Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/190

178 L A B L A B 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 Quietisme, 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 Bruyere s other works, their genuineness has been denied. But the straightforward and circumstantial account of their appearance given by their editor, the Abbe" Dupin, a man of acknowledged probity, the intimacy of La Bruyere with Bossuet, whose views in his contest with Fe nelon 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 Caracteres 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 Bruyere combined the peculiarities of the Montaigne essay, of the Pensees 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 Bruyere reminds the reader of Montaigne, but he aimed too much at senteriti- 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 not 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 Se"vign6 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 Bruyere 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 Bruyere literally "est [trop] descendu dans le particulier. " He has neither like Moliere embodied abstract peculiarities in a single life-like type, nor has he like Shakespeare made the individual pass sub speciem seternitatis, and serve as a type while re taining 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 Bruyere has the air of a literary petit-maitre 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 done 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 1 esprit " contains much good criticism, though it shows that, like most of his contem poraries except Fe nelon, he was lamentably ignorant of the literature of his own tongue. The editions of La Bruyere, both partial and complete, Lave been extremely numerous. Les Caracteres dc Theophraste tradnits du Grcc, avec Us Caracteres ct les Mceurs dc cc Slide, appeared for the first time in 1688, being published by Michallet, to whose little daughter, according to tradition, La Bruyere gave the profits 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 Conde, not till 1867. In the last thirty or forty years numerous editions of the complete works have appeared, notably those of "Walckenaer (1845), Servois (1867), Asselineau (a scholarly reprint of the last original edition, 1872), and finally Chassang (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 Bruyere 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 Come~dic dc La Bruyere, (G. SA.) LABUAN, or LABUHAN, an island of the East Indian Archipelago, which has been a British possession since 1846. It lies about G miles off the north-west coast of Borneo, opposite the northern end of the great bay of Brunei. Rudely triangular in shape, it measures about 7 miles across the base, and has a length of 11 miles from north to south. The general flatness of the surface is broken by a number of undulating hills, none of which, however, exceed 90 feet in height. At the time of the first settlement most of the ground was occupied by virgin forest, in which camphor trees of noble proportions were conspicuous ; but nearly the whole of this has been destroyed either by human effort or by jungle fires. The soil is very poor, except in the valleys of the larger streams. Of the total area, estimated at over 45 square miles, or 29,350 acres, 21,000 acres are supposed to be capable of cultivation; but of this not more than 1500 acres are sown with rice, the only crop attempted on a large scale in the island. The cocoa-nut flourishes to no small profit on the little island of Daat ; and the African oil palm promises well. At the time of its occupation a brilliant future was prophesied for Labuan : its harbour was to make it a second Singapore, and its coal beds were to prove an unfailing source of wealth. Such anticipations are far from having been realized. Though the workable coal in the island has been estimated at no less than 400,000,000 tons, the mines have commercially proved an utter failure. The Scottish Oriental Coal Company the fourth of its kind came to an untimely end in 1880 ; from 1868 it had raised 53,741 tons of clean coal, each