Part 6

The Abbé Morellet, as large as Galiani was small, and as ponderous in style as the Abbé was light, was employed to answer him. The good man wrote his refutation with such haste and ardour that the skin of his little finger was completely worn off from much rubbing against the side of his desk. And, after all, no one read him. He may, or may not, be right; he is certainly dull!

Then Turgot took up a mightier pen and wielded a mightier influence. Noble and disinterested, a better and a greater man than Galiani, the Statesman of that company of which the Abbé was but the Wit, Turgot sought, as did Galiani, the good and the progress of humanity; but he sought it by a different road, and by the labour of his whole life. He recognised the cleverness of the book; a bad cause, said he, could not be maintained with more grace and cleverness. But my little brother the Abbé is wrong, not the less. In the ‘Dialogues’ there peeped out, thought Turgot, something of the comfortable indifference of those who are content to leave the world as it is because it goes so smoothly with them, something of the laziness and the selfishness that come naturally to a little writer himself so comfortably beneficed and mitred. Galiani lacked, in fact, Turgot’s ‘instincts of the heart which teach the head.’

Right or wrong--_l’honnête homme trompé_ perhaps--Turgot had put his soul into the great cause of humanity, and Galiani had only put his mind. What wonder that they saw the same world with different eyes, and would have worked out the salvation of falling France, by methods not only opposite but opposed?

Galiani went back to Naples. For many months, for years, his letters are full of his book, that effort which, even if misdirected, proved that he was no drone in the hive, that he too had that one great virtue common to all the philosophers and redeeming half their sins--he had heard the trumpet-call of responsibility towards his fellows, and had answered it.

After Paris, Naples was not merely dull, it was extinction. The poor little Abbé bemoaned his fate to Madame d’Épinay in the most touching of all jesting letters. True, there was society here, and Galiani was its lion. But what society! There was Lady Orford, Robert Walpole’s daughter-in-law, who had a country house close to Galiani’s at Santo Sorio, at the foot of Vesuvius, and there was Sir William Hamilton, now British envoy and, to be, the husband of Lady Hamilton. Presently there came, too, the Marquis of Lansdowne, who was amiable, which, said Galiani, ‘is a very rare thing for an Englishman, and Secretary of State, which is a very common thing.’

But the Abbé hated the English; and he was bored to death. The Court of Naples gave him more lucrative posts--and though he described himself as _avide_ without being _avare_, which meant that he was greedy of money and yet lavish in spending it--money, even when it does not beget _ennui_, certainly never destroys it. He turned to his museum full of medals and bronzes, pictures and weapons--and that bored him too. Paris, Paris! He hankered after it for ever. ‘What is the good of inoculation here,’ he grumbled, after expressing delight in that discovery, ‘when living itself is not worth while?’ ‘What a life!’ he wrote dismally to d’Holbach in 1770. ‘Nothing amusing here ... no edicts ... no suspensions of payment ... no quarrels about any thing--not even about religion. Dear Paris, how I regret you!’

In 1771 died there that Madame Daubinière to whom he had been attached by no Platonic tie, and whom he had not hesitated to recommend to the good offices of Madame d’Épinay; and in the same year the death of Helvétius, the rich and amiable ex-Farmer-General, ‘left a blank in the line of our battalion.’ ‘Let us love each other the better, we who remain,’ says Galiani. ‘Close the lines. Advance! Fire!’ He was always declaring he had no heart; but it was there, under the lava of worldliness and mockery, as Pompeii and Herculaneum lay hid beneath the lava of his own Vesuvius. He was soon busy procuring a post at Court for his unsuccessful brother Bernard--Bernard, who had a large family, little money, and the dull bookworm talents that bring no more. Then Bernard died, and up starts the Abbé in a new _rôle_. There are three stupid nieces to be married, to say nothing of the widow! The indefatigable uncle found the girls eligible husbands, although one of them, as he wrote frankly, was as ugly as a hunchback. Then he discovered some one to marry his sister-in-law. ‘If this goes on,’ he wrote to Madame d’Épinay, ‘people will clap when I go into my box at the theatre.’

Presently the King of Naples gave him yet two more posts--entailing not only emoluments but work--and he resumed his literary labours, wrote a pamphlet on the ‘Instincts and Habitual Tastes of Man,’ a comic opera, to Paisiello’s music, called ‘The Imaginary Socrates,’ and another most amusing pamphlet, written in a single night, to distract the Neapolitans from their fright on the eruption of Vesuvius in 1779.

In 1781 he visited Rome, and was courted by all the great people; and when he came home Naples gave him another rich abbey and another most lucrative civil appointment. He was still a comparatively young man. Fortune had overturned her horn at his feet. ‘The torment of all things accomplished, the plague of nought to desire,’ might well have been Galiani’s. But he had the rare power of finding happiness where it most often hides--in small and common things. The monkey which had amused his leisure he had replaced by a couple of cats, and it afforded him infinite amusement to watch their gambols and their habits, and write long dissertations on the natural history of the animal to Madame d’Épinay in Paris.

His friendship with her had lasted without break or blot for nearly five-and-twenty years. If happiness meant only exemption from suffering, then well for Galiani that no woman ever held his heart more nearly than this light, bright, irresponsible little person. But that side of existence which brings the deepest sorrow brings too the highest joy, and who is spared the first, misses the second. Madame Daubinière had touched neither his soul nor his life; Madame d’Épinay only aroused a capacity for a friendship which, as he loved no one, had certainly assumed some of the absorption of a passion. When she died in 1783, he stood in the presence of a great and a most genuine sorrow. She had represented the Paris he would see no more; to answer her letters had been a large occupation in his life--and she was dead! He turned to his work as his last hope, to the one means that was left of making life endurable. In 1785 he was attacked by apoplexy, and two years later he travelled for his health. But it was not improved. ‘The dead are so bored,’ he said in his old jesting manner; ‘they have asked me to come and cheer them a little.’

In the October of 1787 the King and Queen of Naples commanded him to meet them at Portici. He went, but he was long past receiving pleasure from such honours. The Sovereigns were struck with his altered appearance, and begged him to consult a doctor. Queen Caroline wrote him a letter imploring him to renounce his scepticism and make ready for heaven. He answered with dignity and respect; but no physician for either the soul or the body could aid him now. He kept his gaiety to the last. As he had loved in life to be surrounded by friends, they were about his deathbed. He declared to them that he felt no sorrow in dying, save that he would fain have lived to publish his book on Horace. The night before his death Gatti, his friend and doctor, told him he had refused an invitation to the opera from the Ambassador of France to be near his friend. ‘Ah,’ says Galiani, ‘you still look on me as Harlequin? Well, perhaps I shall prove more amusing than the opera.’ And he did. Two hours before his death General Acton, the Prime Minister, called to see him. ‘Tell his Excellency I cannot receive him. My carriage is at the door. Warn him to prepare his own.’

He died on October 30, 1787, aged nearly fifty-nine.

Dagonet, King’s Fool at Arthur’s Court, could not avert his master’s ruin, but, noblest of all Fools, he tried. Galiani, with his laughing bells jingling in those ‘Dialogues,’ spoke his message in jests and could not help starving France, nor even postpone by an hour the raid on the bakers’ shops in the Faubourg St. Antoine. But he, too, did his best.

IV

_VAUVENARGUES: THE APHORIST_

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

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 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 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 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 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.

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 soldier’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 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 compared 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 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 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 Encyclopædia 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 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.