initial commit of ebook 16937HEADmain

9 files changed, 4896 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/16937-8.txt b/16937-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ff6a48
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16937-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1509 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3)
+       Essay 1: Vauvenargues
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: October 25, 2005 [EBook #16937]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 2 OF 3) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Luis Amador and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+VOL. II.
+
+Essay 1: Vauvenargues
+
+London
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
+
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+1905
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. II.                                           PAGE
+
+The influence of Pascal                                           1
+
+Vauvenargues holds the balance between him and the
+votaries of Perfectibility                                        4
+
+Birth, education, and hard life of Vauvenargues                   4
+
+Life in Paris, and friendship with Voltaire                      10
+
+His religious sentiment                                          12
+
+His delicacy, reserve, and psychagogic quality                   15
+
+Certain inability to appreciate marked originality               17
+
+Criticisms on Molière, Racine, and Corneille                     19
+
+Comparison with English aphoristic writers and moralists         20
+
+Character the key to his theory of greatness                     25
+
+His exaltation of spontaneous feeling, a protest against
+Rochefoucauld and Pascal                                         26
+
+His plea for a normal sense of human relation, the same          28
+
+His doctrine of the Will connected with his doctrine of
+Character                                                        29
+
+Antipathy to ascetic restrictions                                33
+
+Two ways of examining character: that followed by
+Vauvenargues                                                     34
+
+Examples of his style                                            36
+
+The beauty of his nature to be read in his face                  40
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book.]
+
+
+
+
+VAUVENARGUES.
+
+
+One of the most important phases of French thought in the great century
+of its illumination is only thoroughly intelligible, on condition that
+in studying it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force, and
+genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most influential
+representative of that way of viewing human nature and its
+circumstances, which it was one of the characteristic glories of the
+eighteenth century to have rebelled against and rejected. More than a
+hundred years after the publication of the _Pensées_, Condorcet thought
+it worth while to prepare a new edition of them, with annotations,
+protesting, not without a certain unwonted deference of tone, against
+Pascal's doctrine of the base and desperate estate of man. Voltaire also
+had them reprinted with notes of his own, written in the same spirit of
+vivacious deprecation, which we may be sure would have been even more
+vivacious, if Voltaire had not remembered that he was speaking of the
+mightiest of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal and
+specific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeply
+of the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment of
+revolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century
+before, who had clothed mere theological mysteries with the force and
+importance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistent
+philosophy.
+
+The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingness
+of kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip
+of the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather filled
+the mind with exaltation than really depressed or humiliated it. From
+Bossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn splendour of the church to
+the chill of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional, in
+the first place, and it was purely theological, in the second; so the
+main stream of thought flowed away and aside from him. To Pascal it was
+felt necessary that there should be reply and vindication, whether in
+the shape of deliberate and published formulas, or in the reasoned
+convictions of the individual intelligence working privately. A syllabus
+of the radical articles of the French creed of the eighteenth century
+would consist largely of the contradictions of the main propositions of
+Pascal. The old theological idea of the fall was hard to endure, but the
+idea of the fall was clenched by such general laws of human nature as
+this,--that 'men are so necessarily mad, that it would be to be mad by a
+new form of madness not to be mad;'--that man is nothing but
+masquerading, lying, and hypocrisy, both in what concerns himself and in
+respect of others, wishing not to have the truth told to himself, and
+shrinking from telling it to anybody else;[1] that the will, the
+imagination, the disorders of the body, the thousand concealed
+infirmities of the intelligence, conspire to reduce our discovery of
+justice and truth to a process of haphazard, in which we more often miss
+the mark than hit.[2] Pleasure, ambition, industry, are only means of
+distracting men from the otherwise unavoidable contemplation of their
+own misery. How speak of the dignity of the race and its history, when
+we know that a grain of sand in Cromwell's bladder altered the destinies
+of a kingdom, and that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole
+surface of the earth would be different? Imagine, in a word, 'a number
+of men in chains, and all condemned to death; some of them each day
+butchered in the sight of the others, while those who remain watch their
+own condition in that of their fellows, and eyeing one another in
+anguish and hopelessness, wait their turn; such is the situation of
+man.'[3]
+
+It was hardly possible to push the tragical side of the verities of life
+beyond this, and there was soon an instinctive reaction towards
+realities. The sensations with their conditions of pleasure no less than
+of pain; the intelligence with its energetic aptitudes for the discovery
+of protective and fruitful knowledge; the affections with their large
+capacities for giving and receiving delight; the spontaneous inner
+impulse towards action and endurance in the face of outward
+circumstances--all these things reassured men, and restored in theory to
+them with ample interest what in practice they had never lost--a
+rational faith and exultation in their own faculties, both of finding
+out truth and of feeling a very substantial degree of happiness. On
+this side too, as on the other, speculation went to its extreme limit.
