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THREE FRENCH
MORALISTS
AND THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE


BY

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

OFFICIER DE LA LEGION D'HONNEUR


LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN


TO

LORD RIBBLESDALE

_This little book, long the subject of my meditation, suddenly began
to take shape one Sunday morning when I was your guest at Gisburne. We
were actually starting for church, and the car was at the door, when I
announced to you that the spirit moved me to stay behind. "Very well,
then," you said, with your habitual good-nature, "we leave you to your
folios." My "folios" were the three volumes of one of the smallest of
books, the 18mo edition of Vauvenargues published by Plon in 1874. In
the midst of a violent thunderstorm, which was like a declaration of
war upon your golden Yorkshire summer, I wrote my first pages, and you
were so sceptical, when you came back, as to my having done anything
but watch the lightning, that I told you you would have to endure the
responsibility of being sponsor to a work thus suddenly begun in all
the agitation of the elements. So, such as time has proved it, here it
is._




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

THREE FRENCH MORALISTS--

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

LA BRUYERE

VAUVENARGUES

THE GALLANTRY OF FRANCE

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE




INTRODUCTION

The object of these essays is to trace back to its source, or to some
of its sources--for the soul of France is far too complex to be
measured by one system--the spirit of gallantry which inspired the
young French officers at the beginning of the war. We cannot examine
too minutely, or with too reverent an enthusiasm, the effort of our
great ally, and in this theme for our admiration there are many
strains, some of which present themselves in apparent opposition to
one another. The war has now lasted so long, and has so completely
altered its character, that what was true of the temper of the
soldiers of France in November 1914 is no longer true in April 1918.
Confidence and determination are still there, there is no diminution
in domestic intensity or in patriotic fervour, but the long
continuance of the struggle has modified the temper of the French
officer, and it will probably never be again what it was in the stress
and tempest of sacrifice three years and a half ago, when the young
French soldiers, flushed with the idealisms which they had imbibed at
St. Cyr, rushed to battle like paladins, "with a pure heart," in the
rapture of chivalry and duty.

All that has long been wearied out, and might even be forgotten, if
the letters and journals of a great cloud of witnesses were not
fortunately extant. The record kept by the friends of Paul Lintier and
those others whom I am presently to mention, and by innumerable
persons to whose memory justice cannot here be done, will keep fresh
in the history of France the idealism of a splendid generation. Now we
see, and for a long time past have seen, a different attitude on the
fields of Champagne and Picardy. There is no feather worn now in the
cap, no white gloves grasp the sword; the Saint Cyrian elegance is
over and done with. There is no longer any declamation, any emphasis,
any attaching of importance to "form" or rhetoric. The fervour and the
emotion are there still, but they are kept in reserve, they are below
the surface, "at the bottom of the heart," as La Rochefoucauld puts
it.

Heroism is now restrained by a sense of the prodigious length and
breadth of the contest, by the fact, at last patent to the most
unthinking, that the war is an octopus which has wound its tentacles
about every limb and every organ of the vitality of France. A
revelation of the overwhelming violence of enormous masses of men has
broken down the tradition of chivalry. War is now accepted with a sort
of indifference, as a part of the day's work; "pas de grands mots, pas
de grands gestes, pas de drame!" The imperturbable French officer of
1918 attaches no particular importance to his individual gesture. He
concentrates his energy in another kind of action.

But the French race is by nature bellicose and amorous of adventure,
and more than all other nations has a tendency to clothe its
patrimonial ardour of defence in beautiful terms and gallant
attitudes. This is one of the points on which the British race, with
its scrupulous reserve, often almost its affectation of
self-depreciating shyness, differs most widely from the French, and is
most in need of sympathetic imagination in dealing with a noble ally
whose methods are not necessarily the same as ours. It is difficult to
fancy a young English lieutenant quoting with rapturous approval, as
Pierre de Rozieres and Henri Lagrange did in August 1914, the counsels
which were given more than a hundred years ago by the Prince de Ligne:
"Let your brain swim with enthusiasm! Let honour electrify your heart!
Let the holy flame of victory shine in your eyes! as you hoist the
glorious ensigns of renown let your souls be in like measure
uplifted!" A perpetual delirium or intoxication is the state of mind
which is recommended by this "heart of fire," as the only one becoming
in a French officer who has taken up arms to defend his country.

