The proverb is indigenous to Spain, verse to Italy, and the aphorism to France. In that form of speech in which, in Vauvenargues’ own words, La Rochefoucauld had ‘turned men from virtue by persuading them that it is never genuine,’ Vauvenargues vindicated human goodness, showed man that the best way to reform the world is to reform himself, and taught him how to use the freedom Voltaire gave him.

In his delicate thoughtfulness, in his conviction that man’s happiness depends upon his character and not upon his circumstances, in his mistrust of the cold god, Reason, and his belief in the soundness of the intuitions of the heart, Vauvenargues stands alone among his compeers. He stands alone, too, among them in his personal nearness to Voltaire’s affections. The noblest testimony to Vauvenargues’ character is that it compelled the reverence of him who reverenced
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LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES.

From a Print in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

{97}

nothing; and the finest compliment ever paid to Voltaire was to be loved by a Vauvenargues.

Born on August 6, 1715, at Aix in Provence—in a mean house which still stands and is to-day a grocer’s shop—Luc de Vauvenargues came of a poor family of provincial noblesse and was from the first what he remained to the last, delicate in constitution and with limited prospects of worldly success.

His very imperfect education he received at the College of Aix, where his small Latin and less Greek were frequently interrupted by ill health. But he had a possession which is in itself an education—a good father.

Joseph de Clapiers had been created Marquis de Vauvenargues in 1722, when Luc was seven years old, for having been the only magistrate in Aix who did not run away from the place and his duty when a pestilence devastated the countryside in 1720.

For companions, Luc had two younger brothers and a cousin of his own age, a coarse, clever, selfish, undisciplined boy, named Victor Riquetti Mirabeau, who was to become the ‘crabbed old Friend of Men’ and the great father of a greater son. The boys had little in common but genius, and were attracted to each other by{98} their very unlikeness. At sixteen, Luc was reading with passionate transport that ‘splendid painting of virtue’ ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ (in a translation) and then the letters of Brutus to Caesar, ‘so filled with dignity, loftiness, passion, and courage,’ said he, ‘that I never could read them calmly.’ Victor had already plunged into that blusterous, incontinent life which was to bring ruin to his own family and quite spoil the effect of his loud-voiced schemes for the good of mankind.

When both were seventeen the pair parted for a while. Luc must choose one of the only two professions open to his caste—the Church or the Army. The Church would not do, because, boy though he was, he was already philosopher and thinker—ay, in the noblest sense of the word—free-thinker too. Then it must be the Army! Picture this new subaltern of the King’s Own Regiment, in the loveliest pale grey uniform, faced with Royal blue, with the most splendid braidings, and the very buttonholes sewn with gold silk, with his tall, boyish figure, his handsome face, his ‘proud and pensive grace’—for all the world like the soldier-hero of a woman’s novel. But he was already something very different from that. The handsome face bespoke a noble nature, ambitious for all great things, strong and ready to begin the world, to play his part therein if it be the part of{99} a man of Deeds alone—or if the Deeds be but foundation for the Thoughts.

His first campaign was in Italy in 1733 with Marshal Villars, who was on his last. Italy! the land of dreams! The boy was filled with splendid visions of following Hannibal across the mountains—with young sanguine hopes of gloriously doing his duty and meeting immediate, glorious rewards. For three years he knew the intoxication—and the horrors—of a victorious campaign. And then of a sudden he found himself condemned at one-and-twenty to the vicious idleness, the low pleasures, and the deadening routine of a garrison life. The rich officers were of course drawn by that magnet, the Court, to keep up their military studies and prepare for the next war by dancing attendance on women and flattering the Minister and the King at Versailles. The poor ones remained on duty—with not enough of it to keep them out of mischief, and with, for the most part, debased tastes, because their intellectual limitations precluded them from higher.

The contamination of that useless existence even a Vauvenargues did not wholly escape. For a brief while he was as other men are. But the pleasures of a garrison town could not long hold such a nature as his. Already—he was but twenty-two—he had that love of solitude{100} which, says a great German philosopher, is welcomed or avoided as a man’s personal value is great or small. Already—at an age when other men scarcely realise they have a soul—this man was dominated by the idea of its value and dignity; and deep within him was the passion and resolution to exercise to the full its powers and possibilities.

With his companions he was wholly simple, natural, and friendly—without the faintest taint of that conscious superiority which makes many good people at once useless as a moral influence and objectionable as companions. ‘Father,’ his brother officers used to call him. Marmontel said ‘he held all our souls in his hands.’ He soon resumed, by correspondence, his friendship with Victor Mirabeau; and in their discussions on love—the view he takes of this passion is always a sure test of a man’s character—each letter-writer showed the yawning gulf that divided him from the other.