+The hapless and despairing wretches of Pascal were transformed by the
+votaries of perfectibility into bright beings not any lower than the
+angels. Between the two extremes there was one fine moralist who knew
+how to hold a just balance, perceiving that language is the expression
+of relations and proportions, that when we speak of virtue and genius we
+mean qualities that compared with those of mediocre souls deserve these
+high names, that greatness and happiness are comparative terms, and that
+there is nothing to be said of the estate of man except relatively. This
+moralist was Vauvenargues.
+
+Vauvenargues was born of a good Provençal stock at Aix, in the year
+1715. He had scarcely any of that kind of education which is usually
+performed in school-classes, and he was never able to read either Latin
+or Greek. Such slight knowledge as he ever got of the famous writers
+among the ancients was in translations. Of English literature, though
+its influence and that of our institutions were then becoming paramount
+in France, and though he had a particular esteem for the English
+character, he knew only the writings of Locke and Pope, and the Paradise
+Lost.[4] Vauvenargues must be added to the list of thinkers and writers
+whose personal history shows, what men of letters sometimes appear to be
+in a conspiracy to make us forget, that for sober, healthy, and robust
+judgment on human nature and life, active and sympathetic contact with
+men in the transaction of the many affairs of their daily life is a
+better preparation than any amount of wholly meditative seclusion. He is
+also one of the many who show that a weakly constitution of body is not
+incompatible with fine and energetic qualities of mind, even if it be
+not actually friendly to them. Nor was feeble health any
+disqualification for the profession of arms. As Arms and the Church were
+the only alternatives for persons of noble birth, Vauvenargues, choosing
+the former, became a subaltern in the King's Own Regiment at the age of
+twenty (1735). Here in time he saw active service; for in 1740 the death
+of Charles VI. threw all Europe into confusion, and the French
+Government, falling in with the prodigious designs of the Marshal
+Belle-Isle and his brother, took sides against Maria Theresa, and
+supported the claims of the unhappy Elector of Bavaria who afterwards
+became the Emperor Charles VII. The disasters which fell upon France in
+consequence are well known. The forces despatched to Bavaria and
+Bohemia, after the brief triumph of the capture of Prague, were
+gradually overwhelmed without a single great battle, and it was
+considered a signal piece of good fortune when in the winter of 1742-43
+Belle-Isle succeeded, with a loss of half his force, in leading by a
+long circuit, in the view of the enemy, and amid the horrors of famine
+and intense frost, some thirteen thousand men away from Prague. The
+King's Regiment took part in the Bohemian campaign, and in this
+frightful march which closed it; Vauvenargues with the rest.
+
+To physical sufferings during two winters was added the distress of
+losing a comrade to whom he was deeply attached; he perished in the
+spring of '42 under the hardships of the war. The _Éloge_ in which
+Vauvenargues commemorates the virtues and the pitiful fate of his
+friend, is too deeply marked with the florid and declamatory style of
+youth to be pleasing to a more ripened taste.[5] He complained that
+nobody who had read it observed that it was touching, not remembering
+that even the most tender feeling fails to touch us, when it has found
+stilted and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection were
+prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been
+passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have
+become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a
+certain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never the
+faintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of those
+other vices which betray in men that excessive consciousness of their
+own personality, which lies at the root of most of the obstacles in the
+way of an even and humane life. His nature had such depth and quality
+that the perpetual untowardness of circumstances left no evil print upon
+him; hardship made him not sour, but patient and wise, and there is no
+surer sign of noble temper.
+
+The sufferings and bereavements of war were not his only trials.
+Vauvenargues was beset throughout the whole of his short life with the
+sordid and humiliating embarrassments of narrow means. His letters to
+Saint-Vincens, the most intimate of his friends, disclose the straits to
+which he was driven. The nature of these straits is an old story all
+over the world, and Vauvenargues did the same things that young men in
+want of money have generally done. It cannot be said, I fear, that he
+passed along those miry ways without some defilement. He bethinks him on
+one occasion that a rich neighbour has daughters. 'Why should I not
+undertake to marry one of them within two years, with a reasonable
+dowry, if he would lend me the money I want and provided I should not
+have repaid it by the time fixed?'[6] We must make allowance for the
+youth of the writer, and for a different view of marriage and its
+significance from our own. Even then there remains something to regret.
+Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues, in a maxim smacking unwontedly of
+commonplace, cannot debase strong souls, any more than riches can
+elevate low souls.[7] That depends. If poverty means pinching and
+fretting need of money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense,
+but it is extremely likely to wear away a very priceless kind of
+delicacy in a man's estimate of human relations and their import.
