The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
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an example of distinctly male social ineptness—though, unlike the pedant, he still commands a certain tolerant respect. The social persona of the traditional scholar has become the example par excellence of crude and overbearing masculinity.49 The reason for his social ineptness seemed obvious. After spending his boyhood being drilled in Latin grammar and translating arcane bits and pieces of classical learning, the pedant had acquired a doctorate at one of the university faculties. The quintessence of the type was the Sorbonne-educated theologian. He was still—as Montaigne had portrayed him—a boor and a bore, intent on impressing others with his esoteric and tunnel-visioned academic expertise. Far from exemplifying effeminacy, however, he was a reproof to the fact that the colleges and the university faculties were male ghettos. Having been formed in that world, the pedant was “intractable, arrogant, uncivil, impolite, opinionated.”50 His voice grated; he interrupted imperiously; he droned on. These were stereotypical traits, of course, but they pointed to certain realities of academic education. The battle-like exercise of “dialectic” in public “disputation,” often before a large and rowdy audience, was still a characteristic feature of university learning and teaching. Since their origins in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuit collèges had also simulated a martial spirit by making debates between platoons of pupils central to their curriculum. There was, of course, an ancient pedagogical rationale for pitting boys and young men against each other in relentless argument, but it was one that the standards of honnêteté simply dismissed. The pedant’s combativeness betrayed the excessive masculinity that conventional male education inculcated.
Pedantry was a serviceable social stigma, not a reliable social descriptive. It was not uncommon, particularly in the Jesuit collèges, for sons of the nobility to be introduced to classical Latin literature. There were savants who had been immersed since boyhood in academic Latinity, and who were active in the epistolary exchange of scholarly knowledge in the Republic of Letters, and yet were also accepted in le monde as honnêtes hommes.51 They knew how to mute their learning when they engaged in aesthetic play. And yet there were tensions in their efforts to bridge the worlds of scholarly labor and leisured amusement, and even when they wrote in the honnête key, apparently speaking from within its habitus, they sometimes declared their independence from it. The tensions remain audible in Dominique Bouhours’s The Conversations of Ariste and Eugène, published in 1671, though he assumed the literary persona of mediator between learning and mondanitè. Having first attracted attention as a professor of literature at the prestigious Collège de Clermont in Paris, Bouhours became tutor to the two sons of Henri II d’Orléans, duc de Longueville. His publications from the 1670s onward made him a widely recognized authority on correct and elegant usage in literary French. The Conversations of Ariste and Eugène sought to convey in print the lightness of the art of conversation, and they continue to have literary importance as examples of the polite essay in a conversational mode.52 The two characters Bouhours puts in dialogue are young honnêtes hommes, and though they often question each other’s views, they do so in fluid and accommodating conversation, not in the battle formations of an academic disputation.
The entretien titled “The je ne sais quoi” is an extensive exploration of the meanings of a deliberately mystifying phrase that was much in vogue. By using the definite article Bouhours announced that the phrase, so often used sloppily, now required examination as an object in itself. It is an examination, however, that Ariste and Eugène conduct from within the social aesthetic of play. The je ne sais quoi is what “pleases” or, perhaps better, delights in a way that can neither be grasped intellectually nor captured in language. We recognize it only by its effect, an entirely spontaneous “sympathy” or “inclination” of “the heart.” Experiencing it is an entirely “natural” moment of freedom; in it we are, in fact, free not only of “reason,” but also of the need to exercise freedom of the will. This is a social epistemology that in effect bans philosophers and other savants from intruding their authority into the aesthetic of play; it will likely always be futile for them to try to understand, much less explain, the phenomenon. There are, to be sure, universal cases of the je ne sais quoi, but in matters of taste, as in individuals’ face-to-face reactions to each other, all human beings have a particular je ne sais quoi that makes them pleased or displeased at first sight. It would be hard to imagine a more explicit defense of the modern literary subjectivity of the culture of mondanité. Appropriately Bouhours includes a comparison commonly used in le monde by the 1660s. There are, he acknowledges, “great beauties” in Guez de Balzac’s works; but, turning a word against the author who coined it, he finds Voiture’s works “infinitely” more pleasing because they have that “air du monde,” that “tincture of urbanité that Cicero did not know how to define.”
In the essay on the bel esprit, however, Bouhours cautiously became a critic of fashionable mondanité. He undertook an act of lexical policing, aimed at counteracting a “usurpation” of the phrase bel esprit by all sorts of people who did not merit it. The delicacy of his task lay in politely leveling a scornful critique of pretended bel esprits and, with it, a soft but pointed admonishment of mondanité, as he tried to regenerate the term by steering it into the intellectually more serious waters that the worldly shunned. “The true beauty of l’esprit,” Ariste observes, “consists of a correct (juste) and delicate discernment” that reveals “things such as they are.” If such discernment is “brilliant,” it is also “solid,” a matter of “judgment,” with a “force” to “penetrate the principles of sciences and the most hidden truths.”53 Bouhours was trying to remove the true bel esprit from the mondain preoccupation with pleasing appearance, and that in turn required a male repossession of the phrase. “The beauty of the esprit,” he writes, “is a manly and generous beauty, which has nothing of the soft and effeminate.”54 Later in the essay Bouhours has Eugène observe that “the savants de profession are ordinarily not beaux esprits,” as they are always “buried” in study and, having little “commerce with les honnêtes gens,” they lack “a certain politesse and I know not what of agrément.”55 Bouhours acknowledges the social ineptitude of the stereotypical pedant, however, only to give more credibility to his defense of learned men who are not at home in polite sociability but can nonetheless be polite authors. He breaks down genuine beaux esprits into three types with “talents” that are rarely combined: the worldly conversationalist, the statesman at the pinnacle of government, and the polite author. “There is nothing more opposed to study and public affairs,” he writes, than “the spirit of conversation,” which is “a natural spirit, an enemy of all labor and constraint.” With the term “natural” Bouhours seems to follow the underlying logic of a pure sociability devoted to aisance. But as he continues aisance becomes a more dubious attribute: “those who have this talent are ordinarily idle people (oisifs) whose principal employment is to make and receive visits.” Even as he hales Voiture as the supreme example of the bel esprit who writes effortlessly and delicately, he detaches the bel esprit as a man of letters from Voiture’s conversational artistry. “The most brilliant and exact authors do not always shine in conversation”; they “examine things in depth,” and in company they speak seldom, “as they think too much about what they want to say.”56 Bouhours in effect extracts the man of letters from the symbiosis of orality and the written word that the aesthetic discourse of honnêteté made mandatory. Though the author’s style must of course have “I know not what of the agreeable and the flowery to please people of good taste,”57 the bel esprit is an emphatically male intelligence whose engagement in the labor of strenuous thought grants him a certain independence from the social aesthetic of play.
The savant Pierre Daniel Huet also moved fairly comfortably in le monde but kept himself at a remove from its ethos. In his Treatise on the Origins of the Novel, published in 1670, a year before Bouhours’s Conversations, the implicit assertion of authorial independence we find in Bouhours’s text widens into an explicit effort to reclaim the scholar’s cultural authority.58 A prodigy of Jesuit education, Huet became a scholar’s scholar. Over the course of his career he would produce translated editions of ancient and early Christian