JEAN DE LA BRUYERE, (1645-1696), essayist and moralist, was born at Paris in August 1645, and not, as has more commonly been asserted, at Dourdan (Seine-et-Oise) in 1639. His family was of the middle class, and his reference to a certain Geoffroy de la Bruyere, a crusader, is only a satirical illustration of a method of self-ennoblement common in France as in some other countries. Indeed he himself always signed the name Delabruyere in one word, thus avowing his roture. His progenitors, however, were of respectable position, and he could trace them back at least as far as his great-grandfather, who had been a strong Leaguer. La Bruyere's own father held a municipal appointment in the capital, and seems as well as his son to have been in easy circumstances. The son was educated by the Oratorians, and at the university of Orleans; he was called to the bar, and in 1673 bought a post in the revenue department at Caen, which gave the status of noblesse and a certain income. He afterwards in 1687 sold this office. His predecessor in it was a relation of Bossuet, and it is thought that the transaction was the cause of La Bruyere's introduction to the great orator. Bossuet, who from the date of his own preceptorship of the dauphin, was a kind of agent-general for tutorships in the royal family, introduced him in 1683 or 1684 to the household of the great Cond^, whose grandson Henri Jules de Bourbon he was charged to educate. The rest of his life was passed in the household of the prince or else at court, and he seems to have profited by the inclination which all the Condé family had for the society of men of letters without suffering from the capricious and tyrannical temper which was also one of the characteristics of the house. Very little is known of the events of this part or indeed of any part of his life. Although he certainly mixed freely in society at a time when more gossip was committed to paper than at almost any other, the notices of him are very few, though they are almost always favourable. The impression derived from them is of a silent observant but somewhat awkward man, resembling in manners our own Addison, whose master in literature La Bruyère undoubtedly was. Yet despite the numerous enemies which his book raised up for him, most of the few personal notices we have are, as has been said, favour-able—notably that of St Simon, an acute judge and one bitterly prejudiced against roturiers generally. There is a curious passage in a letter from Boileau to Racine in which he regrets that " nature has not made La Bruyère as agreeable as he would like to be," which, as he at the same time calls him a " fort honnête homme," and says that he would lack nothing were it not for the conduct of nature in this respect, can only refer to the want of manner just noticed. His Caractères appeared in 1688, and at once, as Malezieu had predicted, brought him " bien des lecteurs et bien des ennemis." At the head of these were Thomas Corneille, Fontenelle, and Benserade, who were pretty clearly aimed at in the book, as well as innumerable other persons, men and women of letters as well as of society, on whom the cap of La Bruyere's fancy-portraits was fitted by manuscript "keys" which were at once compiled by the scribblers of the day. The friendship of Bossuet and still more the protection of the Condés defended the author quite sufficiently, and he continued to insert fresh portraits of his contemporaries in each new edition of his book. Those, however, whom he had attacked were powerful in the Academy, and numerous defeats awaited La Bruyère before he could make his way into that guarded hold. He was defeated thrice in 1691, and on one memorable occasion he had but seven votes, five of which were those of Bossuet, Boileau, Racine, Pelisson, and Bussy-Rabutin. It was not till 1695 that he was elected, and even then an epigram, which, considering his admitted insignificance in conversa-tion, was not of the worst, hxsit lateri :—

"Quand la Bruyère se présente
Pourquoi faut il crier hero?
Pour faire un nombre de quarante
Ne falloit il pas un zéro ? "

His unpopularity was, however, chiefly confined to the subjects of his sarcastic portraiture, and to the hack writers of the time, of whom he was wont to speak with a disdain only surpassed by that of Pope. His description of the leading newspaper of the day as " immédiatement au dessous du rien " is the best remembered specimen of these unwise attacks which, both in France and England, retarded the establishment of an independent profession of letters for many years. La Bruyere's discourse of admission at the Academy was, like his admission itself, severely criticized, yet it is certainly one of the best of its kind. With the Caractères, the translation of Theophrastus, and a few letters, it completes the list of his literary work, with the exception of a curious and much-disputed posthumous treatise. La Bruyère died very suddenly, and not long after his admission to the Academy. He is said to have become suddenly deaf in an assembly of his friends, and, being carried home to the Hôtel de Condé, to have expired of apoplexy a day or two afterwards. It is not surprising that, considering the recent panic about poisoning, the bitter personal enmities which he had excited, and the peculiar circumstances of his death, suspicions of foul play should have been entertained, but there seems to be no foundation for them. Two years after his death appeared certain Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, alleged to have been found among his papers incomplete, and to have been completed by the editor. As these dialogues are far inferior in literary merit to La Bruyère's other works, their genuineness lias been denied. But the straightforward and circumstantial account of their appearance given by their editor, the Abbé Dupin, a man of acknowledged probity, the intimacy of La Bruyère with Bossuet, whose views in his contest with Fénelon these dialogues are designed to further, and the entire absence at so short a time after the alleged author's death of the least protest on the part of his friends and representatives, seem to be decisive in their favour.