+
+Vauvenargues has told us what he found the life of the camp. Luxurious
+and indolent living, neglected duties, discontented sighing after the
+delights of Paris, the exaltation of rank and mediocrity, an insolent
+contempt for merit; these were the characteristics of the men in high
+military place. The lower officers meantime were overwhelmed by an
+expenditure that the luxury of their superiors introduced and
+encouraged; and they were speedily driven to retire by the disorder of
+their affairs, or by the impossibility of promotion, because men of
+spirit could not long endure the sight of flagrant injustice, and
+because those who labour for fame cannot tie themselves to a condition
+where there is nothing to be gathered but shame and humiliation.[8]
+
+To these considerations of an extravagant expenditure and the absence of
+every chance of promotion, there was added in the case of Vauvenargues
+the still more powerful drawback of irretrievably broken health. The
+winter-march from Prague to Egra had sown fatal seed. His legs had been
+frost-bitten, and before they could be cured he was stricken by
+small-pox, which left him disfigured and almost blind. So after a
+service of nine years, he quitted military life (1744). He vainly
+solicited employment as a diplomatist. The career was not yet open to
+the talents, and in the memorial which Vauvenargues drew up he dwelt
+less on his conduct than on his birth, being careful to show that he had
+an authentic ancestor who was Governor of Hyères in the early part of
+the fourteenth century.[9] But the only road to employment lay through
+the Court. The claims even of birth counted for nothing, unless they
+were backed by favour among the ignoble creatures who haunted
+Versailles. For success it was essential to be not only high-born, but a
+parasite as well. 'Permit me to assure you, sir,' Vauvenargues wrote
+courageously to Amelot, then the minister, 'that it is this moral
+impossibility for a gentleman, with only zeal to commend him, of ever
+reaching the King his master, which causes the discouragement that is
+observed among the nobility of the provinces, and which extinguishes all
+ambition.'[10] Amelot, to oblige Voltaire, eager as usual in good
+offices for his friend, answered the letters which Vauvenargues wrote,
+and promised to lay his name before the King as soon as a favourable
+opportunity should present itself.[11]
+
+Vauvenargues was probably enough of a man of the world to take fair
+words of this sort at their value, and he had enough of qualities that
+do not belong to the man of the world to enable him to confront the
+disappointment with cheerful fortitude 'Misfortune itself,' he had once
+written, 'has its charms in great extremities; for this opposition of
+fortune raises a courageous mind, and makes it collect all the forces
+that before were unemployed: it is in indolence and littleness that
+virtue suffers, when a timid prudence prevents it from rising in flight
+and forces it to creep along in bonds.'[12] He was true to the counsel
+which he had thus given years before, and with the consciousness that
+death was rapidly approaching, and that all hope of advancement in the
+ordinary way was at an end, even if there were any chance of his life,
+he persevered in his project of going to Paris, there to earn the fame
+which he instinctively felt that he had it in him to achieve. Neither
+scantiness of means nor the vehement protests of friends and
+relations--always the worst foes to superior character on critical
+occasions--could detain him in the obscurity of Provence. In 1745 he
+took up his quarters in Paris in a humble house near the School of
+Medicine. Literature had not yet acquired that importance in France
+which it was so soon to obtain. The Encyclopædia was still unconceived,
+and the momentous work which that famous design was to accomplish, of
+organising the philosophers and men of letters into an army with
+banners, was still unexecuted. Voltaire, indeed, had risen, if not to
+the full height of his reputation, yet high enough both to command the
+admiration of people of quality, and to be the recognised chief of the
+new school of literature and thought. Voltaire had been struck by a
+letter in which Vauvenargues, then unknown to him, had sent a criticism
+comparing Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Coming from a young
+officer, the member of a profession which Voltaire frankly described as
+'very noble, in truth, but slightly barbarous,' this criticism was
+peculiarly striking. A great many years afterwards Voltaire was
+surprised in the same way, to find that an officer could write such a
+book as the _Félicité Publique_ of the Marquis de Chastellux. To
+Vauvenargues he replied with many compliments, and pointed out with a
+good deal of pains the injustice which the young critic had done to the
+great author of _Cinna_. '_It is the part of a man like you,_' he said
+admirably, '_to have preferences, but no exclusions._'[13] The
+correspondence thus begun was kept up with ever-growing warmth and
+mutual respect. 'If you had been born a few years earlier,' Voltaire
+wrote to him, 'my works would be worth all the more for it; but at any
+rate, even at the close of my career, you confirm me in the path that
+you pursue.'[14]
+
+The personal impression was as fascinating as that which had been
+conveyed by Vauvenargues' letters. Voltaire took every opportunity of
+visiting his unfortunate friend, then each day drawing nearer to the
+grave. Men of humbler stature were equally attracted. 'It was at this
+time,' says the light-hearted Marmontel, 'that I first saw at home the
+man who had a charm for me beyond all the rest of the world, the good,
+the virtuous, the wise Vauvenargues. Cruelly used by nature in his body,
+he was in soul one of her rarest masterpieces. I seemed to see in him
+Fénelon weak and suffering. I could make a good book of his
+conversations, if I had had a chance of collecting them. You see some
+traces of it in the selection that he has left of his thoughts and
+meditations. But all eloquent and full of feeling as he is in his
+writings, he was even more so still in his conversation.'[15] Marmontel
+felt sincere grief when Vauvenargues died, and in the _Epistle to
+Voltaire_ expressed his sorrow in some fair lines. They contain the
+happy phrase applied to Vauvenargues, '_ce coeur stoïque et
+tendre_.'[16]
+
+In religious sentiment Vauvenargues was out of the groove of his time.
