Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 3

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 Condé'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 Bruyère 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, Coëffeteau 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 "Caractères"
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 "Pensées" 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
Sévigné 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 Bruyère, distracted with misgivings about his "Caractères,"
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