For the young men who consciously adopted the maxims of the Prince de
Ligne as their guide at the opening of this war, M. Maurice Barres has
found the name of "Traditionalists." They are those who followed the
tradition of the soldierly spirit of France in its three main lines,
in its individualism, in its intelligence, in its enthusiasm. They
endeavoured, in those first months of agony and hope, to model their
conduct on the formulas which their ancestors, the great moralists of
the past, had laid down for them. Henri Lagrange, who fell at
Montereau in October 1915, at the age of twenty, was a type of
hundreds of others. This is how his temper of mind, as a soldier, is
described by his friend Maxime Brienne:--

"The confidence of Lagrange was no less extraordinary than was his
spirit of sacrifice. He possessed the superhuman severity which comes
from being wholly consecrated to duty.... With a magnificent
combination of logic and of violence, with a resolution to which his
unusually lucid intelligence added a sort of methodical vehemence, he
expressed his conviction that resolute sacrifice was necessary if the
result was to be a definite success.... He declared that a soldier
who, by force of mind and a sentiment of honour and patriotism, was
able to conquer the instinct of fear, should not merely "fulfil" his
military duty with firmness, but should hurl himself on death, because
it was only at that price that success could be obtained over a
numerical majority."

This is a revelation of that individualism which is characteristic of
the trained French character, a quality which, though partly obscured
by the turn the great struggle has taken, will undoubtedly survive and
ultimately reappear. It is derived from the admonitions of a series of
moral teachers, and in the wonderful letters which M. Maurice Barres
has brought together with no less tact than passion in his series of
volumes issued under the general title of "L'Ame Francaise et la
Guerre," we have an opportunity of studying it in a great variety of
situations. This is but a portion, and it may be but a small portion,
of the multiform energy of France, and it is capable, of course, of
being subjected to criticism. That, in fact, it has had to endure, but
it is no part of my business here, nor, if I may venture to say so, is
it the business of any Englishman to criticise at any time, except in
pathetic admiration, an attitude so beautiful, and marked in its
self-sacrifice by so delicate an effusion of scrupulous good taste. We
are in presence of a field of those fluttering tricolor flags which
fill the eyes of a wanderer over the battle-centres of the Marne with
a passion of tears. We are in presence of the memorials of a chivalry
that did not count the price, but died "joyfully" for France.[1]

[Footnote 1: The poet Leon Guillot, in dying, bid his
comrades describe him to his father and mother as "tombe au
champ d'honneur et mort _joyeusement_ pour son pays."--"Les
Diverses Familles Spirituelles de la France," pp. 178, 179.]

There is not much advantage in searching for the germs of all this
exalted sentiment earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century.
The malady of the Fronde was serious precisely because it revealed the
complete absence, in the nobles, in the clergy, in the common people,
of patriotic conviction of any kind. Cardinal's men and
anti-cardinalists, Mazarin and Monsieur, Conde and Plessis-Praslin,--we
follow the bewildering turns of their fortune and the senseless
evolution of their mercenaries, without being able to trace any moral
line of conduct, any ethical aim on the part of the one or the other.
It was anarchy for the sheer fun of anarchy's sake, a struggle which
pervaded the nation without ever contriving to be national, a riot of
forces directed by no intellectual or ethical purpose whatever. The
delirium of it all reached a culminating point in 1652 when the
aristocratic bolshevists of Conde's army routed the victorious king
and cardinal at the Faubourg St. Antoine. This was the consummation of
tragical absurdity; what might pass muster for political reason had
turned inside out; and when Mazarin fled to Sedan he left behind him a
France which was morally, religiously, intellectually, a sucked
orange.