+That is to say, he was not unsusceptible of religion. Accepting no
+dogma, so far as we can judge, and complying with no observances, very
+faint and doubtful as to even the fundamentals--God, immortality, and
+the like--he never partook of the furious and bitter antipathy of the
+best men of that century against the church, its creeds, and its book.
+At one time, as will be seen from a passage which will be quoted by and
+by, his leanings were towards that vague and indefinable doctrine which
+identifies God with all the forces and their manifestations in the
+universe. Afterwards even this adumbration of a theistic explanation of
+the world seems to have passed from him, and he lived, as many other not
+bad men have lived, with that fair working substitute for a religious
+doctrine which is provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance in
+a devotional spirit, of all larger mortal experiences and higher human
+impressions. There is a _Meditation on the Faith_, including a _Prayer_,
+among his writings; and there can be little doubt, in spite of
+Condorcet's incredible account of the circumstances of its composition,
+that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling.[17]
+It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one who
+ardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who
+already possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but he
+could not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the period. The
+one fact delivered him from dogma and superstition, and the other from
+scoffing and harsh unspirituality. He saw that apart from the question
+of the truth or falsehood of its historic basis, there was a balance to
+be struck between the consolations and the afflictions of the faith.[18]
+Practically he was content to leave this balance unstruck, and to pass
+by on the other side. Scarcely any of his maxims concern religion. One
+of these few is worth quoting, where he says: 'The strength or weakness
+of our belief depends more on our courage than our light; not all those
+who mock at auguries have more intellect than those who believe in
+them.'[19]
+
+The end came in the spring of 1747, when Vauvenargues was no more than
+thirty-two. Perhaps, in spite of his physical miseries, these two years
+in Paris were the least unhappy time in his life. He was in the great
+centre where the fame which he longed for was earned and liberally
+awarded. A year of intercourse with so full and alert and brilliant a
+mind as Voltaire's, must have been more to one so appreciative of mental
+greatness as Vauvenargues, than many years of intercourse with
+subalterns in the Regiment of the King. With death, now known to be very
+near at hand, he had made his account before. 'To execute great things,'
+he had written in a maxim which gained the lively praise of Voltaire, 'a
+man must live as though he had never to die.'[20] This mood was common
+among the Greeks and Romans; but the religion which Europe accepted in
+the time of its deepest corruption and depravation, retained the mark of
+its dismal origin nowhere so strongly as in the distorted prominence
+which it gave in the minds of its votaries to the dissolution of the
+body. It was one of the first conditions of the Revival of Reason that
+the dreary _memento mori_ and its hateful emblems should be deliberately
+effaced. 'The thought of death,' said Vauvenargues, 'leads us astray,
+because it makes us forget to live.' He did not understand living in the
+sense which the dissolute attach to it. The libertinism of his regiment
+called no severe rebuke from him, but his meditative temper drew him
+away from it even in his youth. It is not impossible that if his days
+had not been cut short, he might have impressed Parisian society with
+ideas and a sentiment, that would have left to it all its cheerfulness,
+and yet prevented that laxity which so fatally weakened it. Turgot, the
+only other conspicuous man who could have withstood the license of the
+time, had probably too much of that austerity which is in the fibre of
+so many great characters, to make any moral counsels that he might have
+given widely effective.
+
+Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint of the pedagogue or
+the preacher to have dispelled the sophisms of licence, less by argument
+than by the gracious attraction of virtue in his own character. The
+stock moralist, like the commonplace orator of the pulpit, fails to
+touch the hearts of men or to affect their lives, for lack of delicacy,
+of sympathy, and of freshness; he attempts to compensate for this by
+excess of emphasis, and that more often disgusts us than persuades.
+Vauvenargues, on the other hand, is remarkable for delicacy and
+half-reserved tenderness. Everything that he has said is coloured and
+warmed with feeling for the infirmities of men. He writes not merely as
+an analytical outsider. Hence, unlike most moralists, he is no satirist.
+He had borne the burdens. 'The looker-on,' runs one of his maxims,
+'softly lying in a carpeted chamber, inveighs against the soldier, who
+passes winter nights on the river's edge, and keeps watch in silence
+over the safety of the land.'[21] Vauvenargues had been something very
+different from the safe and sheltered critic of other men's battles,
+and this is the secret of the hold which his words have upon us. They
+are real, with the reality that can only come from two sources; from
+high poetic imagination, which Vauvenargues did not possess, or else
+from experience of life acting on and strengthening a generous nature.
