“A father,” he said, “takes his son to the theatre: a great crowd, the door besieged. But he is a tall man and a stout. He breaks a way to the turnstile, and as he is on the point of passing in, puts the lad before him, who, without that foresight, would either have come in late or not come in at all.”
A pretty turn to give his gratitude! Apart from that he was unnecessarily provocative. He went out of his way to praise Racine at the expense of Corneille, which, seeing that Thomas Corneille was a brother, and Fontenelle a nephew of the great man, and that both were present was asking for trouble. Trouble there was--efforts to refuse him inscription in the archives, a foaming attack in the _Mercure Galant_, a plot to print and publish separately the address of his co-nominee, and so on. But the Abbé Bignon stood by him; both addresses were published together, La Bruyère’s with a fighting preface, and inscription in the records followed.
In his preface he girds at his critics for not having seen what he was driving at in _Les Caractères_. They had taken it, he says, for a collection of aphorisms and sentences loosely assorted under headings, with portraits here and there of distinguished persons, scandalous or malicious as might be. They took it, in short, for a nosegay of flowers of speech, selected more for their pungency than their fragrance, relieved by foliage luxuriant enough, but beset with thorns. That was not at all his own idea of it.
“Have they not observed,” he asks, “that of the sixteen chapters comprised in it, there are fifteen which, applied to the discovery of what is false and absurd in the objects of the passions and attachments of mankind, aim only at breaking down the growths which first enfeeble and presently extinguish the knowledge of God in men--nothing therefore but preliminary to the sixteenth and last, in which atheism is attacked, and possibly routed.”
I confess that if the critics had not detected all that in the plan or content of Sections I-XV, there is much excuse for them. I am in the same condemnation. It is true that those sections may be said to attack false gods in general: folly, ostentation, vainglory, evil concupiscence and such like. It is true that La Bruyère is a _censor morum_, like many a man before him and since. But it is not at all obvious that he is clearing a way by his analytic philosophy for a synthetic which will seat the true God firmly on his throne in the heart. Nor is the effort to do that conspicuous. “I feel that there is a God,” he says in his sixteenth section, “and I do not feel that there is no God. That is enough for me; all the reasoning in the world is beyond the purpose: I conclude that God is.” Very good; but then, why all the reasoning in the book? Pascal said the same thing, rather better. “It is the heart that feels God, not the reason. That is faith: God sensible to the heart, not to the reason.” It is probably as near as one can go. But how does La Bruyère make it more pointed by what has gone before? If you prove to demonstration that the goods of this world are but vanity, does that of itself imply, first that there is another world, whose goods (secondly) are not vain? Not at all. My impression is that La Bruyère had no such large intention when he began, and that if he had had it, he would have declared it in his opening observations. He was moralist and satirist both; but as much of one as the other. Character rather than characteristics attracted him, as I think, and the sharp sentences he aimed at were more literary than ethical. As for maxim-drawing, although he drew plenty, he expressly disavowed it. “I ought to say that I have had no desire to write maxims. Maxims are the laws of morality, and I own that I have neither the authority nor the genius which would fit me to legislate.... Those, in a word, who make maxims desire to be believed. I, on the other hand, am willing that anyone should say of me that I have not always well observed, provided that he himself observe better.”