Les Moralistes: une apologie (review)

Two scholars of seventeenth-century French literature have distinguished themselves by the manner in which they have adopted and adapted the approach of the authors they study. This intellectual identification has been responsible for several 'classical' examples of criticism that transcend movements and mouvances, while offering wisdom about life and literature. Jules Brody and Louis Van Delft (who edited Brody's Festschrift) reflect, in their books and essays, the method of the moralistes, especially Montaigne and La Bruyère.

Successive editions of Les Essais, like Les Caractères, reveal a conscious effort to expand and deepen, to cast one's referential net ever wider across time and space, to confront contemporary mores with the examples of the past in an effort to clear away the thicket of opinion or spin that obstructs the path to an enlightened future. So too Louis Van Delft in his latest book.

Van Delft makes it everywhere evident that Les Moralistes: une apologie is the sum and the synthesis of his reflections on the moralistes. It is, therefore, the culmination of the thinking that gave us La Bruyère moraliste (1971), Le Moraliste classique (1982), Littérature et anthropologie (1993), and Les Spectateurs de la vie (2005). Like the fifth act of a classical tragedy (Van Delft writes reviews of contemporary plays for Commentaire), Les Moralistes offers a flashback on previous positions before coming, not to a conclusion—what disciple of Montaigne would ever conclude?—but to a proposal on how to read the moralists, that is, how to continue to profit from consulting classical authors who are under attack in certain quarters.

While the first four chapters cover familiar ground, they are not to be passed over, because the material has been enriched by the two ways of knowing that typify the work of Van Delft and his models: reading and experience—le vécu. Contributions from different fields of inquiry and especially from different countries make these chapters models of interdisciplinarity. (The quotes from John Donne, that English Pascalian, are striking.) The last chapter, "Moralia revisitée," is the true Apologie of the book's title, a plea for the modernity of the 200 years of the moraliste tradition: "L'important est de prendre conscience qu'il y eut alors bien plus d' 'essais' et d'ébauches, de 'figures' (au sens où l'entendait précisement l'époque), qu'on ne le soupçonne d'abord" (321).

Van Delft notes the trace of the moralistes in neuroscience, anthropology, the social sciences, phenomenology, and rhetoric. He makes the telling point that there are no new questions under the sun, but lots of meditations proffered by the "anciens"; for example, questions on "la nature humaine" have turned into research on the genome. And just as the classical subject encountered "textes ouverts," so the modern reader navigates—surfs—through series of disconnected data. Yet they both necessarily confront the four themes that preoccupy the moralistes: homo viator, theatrum mundi, war, and judgment.

Van Delft closes by reiterating a point he has made from his earliest writings: the real matter of the moralistes is the common place. With typical modesty, he allows another—Bernard Beugnot—to make the point: "Le lieu commun qu'elle [la poésie morale] mobilise convoque toute une tradition sans renier la singularité d'une expérience qu'elle transmet par ses réussites expressives" (364-65). The reflections of the moralistes, whether as treatise or fragment, are like music with variations and modulations on a set of general themes. Listening to them—and to their major proponent, Louis Van Delft—opens a world of pleasure and prudence.