The plan of the book is thoroughly original, if that term may be accorded to a novel and skilful combination of existing elements. The treatise of Theophrastus may have furnished the first idea, but it gave little more. With the ethical generalizations and social Dutch painting of his original 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 sententiousness 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 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.
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, 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 aeternitatis, 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 Rochefoucauld. 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. 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 l’esprit” contains much good criticism, though it shows that, like most of his contemporaries 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 profits of the book as a dowry. 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 1699; most of the letters, including those addressed to Condé, not till 1867. In recent times numerous editions of the complete works have appeared, notably those of Walckenaer (1845), Servois (1867, in the series of Grands écrivains de la France), 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 Bruyère is extensive and apocryphal. Almost everything that can be done in this direction and in that of general illustration was done by Edouard Fournier in his learned and amusing Comédie de La Bruyère (1866); M. Paul Morillot contributed a monograph on La Bruyère to the series of Grands écrivains français in 1904. (G. Sa.)
LABUAN (a corruption of the Malay word labuh-an, signifying
an “anchorage”), an island of the Malay Archipelago, off the
north-west coast of Borneo in 5° 16′ N., 115° 15′ E. Its area
is 30.23 sq. m.; it is distant about 6 m. from the mainland
of Borneo at the nearest point, and lies opposite to the northern
end of the great Brunei Bay. The island is covered with low
hills rising from flats near the shore to an irregular plateau
near the centre. About 1500 acres are under rice cultivation,
and there are scattered patches of coco-nut and sago palms and
a few vegetable gardens, the latter owned for the most part
by Chinese. For the rest Labuan is covered over most of its
extent by vigorous secondary growth, amidst which the charred
trunks of trees rise at frequent intervals, the greater part of the
forest of the island having been destroyed by great accidental
conflagrations. Labuan was ceded to Great Britain in 1846,
chiefly through the instrumentality of Sir James Brooke, the
first raja of Sarawak, and was occupied two years later.
At the time of its cession the island was uninhabited, but in 1881 the population numbered 5731, though it had declined to 5361 in 1891. The census returns for 1901 give the population at 8411. The native population consists of Malay fishermen, Chinese, Tamils and small shifting communities of Kadayans, Tutongs and other natives of the neighbouring Bornean coast. There are about fifty European residents. At the time of its occupation by Great Britain a brilliant future was predicted for Labuan, which it was thought would become a second Singapore. These hopes have not been realized. The coal deposits, which are of somewhat indifferent quality, have been worked with varying degrees of failure by a succession of companies, one of which, the Labuan & Borneo Ltd., liquidated in 1902 after the collapse of a shaft upon which large sums had been expended. It was succeeded by the Labuan Coalfields Ltd. The harbour is a fine one, and the above-named company possesses three wharves capable of berthing the largest Eastern-going ocean steamers. To-day Labuan chiefly exists as a trading depôt for the natives of the neighbouring coast of Borneo, who sell their produce—beeswax, edible birds-nests, camphor, gutta, trepang, &c.,—to Chinese shopkeepers, who resell it in Singapore. There is also a considerable trade in sago, much of which is produced on the mainland, and there are three small sago-factories on the island where the raw product is converted into flour. The Eastern Extension Telegraph Company has a central station at Labuan with cables to Singapore, Hong-Kong and British North Borneo. Monthly steam communication is maintained by a German firm between Labuan, Singapore and the Philippines. The colony joined the Imperial Penny Postage Union in 1889. There are a few miles of road on the island and a metre-gauge railway from the harbour to the coal mines, the property of the company. There is a Roman Catholic church with a resident priest, an Anglican church, visited periodically by a clergyman from the mainland, two native and Chinese schools, and a sailors’ club, built by the Roman Catholic mission. The bishop of Singapore and Sarawak is also bishop of Labuan. The European graveyard has repeatedly been the scene of outrages perpetrated, it is believed, by natives from the mainland of Borneo, the graves being rifled and the hair of the head and other parts of the corpses being carried off to furnish ornaments to weapons and ingredients in the magic philtres of the natives. Pulau Dat, a small island in the near neighbourhood of Labuan, is the site of a fine coco-nut plantation whence nuts and copra are exported in bulk. The climate is hot and very humid.
Until 1869 the expenditure of the colony was partly defrayed by imperial grants-in-aid, but after that date it was left to its own resources. A garrison of imperial troops was maintained until 1871, when the troops were withdrawn after many deaths from fever and dysentery had occurred among them. Since then law and order
