cette bonne humeur bienfaisante" which so marvellously
characterized the young French officers of August 1914. Moreover, the
mere physical element of fatigue has been enough to quench that first
radiant flame. We find it deadening, at last, even the high spirit of
Paul Lintier, and we listen to his confession: "To sleep! to sleep! O
to live without a thought, in absolute silence. To live, after having
so often nearly died. I could sleep for days, and days, and days!"

These are considerations which belong to a heavier and a wearier time.
As a matter of history--so that in our hurrying times a gesture of so
much beauty may not, because it was so ephemeral, be forgotten--I have
endeavoured to catch a reflection of the glow which blazed in the
hearts of young intellectual officers at the very beginning of the
war. If in the inevitable wear and tear of the interminable struggle,
this beauty fades into the light of common day, so much the more is
there need that we should fix it in memory, since in a world which
savagery and treason have made so hideous, we cannot afford to let
this jewel of pure moral beauty be trampled into oblivion.

        _breve et irreparabile tempus
     Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere facti
     Hoc virtutis opus._

                          BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The writings of La Rochefoucauld were subjected to accurate and
detailed examination in the edition begun by Gilbert in 1868, and
brought to a pause at his untimely death in 1870. It was completed in
1883 by J. Gourdault. After the lapse of half a century, the short
biography by Gilbert, with which this edition began, naturally
requires some revision, and is open to several additions. An earlier
volume (1863), by E. de Barthélemy, is of a more technical character,
but may be referred to with advantage by those curious regarding
detail. The MSS of Rochefoucauld still in existence--one of these,
known as the Liancourt MS., is in the Duke's handwriting--are
numerous, and may still, no doubt, reward investigation. The best
recent summary is that by J. Bourdeau (1895), published in M.
Jusserand's charming series. There is not, so far as I am aware, any
English biography of the author of the "Maximes."

The complete works of La Bruyère were elaborately edited in three
volumes (1865-1878) by G. Servois. Much curious information is to be
found in Allaire's "La Bruyère dans la Maison de Condé" (1887), and an
excellent summary in the Life by M Paul Morillot, 1904. But the latest
and fullest account of La Bruyère's career is to be found in M. Emile
Magne's Preface to the selected works (1914). Editions of "Les
Caractères" are countless.

The writings of Vauvenargues were collected by the Marquis de Portia
in 1797, by Suard in 1806, by Brière in 1821, by Gilbert in 1857, and
again in 1874; each of these editions added considerably to knowledge.
The only recent Life is that by M Maurice Paléologue (1890).

The principal volumes referred to in "The Gallantry of France" are the
  following:--

"Ma Pièce" Souvenir d'un canonnier de 1914. Par Paul Lintier. Paris:
  Librairie Plon, 1916.

"Anthologie des Écrivains français morts pour la Patrie." Par Carlos
  Larronde. Préface de Maurice Barrès. I-IV. Paris: Larousse. 1916-1917

"La Jeunesse Nouvelle." Par Henri Bordeaux. Paris: Librairie Plon
  1917.

"En Campagne" (1914-1915). Impression d'un officier de Légère. Par
  Marcel Dupont. Paris: Librairie Plon. 1916.

"Ma Campagne de jour de jour." Par le Capitaine Hassler. Paris:
  Librairie Plon. 1917.

                                 INDEX

Academy, French, 91

Addison, at Blois, 87,88

----compared with La Bruyère, 87

d'Ailly, Abbé, 22

Aix in Provence, 100

Alençon, 155

Allard, Jean, 136-138

Alsace, 162

Alsace-Lorraine, 132

Amelot, 118

Amyot, Jacques, 99

Anne of Austria, 11, 13