+'The cause of most books of morality being so insipid,' he says, 'is
+that their authors are not sincere; is that, being feeble echoes of one
+another, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims and
+private sentiments.'[22] One of the secrets of his own freedom from this
+ordinary insipidity of moralists was his freedom also from their
+pretentiousness and insincerity.
+
+Besides these positive merits, he had, as we have said, the negative
+distinction of never being emphatic. His sayings are nearly always
+moderate and persuasive, alike in sentiment and in phrase. Sometimes
+they are almost tentative in the diffidence of their turn. Compared with
+him La Rochefoucauld's manner is hard, and that of La Bruyère
+sententious. In the moralist who aspires to move and win men by their
+best side instead of their worst, the absence of this hardness and the
+presence of a certain lambency and play even in the exposition of truths
+of perfect assurance, are essential conditions of psychagogic quality.
+In religion such law does not hold, and the contagion of fanaticism is
+usually most rapidly spread by a rigorous and cheerless example.
+
+We may notice in passing that Vauvenargues has the defects of his
+qualities, and that with his aversion to emphasis was bound up a certain
+inability to appreciate even grandeur and originality, if they were too
+strongly and boldly marked. 'It is easy to criticise an author,' he has
+said, 'but hard to estimate him.'[23] This was never more unfortunately
+proved than in the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the great
+Molière. There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a writer who can say
+that 'La Bruyère, animated with nearly the same genius, painted the
+crookedness of men with as much truth and as much force as Molière; but
+I believe that there is more eloquence and more elevation to be found in
+La Bruyère's images.'[24] Without at all undervaluing La Bruyère, one of
+the acutest and finest of writers, we may say that this is a truly
+disastrous piece of criticism. Quite as unhappy is the preference given
+to Racine over Molière, not merely for the conclusion arrived at, but
+for the reasons on which it is founded. Molière's subjects, we read, are
+low, his language negligent and incorrect, his characters bizarre and
+eccentric. Racine, on the other hand, takes sublime themes, presents us
+with noble types, and writes with simplicity and elegance. It is not
+enough to concede to Racine the glory of art, while giving to Molière or
+Corneille the glory of genius. 'When people speak of the art of
+Racine--the art which puts things in their place; which characterises
+men, their passions, manners, genius; which banishes obscurities,
+superfluities, false brilliancies; which paints nature with fire,
+sublimity, and grace--what can we think of such art as this, except that
+it is the genius of extraordinary men, and the origin of those rules
+that writers without genius embrace with so much zeal and so little
+success?'[25] And it is certainly true that the art of Racine implied
+genius. The defect of the criticism lies, as usual, in a failure to see
+that there is glory enough in both; in the art of highly-finished
+composition and presentation, and in the art of bold and striking
+creation. Yet Vauvenargues was able to discern the secret of the
+popularity of Molière, and the foundation of the common opinion that no
+other dramatist had carried his own kind of art so far as Molière had
+carried his; 'the reason is, I fancy, that he is more natural than any
+of the others, and this is an important lesson for everybody who wishes
+to write.'[26] He did not see how nearly everything went in this
+concession, that Molière was, above all, natural. With equal truth of
+perception he condemned the affectation of grandeur lent by the French
+tragedians to classical personages who were in truth simple and natural,
+as the principal defect of the national drama, and the common rock on
+which their poets made shipwreck.[27] Let us, however, rejoice for the
+sake of the critical reputation of Vauvenargues that he was unable to
+read Shakespeare. One for whom Molière is too eccentric, grotesque,
+inelegant, was not likely to do much justice to the mightiest but most
+irregular of all dramatists.
+
+A man's prepossessions in dramatic poetry, supposing him to be
+cultivated enough to have any prepossessions, furnish the most certain
+clue that we can get to the spirit in which he inwardly regards
+character and conduct. The uniform and reasoned preference which
+Vauvenargues had for Racine over Molière and Corneille, was only the
+transfer to art of that balanced, moderate, normal, and emphatically
+harmonious temper, which he brought to the survey of human nature.
+Excess was a condition of thought, feeling, and speech, that in every
+form was disagreeable to him; alike in the gloom of Pascal's reveries,
+and in the inflation of speech of some of the heroes of Corneille. He
+failed to relish even Montaigne as he ought to have done, because
+Montaigne's method was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, his
+egoism too manifest, and because he did not produce complete and
+artistic wholes.[28]
+
+Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues' thinking; balance,
+evenness, purity of vision, penetration finely toned with indulgence. He
+is never betrayed into criticism of men from the point of view of
+immutable first principles. Perhaps this was what the elder Mirabeau
+meant when he wrote to Vauvenargues, who was his cousin: 'You have the
+English genius to perfection,' and what Vauvenargues meant when he wrote
+of himself to Mirabeau: 'Nobody in the world has a mind less French than
+I.'[29] These international comparisons are among the least fruitful of
+literary amusements, even when they happen not to be extremely
+misleading; as when, for example, Voltaire called Locke the English
+Pascal, a description which can only be true on condition that the
+qualifying adjective is meant to strip either Locke or Pascal of most of
+his characteristic traits. And if we compare Vauvenargues with any of
+our English aphoristic writers, there is not resemblance enough to make
+the contrast instructive. The obvious truth is that in this department
+our literature is particularly weak, while French literature is
+particularly strong in it. With the exception of Bacon, we have no
+writer of apophthegms of the first order; and the difference between
+Bacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues, is the difference
+between Polonius's famous discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy of
+Hamlet.