If Vauvenargues ever met the woman worthy to hold his heart, to be, in the finest and highest understanding of those words, his companion and completion, is not known. He writes of love as if he had felt it. But to some pure souls—as to a Milton and a St. John the Divine—are revealed in visions the Eden and the New Jerusalem wherein{101} they never walked. Vauvenargues’ letters to Mirabeau treat of the subject with such an exquisite dignity and refinement—with such noble silences—that there is at least no doubt that if he never found the woman who would have realised his ideals, he was spared the bitterness of loving one who broke them.

Cousin Victor easily perceived that this thoughtful young soldier was fitted for something widely different from the life of a garrison town. Come up to Paris, then! Take up letters as a career! Win the smiles of the Court, and a pension from the Privy Purse! But Vauvenargues not only preferred literature to the sham called literary fame, but he loved his own profession.

Thinker as nature had made him, thinker, moralist, aphorist as he has come down the ages, he was first of all a man of action, and so sound in thought because he was so strong in deeds. All his maxims were ‘hewn from life.’ When the death of the Emperor Charles VI. in 1740 shook the kingdoms of Europe as a child shakes its marbles in a bag, Luc de Vauvenargues shouldered his knapsack and went out to Bohemia under the command of Belle-Isle. Ready to dare and to do, brave, young, high-spirited, knowing no career more glorious than arms, he looked round him and drew from keen experience his views of the world.{102}

The philosopher in a study, weighing the pros and cons of motives he knows by hearsay, of deeds of which he has read, of passions he has never felt, may be a very fine thinker, but will hardly be chosen as a sound guide to practice.

The explorer who has faced the torrent and the mountain, the burning sun of the desert, hunger and cold and thirst, who has himself fought with beasts at Ephesus, will have a knowledge of the country he has discovered, which no books and lectures, no geographical or topographical knowledge can ever give to the cleverest student at home. The worth and the use of Vauvenargues’ axioms on life lie largely in the fact that he had been there himself.

The very brief triumph of the capture of Prague in 1742 was succeeded by the horrors of the great mid-winter march from Prague to Egra. The King’s Own suffered terribly. Death, defeat, famine, Vauvenargues knew not as names but as realities. In the spring of 1742 he had lost a young comrade, de Seytres, and wrote an éloge of him. Its immature and stilted style gives little idea of the warm feeling it clothed. Morley speaks of Vauvenargues’ ‘patient sweetness and equanimity’ as a friend; and records how hardship made him ‘not sour,’ but wise and tender. All through that fearful march, in this strange soldie{103}r’s knapsack were the manuscripts of ‘Discourses on Fame and Pleasure,’ ‘Counsels to a Young Man,’ and a ‘Meditation on Faith.’ Of many of his maxims on patience and the brave endurance of suffering, he must have found at this time cruel personal need.

The handsome young officer who had left France in the prime of his hopes and his manhood, returned to it with his health utterly ruined, both his legs frost-bitten, and his lungs seriously affected.

Still, he gathered together the strength he had left him and the pluck that never failed him, rejoined his regiment in Germany in 1743, fought nobly for his fallen cause at Dettingen, and returned to the garrison of Arras at the end of the year, an invalid for life.

It was now obvious he could no longer pursue his calling. Though he wrote with a keen and bitter truth that courage had come to be regarded as a popular delusion, patriotism as a prejudice, and that ‘one sees in the army only disgust, ennui, neglect, murmuring; luxury and effeminacy have produced the same effrontery as peace; and those who should, from their position, arrest the progress of the evil, encourage it by their example,’ yet still he would, if he could, have been soldier to the end. For{104} a time he thought of diplomacy. ‘Great positions soon teach great minds,’ was one of his axioms. He would have been well fitted. But merit was not of the slightest help to advancement. To fawn on the King and the Mistress, to prostitute one’s life and one’s talents to a Court—here was the way to promotion. Vauvenargues wrote to the King and corresponded with Amelot the Minister, who answered most amiably and affably—and did nothing at all. ‘Permit me, sir,’ wrote Vauvenargues to him at last, with the directness taught in camps, ‘to assure you that it is a moral impossibility for a gentleman, with nothing but zeal to commend him, ever to reach the King.’ Amelot, stung a little, promised the next vacant post, and this time promised sincerely.