Out of the empty welter of the Fronde there grew with surprising
rapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France which
has gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageous
revolutionary earthquakes, persisting ever since. We find La
Rochefoucauld, as a moral teacher, with his sardonic smile, actually
escaping out of the senseless conflict, and starting, with the
stigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theory
that the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour is
the first of the moral virtues. We see him, the cynic and sensual
brawler of 1640, turned within a few years into a model of regularity,
the anarchist changed into a serious citizen with a logical scheme of
conduct, the atheistical swashbuckler become the companion of saints
and pitching his tent under the shadow of Port Royal. More than do the
purely religious teachers, he marks the rapid crystallization of
society in Paris, and the opening of a new age of reflection, of
polish and of philosophical experiment. Moral psychology, a science in
which Frenchmen have ever since delighted, seems to begin with the
stern analysis of _amour-propre_ in the "Maximes."

It is obvious that my choice of three moral maxim-writers to exemplify
the sources of modern French sentiment must be in some measure an
arbitrary one. The moralists of the end of the seventeenth century in
France are legion, and I would not have it supposed that I am not
aware of the relative importance of some of them. But although La
Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere were not the inventors of their
respective methods of writing, nor positively isolated in their
treatment of social themes, I do not think it is claiming too much for
them to say that in the crowd of smaller figures they stand out large,
and with each generation larger, in any survey of their century. In
their own day, Cureau de la Chambre, Coeffeteau and Senault were
considered the first of moral philosophers, but there must be few who
turn over the pages of the "Usages des Passions" now, whereas the
"Caracteres" enjoys a perpetual popularity.

The writers whom I have just named are dead, at least I presume so,
for I must not profess to have done more than touch their
winding-sheets in the course of my private reading. But there are two
moralists of the period who remain alive, and one of whom burns with
an incomparable vivacity of life. If I am asked why Pascal and Nicole
have not been chosen among my types, I can only answer that Pascal,
unlike my select three, has been studied so abundantly in England that
by nothing short of an exhaustive monograph can an English critic now
hope to add much to public apprehension of his qualities. The case of
Nicole is different. Excessively read in France, particularly during
the eighteenth century, and active always in influencing the national
conscience--since the actual circulation of the "Essais de Morale" is
said to have far exceeded that of the "Pensees" of Pascal--Nicole has
never, in the accepted phrase, "contrived to cross the Channel," and
he is scarcely known in England. Books and their writers have these
fates. Mme de Sevigne was so much in love with the works of Nicole,
that she expressed a wish to make "a soup of them and swallow it"; but
I leave her to the enjoyment of the dainty dish. As theologians, too,
both Pascal and Nicole stand somewhat outside my circle.

The three whom I have chosen stand out among the other moralists of
France by their adoption of the maxim as their mode of instruction.
When La Bruyere, distracted with misgivings about his "Caracteres,"
had made up his mind to get an introduction to Boileau, and to ask the
advice of that mighty censor, Boileau wrote to Racine (May 19, 1687),
"Maximilian has been out to Auteuil to see me and has read me parts of
his Theophrastus." Nicknames were the order of the day, and the critic
called his new friend "Maximilian," although his real name was Jean,
because he wrote "Maximes." There is no other country than France
where the maker of maxims has stamped a deep and permanent impression
upon the conscience and the moral habits of the nation. But this has
been done by La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Vauvenargues, whom, did it
not sound frivolous, we might style the three great Maximilians.

The three portraits were first exhibited as a course of lectures at
the Royal Institution in February of this year. They have been revised
and considerably enlarged. For the English of the passages translated
or paraphrased I am in every case responsible. The chapter on "The
Gallantry of France" appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_, and I thank
the editor and publisher of that periodical for their courteous
permission to include it here.

_April 1918_.




LA ROCHEFOUCAULD


One of the most gifted of the young officers who gave their lives for
France at the beginning of the war, Quartermaster Paul Lintier, in the
admirable notes which he wrote on his knee at intervals during the
battle of the Meuse in August 1914, said--

"The imperative instinct for making the best you can of life, the
sentiment of duty, and anxiety for the good opinion of others, in a
word _honour_--these are the main educators of the soldier under fire.
This is not a discovery, it is simply a personal statement."

Taken almost at random from the records of the war, this utterance may
serve us as well as any other to distinguish the attitude of the
Frenchman in the face of violent and critical action from the equally
brave and effective attitude of other races. He has the habit, not
common elsewhere, of analyzing conduct and of stripping off from the
contemplation of it those voluntary illusions which drop a curtain
between it and truth.