+
+Bacon's precepts refer rather to external conduct and worldly fortune
+than to the inner composition of character, or to the 'wide, gray,
+lampless' depths of human destiny. We find the same national
+characteristic, though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin's
+oracular saws. Among the French sages a psychological element is
+predominant, as well as an occasional transcendent loftiness of feeling,
+not to be found in Bacon's wisest maxims, and from his point of view in
+their composition we could not expect to find them there. We seek in
+vain amid the positivity of Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox of
+Browne, or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any of that poetic
+pensiveness which is strong in Vauvenargues, and reaches tragic heights
+in Pascal.[30] Addison may have the delicacy of Vauvenargues, but it is
+a delicacy that wants the stir and warmth of feeling. It seems as if
+with English writers poetic sentiment naturally sought expression in
+poetic forms, while the Frenchmen of nearly corresponding temperament
+were restrained within the limits of prose by reason of the vigorously
+prescribed stateliness and stiffness of their verse at that time. A man
+in this country with the quality of Vauvenargues, with his delicacy,
+tenderness, elevation, would have composed lyrics. We have undoubtedly
+lost much by the laxity and irregularity of our verse, but as
+undoubtedly we owe to its freedom some of the most perfect and
+delightful of the minor figures that adorn the noble gallery of English
+poets.
+
+It would be an error to explain the superiority of the great French
+moralists by supposing in them a fancy and imagination too defective for
+poetic art. It was the circumstances of the national literature during
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which made Vauvenargues for
+instance a composer of aphorisms, rather than a moral poet like Pope.
+Let us remember some of his own most discriminating words. 'Who has more
+imagination,' he asks, 'than Bossuet, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, all
+of them great philosophers? Who more judgment and wisdom than Racine,
+Boileau, La Fontaine, Molière, all of them poets full of genius? _It is
+not true, then, that the ruling qualities exclude the others; on the
+contrary, they suppose them._ I should be much surprised if a great poet
+were without vivid lights on philosophy, at any rate moral philosophy,
+and it will very seldom happen for a true philosopher to be totally
+devoid of imagination.'[31] With imagination in the highest sense
+Vauvenargues was not largely endowed, but he had as much as is essential
+to reveal to one that the hard and sober-judging faculty is not the
+single, nor even the main element, in a wise and full intelligence. 'All
+my philosophy,' he wrote to Mirabeau, when only four or five and twenty
+years old, an age when the intellect is usually most exigent of
+supremacy, 'all my philosophy has its source in my heart.'[32]
+
+In the same spirit he had well said that there is more cleverness in the
+world than greatness of soul, more people with talent than with lofty
+character.[33] Hence some of the most peculiarly characteristic and
+impressive of his aphorisms; that famous one, for instance, '_Great
+thoughts come from the heart,_' and the rest which hang upon the same
+idea. 'Virtuous instinct has no need of reason, but supplies it.'
+'Reason misleads us more often than nature.' 'Reason does not know the
+interests of the heart.' 'Perhaps we owe to the passions the greatest
+advantages of the intellect.' Such sayings are only true on condition
+that instinct and nature and passion have been already moulded under the
+influence of reason; just as this other saying, which won the warm
+admiration of Voltaire, '_Magnanimity owes no account of its motives to
+prudence_,' is only true on condition that by magnanimity we understand
+a mood not out of accord with the loftiest kind of prudence.[34] But in
+the eighteenth century reason and prudence were words current in their
+lower and narrower sense, and thus one coming like Vauvenargues to see
+this lowness and narrowness, sought to invest ideas and terms that in
+fact only involved modifications of these, with a significance of direct
+antagonism. Magnanimity was contrasted inimically with prudence, and
+instinct and nature were made to thrust from their throne reason and
+reflection. Carried to its limit, this tendency developed the
+speculative and social excesses of the great sentimental school. In
+Vauvenargues it was only the moderate, just, and most seasonable protest
+of a fine observer, against the supremacy among ideals of a narrow,
+deliberative, and calculating spirit.
+
+His exaltation of virtuous instinct over reason is in a curious way
+parallel to Burke's memorable exaltation over reason of prejudice.
+'Prejudice,' said Burke, 'previously engages the mind in a steady course
+of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the
+moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice
+renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts;
+through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature.'[35] What
+Burke designated as prejudice, Vauvenargues less philosophically styled
+virtuous instinct; each meant precisely the same thing, though the
+difference of phrase implied a different view of its origin and growth:
+and the side opposite to each of them was the same--namely, a
+sophisticated and over-refining intelligence, narrowed to the
+consideration of particular circumstances as they presented themselves.