Vauvenargues retired to Provence and to quiet, to learn his new business. There he was attacked by confluent small-pox, which left him nearly blind and wholly disfigured: a misfortune he felt painfully as ‘one of those accidents which prevent the soul from showing itself.’ But worse than any disfigurement, the partial blindness made, of course, a diplomatic career an impossibility for ever.

Before the campaign of 1743, Vauvenargues had introduced himself to Arouet de Voltaire, by a letter in which the obscure soldier-critic com{105}pared Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Nothing is so delightful in Voltaire’s own genius as his generous recognition of other men’s. Nothing is more to his honour than his high admiration for the moral gifts of a Vauvenargues who was young enough to be his son, who was poor, forlorn, a nobody, and whose fine qualities of lofty highmindedness, delicacy, patience and serenity found, alas! no counterpart in Voltaire’s own nature. It is so much the more to his credit that he could admire what he could never imitate, and appreciate what was wholly foreign to his temperament. He rejoiced in the thoughtful ability of that letter. ‘It is the part of such a man as you,’ he replied, ‘to have preferences but no exclusions.’

The campaign of 1743 had interrupted their relationship. But they resumed it now, and, behold! it had turned into friendship.

Voltaire was at this time fifty years old, famous as the author of the ‘English Letters,’ the ‘Henriade,’ a few brilliant plays, and also as Court wit and versifier. But he was already in mental attitude what he had not yet become in mental output and in active deed. He could recognise in this Vauvenargues not only a friend and a literary critic, but a thinker and a philosopher. Vauvenargues sent him by degrees most of his{106} writings, and Voltaire’s criticisms thereon, as sincere as they were enthusiastic, were in themselves a powerful persuasion to the man of deeds to become man of words; while the Master’s whole-hearted devotion to his own profession—the best and the noblest of all, though it bring no bread but the bread of affliction and of tears—was a further strong inducement to Vauvenargues to join the great brotherhood too. This soldier-thinker can tell men what to do when we have made them free to do what they will! He is, he has confessed it, as ‘follement amoureux de la liberté’ as I myself! To the individual soul he can give the help and the courage I have tried to give to the race, and to the riddle of the painful earth he can bring a wiser, tenderer, and braver solution than mine!

Vauvenargues was not, in fact, an intellect a Voltaire would lose. The young soldier decided to adopt literature as a profession, and began the world afresh.

Everything, save only Voltaire’s encouragement, was against such a decision. The old Marquis de Vauvenargues—from a very natural but very mistaken and unrobust tenderness—would have kept his son at home to lead a safe, idle, invalid life in Provence, with a stroll on the terrace of the Vauvenargues’ country-house for exercise, a thick-headed provincial neighbour for{107} mental recreation, and his own aches and pains for an interest. His other relations (on the principle of Myrtle in ‘The Conscious Lovers’—‘We never had one of our Family before that descended from Persons that Did anything’) objected to letters for one of Us as a low walk, leading directly to the Bastille. It was true that the moment was an inglorious one for literature. The Encyclop?dia was unconceived. Voltaire himself was not yet the mighty influence he was to become. Writing did pay badly, and the young Marquis was deadly poor. Greatest objection of all was his own strong leaning to a life of action, and he himself first wrote of literature as being as ‘repugnant’ to him as to his family. ‘But necessity knows no law.’

That momentary bitterness passed. ‘Despair is the worst of faults,’ said he. It was his part—allotted to him by misfortune, by fate, by God—no longer to act himself, but to teach other men how to act. He thrust aside the objections of his relatives. ‘It is better to derogate from one’s caste than from one’s genius.’ He silenced his own disappointment. ‘A great soul loves to fight against ill fortune ... and the battle pleases him, independently of the victory.’

In May, 1745, he came up to Paris, and in a {108}very humble lodging, where the Rue Larrey and the School of Medicine are now situated, began the world afresh.

Anyone who supposes his discontent to come from his circumstances and not from himself, should consider the life of Vauvenargues, and the one book with which he has enriched humanity.

Disappointed, disfigured, a failure; useless for the career he had loved, incapable of the career he had tried; cast off by his own people; solitary in a great city; often in pain of body, and because the work he had chosen was not the work Nature had originally chosen for him, often in pain of mind too—if ever man had an excuse for cursing God and fate, it was surely Luc de Vauvenargues.

La Rochefoucauld, rich and prosperous, with friends, position, and honour, had denied human virtue, and assailed it with cold malignities which still strike despair into the soul; and Voltaire himself, the most successful man of letters in history, turned upon life with gibes, and sneered at faith and happiness as alike chim?ras.