The result of this habit of ruthless criticism is to concentrate the
Frenchman's attention, even to excess, on the motives of conduct, and
to bring him more and more inevitably to regard self-love,
self-preservation, personal vanity in its various forms, as the source
of all our apparent virtues. Even when we appear to be most
disinterested, even when we are most clearly actuated by unselfish
devotion, by _honour_, we are really the prey, as Lintier saw it, of
the wish to save our lives and to preserve the good opinion of others.
Underneath the transports of patriotism, underneath the sincerity of
religious fervour, the Frenchman digs down and finds _amour-propre_ at
the root of everything.

This attitude or habit of mind is particularly shocking to all those
who live in a state of illusion, and there is probably no aspect of
French character which is more difficult for the average Englishman to
appreciate than this tendency towards sceptical dissection of the
motives of conduct. Yet it is quite certain that it is widely
disseminated among those of our neighbours who are most prompt and
effective in action, and whose vigour is in no degree paralysed by the
clairvoyance with which they seek for exact truth even in the most
romantic and illusive spiritual circumstances. To throw light on this
aspect of French character, I propose to call attention to a little
book, which is probably well-known to my readers already, but which
may be regarded from a point of view, as I venture to think, more
instructive than that which is usually chosen.

In the year 1665 there appeared anonymously in Paris, in all the
circumstances of well-advertised secrecy, a thin volume of "Maximes,"
which were understood to have exercised for years past the best
thoughts of a certain illustrious nobleman. Mme de Sable, who was not
foreign to the facts, immediately wrote a review, intended for the
_Journal des Scavants_, in the course of which she said that the new
book was "a treatise on movements of the human heart which may be said
to have remained until now unrecognized." The book, as every one
knows, was the work of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, and the subject
of it was an unmasking of "the veritable condition of man."

It would be idle not to admit that La Rochefoucauld has been almost
exclusively regarded as the chief exponent of egotism among the great
writers of Europe. He has become--he became during his own lifetime--
the bye-word for bitterness. He is represented as believing that
egotism is the _primum mobile_ of all human action, and that man is
wholly the victim of his passions, which lead him whither they will.
He denies all spirituality and sees a physical cause for everything we
do. His own words are quoted against him. It is true that he says,
"All the passions are nothing but divers degrees of heat or cold in
the blood." It is true that he says, "All men naturally hate one
another," and again, "Our virtues are mostly vices in disguise." Yet
again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms which
seem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterested
instincts of the human soul, for he says "_Amour-propre_ is the love
of one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men into
their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the opportunity, makes
them the tyrants of others.... It exists in all states of life and in
all conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it
lives on nothing." He does not admit that Christianity itself is
immune from the ravages of this essential cankerworm, which adopts all
disguises and slips from one Protean shape into another. "The
refinements of self-love surpass those of chemistry," and the purpose
of La Rochefoucauld is to resolve all our virtues in a crucible and to
show that nothing remains but a poisonous deposit of egotism.

No wonder that La Rochefoucauld has been generally regarded as a
scourge of the human race, a sterile critic of mankind without
sympathy or pity. It is true that his obstinate insistence on the
universality of egotism produces a depressing and sometimes a
fatiguing impression on the reader, who is apt to think of him as
Shakespeare's Apemantus, "that few things loves better than to abhor
himself." But when the First Lord goes on to add "He's opposite to
humanity," we feel that no phrase could less apply to La
Rochefoucauld. We have, therefore, immediately to revise our opinion
of this severe dissector of the human heart, and to endeavour to find
out what lay underneath the bitterness of his "Maximes." It is a
complete mistake to look upon La Rochefoucauld as a monster, or even
as a Timon. Without insisting, at all events for the moment, on the
plain effect of his career on his intellect, but yet accepting the
evidence that much of his bitterness was the result of bad health,
sense of failure, shyness, foiled ambition, we have to ask ourselves
what he gave to French thought in exchange for the illusions which he
so rudely tore away. In dealing with any savage moralist, we are
obliged to turn from the abstract question: Why did he say these
things? to the realistic one. What did he hope to effect by what he
said? Perhaps we can start no better on this inquiry than to quote the
Duchess of Schomberg's exclamation when she turned over the pages of
the first edition--namely that "this book contains a vast number of
truths which I should have remained ignorant of all my life if it had
not taught me to perceive them." This may be applied to French energy,
and we may begin to see what has been the active value of La
Rochefoucauld's apparently negative and repugnant aphorisms.