+
+Translated into the modern equivalent, the heart, nature, instinct of
+Vauvenargues all mean _character_. He insisted upon spontaneous impulse
+as a condition of all greatest thought and action. Men think and work on
+the highest level when they move without conscious and deliberate strain
+after virtue: when, in other words, their habitual motives, aims,
+methods, their character, in short, naturally draw them into the region
+of what is virtuous. '_It is by our ideas that we ennoble our passions
+or we debase them; they rise high or sink low according to the man's
+soul_.'[36] All this has ceased to be new to our generation, but a
+hundred and thirty years ago, and indeed much nearer to us than that,
+the key to all nobleness was thought to be found only by cool balancing
+and prudential calculation. A book like _Clarissa Harlowe_ shows us this
+prudential and calculating temper underneath a varnish of
+sentimentalism and fine feelings, an incongruous and extremely
+displeasing combination, particularly characteristic of certain sets and
+circles in that century. One of the distinctions of Vauvenargues is that
+exaltation of sentiment did not with him cloak a substantial adherence
+to a low prudence, nor to that fragment of reason which has so
+constantly usurped the name and place of the whole. He eschewed the too
+common compromise which the sentimentalist makes with reflection and
+calculation, and it was this which saved him from being a
+sentimentalist.
+
+That doctrine of the predominance of the heart over the head, which has
+brought forth so many pernicious and destructive fantasies in the
+history of social thought, represented in his case no more than a
+reaction against the great detractors of humanity. Rochefoucauld had
+surveyed mankind exclusively from the point of their vain and egoistic
+propensities, and his aphorisms are profoundly true of all persons in
+whom these propensities are habitually supreme, and of all the world in
+so far as these propensities happen to influence them. Pascal, on the
+one hand, leaving the affections and inclinations of a man very much on
+one side, had directed all his efforts to showing the pitiful feebleness
+and incurable helplessness of man in the sphere of the understanding.
+Vauvenargues is thus confronted by two sinister pictures of
+humanity--the one of its moral meanness and littleness, the other of its
+intellectual poverty and impotency. He turned away from both of them,
+and found in magnanimous and unsophisticated feeling, of which he was
+conscious in himself and observant in others, a compensation alike for
+the selfishness of some men and the intellectual limitations of all men.
+This compensation was ample enough to restore the human self-respect
+that Pascal and Rochefoucauld had done their best to weaken.
+
+The truth in that disparagement was indisputable so far as it went. It
+was not a kind of truth, however, on which it is good for the world much
+to dwell, and it is the thinkers like Vauvenargues who build up and
+inspire high resolve. 'Scarcely any maxim,' runs one of his own, 'is
+true in all respects.'[37] We must take them in pairs to find out the
+mean truth; and to understand the ways of men, so far as words about men
+can help us, we must read with appreciation not only Vauvenargues, who
+said that great thoughts come from the heart, but La Rochefoucauld, who
+called the intelligence the dupe of the heart, and Pascal, who saw only
+desperate creatures, miserably perishing before one another's eyes in
+the grim dungeon of the universe. Yet it is the observer in the spirit
+of Vauvenargues, of whom we must always say that he has chosen the
+better part. Vauvenargues' own estimate was sound. 'The Duke of La
+Rochefoucauld seized to perfection the weak side of human nature; maybe
+he knew its strength too; and only contested the merit of so many
+splendid actions in order to unmask false wisdom. Whatever his design,
+the effect seems to me mischievous; his book, filled with delicate
+invective against hypocrisy, even to this day turns men away from
+virtue, by persuading them that it is never genuine.'[38] Or, as he put
+it elsewhere, without express personal reference: 'You must arouse in
+men the feeling of their prudence and strength, if you would raise their
+character; those who only apply themselves to bring out the absurdities
+and weaknesses of mankind, enlighten the judgment of the public far less
+than they deprave its inclination.'[39] This principle was implied in
+Goethe's excellent saying, that if you would improve a man, it is best
+to begin by persuading him that he is already that which you would have
+him to be.
+
+To talk in this way was to bring men out from the pits which cynicism on
+the one side, and asceticism on the other, had dug so deep for them,
+back to the warm precincts of the cheerful day. The cynic and the
+ascetic had each looked at life through a microscope, exaggerating
+blemishes, distorting proportions, filling the eye with ugly and
+disgusting illusions.[40] Humanity, as was said, was in disgrace with
+the thinkers. The maxims of Vauvenargues were a plea for a return to a
+healthy and normal sense of relations. 'These philosophers,' he cried,
+'are men, yet they do not speak in human language; they change all the
+ideas of things, and misuse all their terms.'[41] These are some of the
+most direct of his retorts upon Pascal and La Rochefoucauld:
+
+'I have always felt it to be absurd for philosophers to fabricate a
+Virtue that is incompatible with the nature of humanity, and then after
+having pretended this, to declare coldly that there is no virtue. If
+they are speaking of the phantom of their imagination, they may of
+course abandon or destroy it as they please, for they invented it; but
+true virtue--which they cannot be brought to call by this name, because
+it is not in conformity with their definitions; which is the work of
+nature and not their own; and which consists mainly in goodness and
+vigour of soul--that does not depend on their fancies, and will last
+for ever with characters that cannot possibly be effaced.'