Although for reasons to be given shortly it is permissible to doubt whether the value of the Caractères has not been somewhat exaggerated by traditional French criticism, they deserve beyond all question a high place among the great works of French literature. The plan of the book is thoroughly original, if that term may be accorded to a novel and skilful combination of existing elements. That the little treatise of Theophrastus may have furnished the first idea of it is doubtless true, but only a very small part of the Frenchman's work is due to the Greek. With the ethical generalizations and social Dutch painting of Theophrastus La Bruyère combined the peculiarities of the Montaigne essay, of the Pensées and Maximes of which Pascal and La Rochefoucauld are the masters respectively, and lastly of that peculiar 17th century product, the portrait or elaborate literary picture of the personal and mental characteristics of an individual. The result was quite unlike anything that had been before seen, and it has not been exactly reproduced since, though the essay of Addison and Steele resembles it very closely, especially in the introduction of fancy portraits. In the titles of his work and in its extreme desultoriness La Bruyère reminds the reader of Montaigne, but he aimed too much at sententi-ousness to attempt even the apparent continuity of the great essayist. The short paragraphs of which his chapters consist are made up of maxims proper, of criticisms literary and ethical, and above all of the celebrated sketches of individuals baptized with names taken from the plays and romances of the time. These last are undoubtedly the great feature of the work, and that which gave it its immediate if hot its enduring popularity. They are wonderfully piquant, extraordinarily life-like in a certain sense, and must have given great pleasure or more frequently exquisite pain to the originals, who were in many cases unmistakable and in most recognizable by a society which held to the full Madame de Sévigné's views of the usefulness of " le prochain " as a butt for satirical observation. But there is something wanting in them. The criticism of Charpentier, who received La Bruyère at the Academy, and who was of the opposite faction, has usually been dismissed as one-sided, but it is in fact fully justified as far as it goes. La Bruyère literally "est [trop] descendu dans le particulier." He has neither like Molière embodied abstract peculiarities in a single life-like type, nor has he like Shakespeare made the individual pass sub speciem ssternitatis. and serve as a type while retaining his individuality. He is a photographer rather than an artist in his portraiture. So too his maxims, admirably as they are expressed, and exact as their truth often is, are on a lower level than those of La Rochefou-cauld, which, rather unwisely, they sometimes follow very closely. Beside the sculpturesque precision, the Roman brevity, the profoundness of ethical intuition "piercing to the accepted hells beneath," of the great Frondeur, La Bruyère has the air of a literary petit-maître dressing up superficial observation in the finery of esprit. It is indeed only by comparison that he loses, but then it is by comparison that he is usually praised. There is no doubt that his abundant wit and his personal " malice " have clone much to give him his rank in French literature, but much must also be allowed to his purely literary merits. With Racine and Massillon he is probably the very best writer of what is somewhat arbitrarily styled classical French. He is hardly ever incorrect—the highest merit in the eyes of a French academic critic. He is always well-bred, never obscure, rarely though sometimes " precious " in the turns and niceties of language in which he delights to indulge, in his avowed design of attracting readers by form now that in point of matter "tout est dit." It ought to be added to his credit that he was sensible of the folly of impoverishing French by ejecting old words. His chapter on " Les ouvrages de l'esprit " contains much good criticism, though it shows that, like most of his contem-poraries except Fénelon, he was lamentably ignorant of the literature of his own tongue.

The editions of La Bruyère, both partial and complete, have been extremely numerous. Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du Grec, avec les Caractères et les Mœurs de ce Siècle, appeared for the first time in 1688, being published by Michallet, to whose little daughter, according to tradition, La Bruyère gave the profita of the book. Two other editions, little altered, were published in the same year. In the following year, and in each year until 1694, with the exception of 1693, a fresh edition appeared, and, in all these five, additions, omissions, and alterations were largely made. A ninth edition, not much altered, was put forth in the year of the author's death. The Academy speech appeared in the eighth edition. The Quietist dialogues were published in 1698 ; most of the letters, in- cluding those addressed to Condé, not till 1867. In the last thirty or forty years numerous editions of the complete works have appeared, notably those of AValckenaer (1845), Servois (1867), Asseliueau (a scholarly reprint of the last original edition, 1872), and finally Ghassang (1876) ; the last is one of the most generally useful, as the editor has collected almost everything of value in his predecessors. The literature of " keys" to La Bruyère is extensive and apocryphal. Almost everything that can be done in this direction and in that of general illustration was done by the late M. Edouard Fournier in his learned and amusing Comédie de La Bruyère. (G. SA.)