The La Rochefoucauld whom we know belongs to a polite and modern age.
He is instinct with the spirit of society, "la bonne compagnie," as it
was called in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a crowd of
refined and well-trained pens competed to make of the delicate
language of France a vehicle which could transfer from brain to brain
the subtlest ingenuities of psychology. He is a typical specimen of the
Frenchman of letters at the moment when literature had become the ally
of political power and the instrument of social influence. Into this
new world, before it had completely developed, the future author of
the "Maximes" was introduced at a very early age. He was presented to
the wits and _precieuses_ of the Hotel Rambouillet at the age of
eighteen. It is amusing to think that he may have seen Voiture, in the
Blue Room, seize his lute and sing a Spanish song, or have volunteered
as a paladin in the train of Hector, King of Georgia. But the
pedantries and affectations of this wonderful society seem to have
made no immediate impression upon La Rochefoucauld, whose early years
were those of the young nobleman devoid of all apparent intellectual
curiosity. It is true that he says of himself that directly he came
back from Italy (this was in 1629, when he was only sixteen), "I began
to notice with some attention whatever I saw," but this was, no doubt,
external; he does not exhibit in his writings, and in all probability
did not feel, the slightest interest in the pedantic literature of the
end of Louis XIII.'s reign. He represented, through his youth, the
purely military and aristocratic element in the society of that age.
If he had died when he was thirty, or at the close of the career of
Richelieu, nothing would have distinguished him from the mob of
violent noblemen who made the streets of Paris a pandemonium.

To understand the influence of La Rochefoucauld it is even more
needful than in most similar cases to form a clear idea of his
character, and this can only be obtained by an outline of his
remarkable career. Francois VI. Duke of La Rochefoucauld, as a typical
Parisian, was born in the ducal palace in the rue des Petits-Champs,
on September 15, 1613. The family was one of the most noble not merely
in France but in Europe, and we do not begin to understand the author
until we realize his excessive pride of birth. In a letter he wrote to
Cardinal Mazarin in 1648 he says, "I am in a position to prove that
for three hundred years the monarchs [of France] have not disdained to
treat us as members of their family." This arrogance of race inspired
the early part of his life to the exclusion, so far as we can
perceive, of any other stimulus to action. He was content to be the
violent and fantastic swashbuckler of the half-rebellious court of
Louis XIII. In late life, he crystallized his past into a maxim,
"Youth is a protracted intoxication; it is the fever of the soul."
Fighting and love-making, petty politics and scuffle upon
counter-scuffle--such was the life of the young French nobleman of whom
La Rochefoucauld reveals himself and is revealed by others as the type
and specimen.

La Rochefoucauld is the author, not merely of the "Maximes," but of a
second book which is much less often read. This is his "Memoires," a
very intelligent and rather solemn contribution to the fragmentary
history of France in the seventeenth century. It is hardly necessary
to point out that not one of the numerous memoirs of this period must
be taken as covering the whole field of which they treat. Each book is
like a piece of a dissected map, or of a series of such maps cut to a
different scale. All are incomplete and most of them overlap, but they
make up, when carefully collated, an invaluable picture of the times.
No other country of Europe produced anything to compare with these
authentic fragments of the social and political history of France
under Richelieu and Mazarin. These Memoirs had a very remarkable
influence on the general literature of France. They turned out of
favour the chronicles of "illustrious lives," the pompous and false
travesties of history, which the sixteenth century had delighted in,
and in this way they served to prepare for the purification of French
taste. The note of the best of them was a happy sincerity even in
egotism, a simplicity even in describing the most monstrous and
grotesque events. Among this group of writers, Cardinal de Retz seems
to me to be beyond question the greatest, but La Rochefoucauld is not
to be despised in his capacity as the arranger of personal
recollections.

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