But Vauvenargues looked out on the world which had given him nothing, with serene and patient eyes, and in a single book, as direct, strong, and simple as his own nature, evolved one of the most wise and comforting, one of the most sane,{109} serene, and practical schemes of life, given to our race.

The great questions, Why am I? Whither go I? Whence came I? he asked himself as a thoughtful man must, but being a doer long before he was a thinker, he wasted little time in vainly seeking to answer them. Among his papers are a Prayer as well as the ‘Meditation.’ For simple faith he had ever reverence and envy—for all solemn questions a deep respect; and though he had no formulated religion, was yet deeply religious. But with him to be religious meant to Do Well. Live this life aright, and the next will take care of itself. ‘The thought of death deceives us, it makes us forget to live: one must live as if one would never die.’ To waste time and energy in idle discussion and speculation on another world when there is so much to do to set this one straight, found no countenance from this man of Deeds. Do, not dream, was his motto for ever.

There is not a page in his book—there is scarcely a line—which does not bear witness to his strong faith in men’s honour and goodness, to his passionate conviction that out of worst evil one can get good, that the cruellest misfortunes ennoble and purify if one will let them, and our griefs may be for ever our gains. The hand that wrote was fevered with disease. No rich man,{110} this, announcing glibly how comfortable it is to be poor. In the most vicious of all ages—and in not the least vicious of that age’s environments—Vauvenargues had preserved his high ideals and his lofty character, and in sickness, sorrow, and disappointment he practised daily the courage he preached.

Instead of mockery—the besetting sin of his generation—this man, and this man alone, had for men’s follies and absurdities only infinite compassion. Of him has been aptly quoted Bacon’s beautiful phrase, ‘he had an aspect as though he pitied men.’ His philosophy remains for ever to the unquiet heart at once balm and tonic—the cool hand of compassion on the burning forehead—the touch of a friend, who knows—the strong grasp of help to raise the feeble from his weakness and despair, and to make him do what he can.

Some of the axioms have become part of men’s speech, if not part of their soul.

‘Great thoughts come from the heart.’

‘We should comfort ourselves for not having fine talents, as we comfort ourselves for not having fine positions; we can be above both by the heart.’

‘Great men undertake great things because they are great, and fools because they think them easy.{111}’

‘Would you say great things? Then first accustom yourself never to say false ones.’

‘Who can bear all, can dare all.’

‘Envy is confessed inferiority.’

‘Few sorrows are without remedy: despair is more deceptive than hope.’

‘Who gives his word lightly, breaks it.’

‘He who has great feeling, knows much.’

‘To the passions one owes the best things of the mind.’

Into that mad devotion to wit which was the snare of all his compeers, Vauvenargues never fell. He worshipped at the shrine of a diviner goddess called Truth. There is not a single example—even in his maxims, when the temptation would naturally be strongest—of his sacrificing fidelity to smartness.

In February 1746, after he had been less than a year in Paris, he published anonymously that book by which he has gone down the ages and up to the gods, and which contains only the ‘Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind,’ some ‘Reflections,’ the ‘Counsels to a Young Man,’ a few critical articles, the ‘Meditation on Faith,’ and the ‘Maxims.’

Clear, clean, and vigorous in style, as sharp and brief as a military order—it was well said by a friend that its author ‘wanted first of all to get{112} along quickly and drag little baggage after him;’ and better said by himself that, ‘when an idea will not bear a simple form of expression, it is the sign for rejecting it.’

It was not the sort of work likely to bring him present fame, or money. He did not expect them. As he worked in his miserable lodgings, ill lit and ill warmed, already a prey to consumption, and suffering often acutely from the old frost-bites—no such hopes had buoyed him. But he did what he had told other men to do—worked for the work’s sake—and he found what he had told them they would find, joy in the working and satisfaction in a noble aim, be it unrewarded for ever.

The book dropped from the press perfectly stillborn. Reflections and moralities in the Paris of 1746! No, thank you. No one even troubled to abuse it. No one, except Marmontel, who was Vauvenargues’ personal friend, reviewed it. But Voltaire loudly pronounced it one of the best books in the language: ‘The age ... is not worthy of you, but it has you, and I bless Nature. A year ago I said you were a great man, and you have betrayed my secret.’ After Vauvenargues’ death he wrote of him, ‘How did you soar so high in this age of littleness?’ and spoke of the ‘Maxims’ as characteristic of a profoundly sincere and thoughtful mind, wholly above all jealousies and party{113} spirit. For sixty years the book lay germinating in a hard and barren soil, unworthy of it; and then rose fresh and strong from oblivion to the just and growing fame it enjoys to-day. It has been well said ‘to give the soul of man an impetus towards truth.’

