Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France — Context and Discussion

A Thunderstorm and a Dedication

The book's origin story is unusually specific. Gosse recounts that he was a guest at Gisburne when, on a Sunday morning, he told Lord Ribblesdale that 'the spirit moved me to stay behind' while the household went to church. Left alone with a small 18mo edition of Vauvenargues published by Plon in 1874, he wrote his first pages during a violent thunderstorm. The storm is described as 'like a declaration of war upon your golden Yorkshire summer,' a metaphor that anticipates the wartime context. Gosse's dedication to Lord Ribblesdale is playful yet pointed: he tells his host that he will have to 'endure the responsibility of being sponsor to a work thus suddenly begun in all the agitation of the elements.' This anecdote establishes the book as a product of both personal impulse and historical pressure.

La Bruyère's Compassionate Critique

Gosse devotes considerable attention to La Bruyère's Caractères, emphasizing its role as a lay-preacher's text that avoided the 'savage attacks on amour-propre' of earlier ascetic writers. He quotes a long passage from the chapter 'De l'Homme' that describes peasants as 'certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid and scorched by the sun.' Gosse calls this passage 'a crisis in the conscience of Europe.' He argues that La Bruyère's genius lay in his ability to 'descend from the pulpit, and walk about among his readers with a smile,' offering persuasion rather than denunciation. This approach, Gosse suggests, made moral improvement seem attainable to ordinary readers. He also notes La Bruyère's direct influence on Addison, who was an undergraduate at Oxford when the Caractères was published, and who later stayed in France for over twelve months.

The Shifting Temper of War

Gosse is careful to limit his claims about the soldiers' mentality. He writes that 'what was true of the temper of the soldiers of France in November 1914 is no longer true in April 1918.' The early idealism—when young officers 'rushed to battle like paladins, with a pure heart, in the rapture of chivalry and duty'—has been 'wearied out' by the long struggle. Yet he insists that this spirit is preserved in letters and journals, such as those of Paul Lintier. Gosse's method is to trace the moral and literary roots of that initial gallantry, not to describe the war itself. He positions the three moralists as sources of a complex national character that includes apparent oppositions, and he treats the war as a lens through which to examine enduring French traits rather than as a subject in its own right.

Gosse's essays are best approached as a work of cultural criticism rather than military history. He uses the war as a framing device to explore how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral thought shaped a national ideal of gallantry. Readers interested in the literary lineage of French self-understanding will find his close readings of La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, and Vauvenargues instructive, particularly his attention to La Bruyère's influence on English writers like Addison. The book's strength lies in its specific textual observations, not in sweeping claims about the war itself.

Years ago, I shelved Gosse’s little volume beside a slimmer one, and they seemed to nod at each other. Both whisper of how restraint shapes character—the young officers’ gallantry, and the quiet ethics of intimacy. There is a gentle kinship in their shared gravity. Sexual ethics — Story, Setting & Ideas lingers beside La Bruyère’s compassion, a patient neighbor on my shelf.