Though his tastes, his poverty, and his health alike precluded Vauvenargues from joining in the socialities of the cafés and the salons during his brief life in Paris, he saw sometimes Marmontel and d’Argental, and often Voltaire. Marmontel was still only a boy who had just started literary life on a capital of six louis and the patronage of Voltaire; and d’Argental, Voltaire’s dear ‘guardian angel,’ was the nephew of Madame de Tencin, and, perhaps, the author of her novels. Marmontel was on a very different plane of intellect and character from Vauvenargues—while the one was a lusty boy beginning the world, the other was a patient thinker who was leaving it. But in those bare and dreary surroundings, in the disfigured invalid of whom men had never heard, even the commonplace cleverness of a Marmontel worshipped a hero. Long years after, he speaks of Vauvenargues’ ‘unalterable serenity’—of his brave and tender heart. ‘With him one learnt to live and learnt to die.’

As for Voltaire, one can picture him just elected to the French Academy, the protégé of{114} Madame de Pompadour, the dearest friend of young Frederick the Great, and fast becoming the most astonishing man in Europe, entering into the dull room, full of liveliness and animation, ay, and full too of real kindness and sympathy, while the invalid sat by the fireside listening silently awhile, and then striking across the Master’s brilliant volubility with some quiet truth which he had long proved and pondered. That he found Voltaire’s conversation a powerful stimulus to his own mind, and a very real delight, is not doubtful. There are few Voltaires in the world, and it was one of Vauvenargues’ misfortunes that, save Victor Mirabeau, he had known scarcely anyone who was his intellectual equal.

But if Voltaire roused the mind, Vauvenargues strengthened the soul. After his death, Voltaire wrote of him that he had always seen him ‘the most unfortunate and the most tranquil of men.’ It was this lucky genius of an Arouet who brought his fumings and his impatience, his irritableness over this, his chagrins about that, for the consolation of the man to whose sufferings his own had been as a drop in the ocean. Vauvenargues always seems the elder of the two, as it were. He was as certainly the wiser, as he was certainly the far inferior genius.

What were his thoughts when those few friends{115} had left him? It is on their testimony that he never uttered a complaining or a bitter word. His writings contain not an angry line—not one rebellion against God and Fate. It was the happy people who grumbled—perhaps it always is. Once, only once, there is a striving against destiny. In a moment of relaxation from bodily pain he wrote to an intimate friend, ‘I have need of all your affection, my dear Saint-Vincens: all Provence is in arms, and I am here at my fireside.’ He went on to offer his feeble help to the service he had loved, and to beg for the smallest post in his old active career.

But in a second came realisation. He was too ill to be of any use. Only thirty-two, he saw life slipping from him, and leaving him at that fireside a wreck, only fit for the hulks. But he bore ‘his dark hour unseen,’ and troubled no man with his troubles.

His disease gained on him daily now. For the last year he was too ill to write. How far harder to die bravely by inches, unable even to do one’s work, than to rush a smiling hero upon the swords in a glorious moment of exaltation, unweakened by disease, and uplifted by the applause of just men and of one’s own heart!

Vauvenargues saw death coming slowly while it was yet a great way off, and was not afraid.{116} No saint this, beholding in fervid ecstasy the vision of a world to come; but a strong man who had done his best with the world he had, and had written of that unknown future only in patient hope. ‘My passions and thoughts die but to be born again: every night I die on my bed but to take again new strength and freshness: this experience of death reassures me against the decay and the dissolution of my body.’

He had lived to do his duty and to think of others, and thus he died.

The date was May 28, 1747, and the period one of the least honourable in the life of his friend Voltaire. But from his sycophancy of Pope and King, from a foul and noisy Court, from feverish bickerings with his Madame du Chatelet, and the coarse worldliness of his old Duchesse du Maine, Vauvenargues’ death recalled him to his truer self, and roused him to the real work of his life. No other loss he ever suffered, it is said, affected him more profoundly.

If the fact that Vauvenargues loved him bears high testimony to the character of Voltaire, the virtue of Vauvenargues, like the virtue of Addison, may well give ‘reputation to an age.’

Flippant and false, at once supremely clever and supremely silly, the eighteenth century, to whom Duty was a mockery and Wit was a god,{117} is in some sort redeemed by the brave, silent life, and the high ideals he proved practical and not visionary by fulfilling himself, of this soldier aphorist.

While of all the Brothers of Progress, Vauvenargues alone approached Truth as a suppliant, and thus gained, surely, the nearest vision of her face.