+
+'The body has its graces, the intellect its talents; is the heart then
+to have nothing but vices? And must man, who is capable of reason, be
+incapable of virtue?'
+
+'We are susceptible of friendship, justice, humanity, compassion, and
+reason. O my friends, what then is virtue?'
+
+'Disgust is no mark of health, nor is appetite a disorder; quite the
+reverse. Thus we think of the body, but we judge the soul on other
+principles. We suppose that a strong soul is one that is exempt from
+passions, and as youth is more active and ardent than later age, we look
+on it as a time of fever, and place the strength of man in his
+decay.'[42]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The theological speculator insists that virtue lies in a constant and
+fierce struggle between the will and the passions, between man and human
+nature.
+
+Vauvenargues founded his whole theory of life on the doctrine that the
+will is not something independent of passions, inclinations, and ideas,
+but on the contrary is a mere index moved and fixed by them, as the hand
+of a clock follows the operation of the mechanical forces within.
+Character is an integral unit. 'Whether it is reason or passion that
+moves us, it is we who determine ourselves; it would be madness to
+distinguish one's thoughts and sentiments from one's self.... No will in
+men, which does not owe its direction to their temperament, their
+reasoning, and their actual feelings.'[43] Virtue, then, is not
+necessarily a condition of strife between the will and the rest of our
+faculties and passions; no such strife is possible, for the will obeys
+the preponderant passion or idea, or group of passions and ideas; and
+the contest lies between one passion or group and another. Hence, in
+right character there is no struggle at all, for the virtuous
+inclinations naturally and easily direct our will and actions; virtue is
+then independent of struggle; and the circumstance of our finding
+pleasure in this or that practice, is no reason why both the practice
+and the pleasure should not be unimpeachably virtuous.
+
+It is easy to see the connection between this theory of the dependence
+of the will, and the prominence which Vauvenargues is ever giving to the
+passions. These are the key to the movements of the will. To direct and
+shape the latter, you must educate the former. It was for his perception
+of this truth, we may notice in passing, that Comte awarded to
+Vauvenargues a place in the Positivist Calendar; 'for his direct effort,
+in spite of the universal desuetude into which it had fallen, to
+reorganise the culture of the heart according to a better knowledge of
+human nature, of which this noble thinker discerned the centre to be
+affective.'[44]
+
+This theory of the will, however, was not allowed to rest here; the
+activity of man was connected with the universal order. 'What prevents
+the mind from perceiving the motive of its actions, is only their
+infinite quickness. Our thoughts perish at the moment in which their
+effects make themselves known; when the action commences, the principle
+has vanished; the will appears, the feeling is gone; we cannot find it
+ourselves, and so doubt if we ever had it. But it would be an enormous
+defect to have a will without a principle; our actions would be all
+haphazard; the world would be nothing but caprice; all order would be
+overturned. It is not enough, then, to admit it to be true that it is
+reflection or sentiment that leads us: we must add further that it would
+be monstrous for this to be otherwise.[45] ...
+
+'The will recalls or suspends our ideas; our ideas shape or vary the
+laws of the will; the laws of the will are thus dependent on the laws of
+creation; but the laws of creation are not foreign to ourselves, they
+constitute our being, and form our essence, and are entirely our own,
+and we can say boldly that we act by ourselves, when we only act by
+them.[46] ...
+
+'Let us recognise here, then, our profound subjection.... Let us rend
+the melancholy veil which hides from our eyes the eternal chain of the
+world and the glory of the Creator.... External objects form ideas in
+the mind, these ideas form sentiments, these sentiments volitions, these
+volitions actions in ourselves and outside of ourselves. So noble a
+dependence in all the parts of this vast universe must conduct our
+reflections to the unity of its principle; this subordination makes the
+true greatness of the beings subordinated. The excellence of man is in
+his dependence; his subjection displays two marvellous images--the
+infinite power of God, and the dignity of our own soul.... Man
+independent would be an object of contempt; the feeling of his own
+imperfection would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling, when we
+admit his dependence, is the foundation of his sweetest hope; it reveals
+to him the nothingness of finite good, and leads him back to his
+principle, which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone can
+satisfy his desires in the possession of himself.'[47]
+
+Vauvenargues showed his genuine healthiness not more by a plenary
+rejection of the doctrine of the incurable vileness and frenzy of man,
+than by his freedom from the boisterous and stupid transcendental
+optimism which has too many votaries in our time. He would not have men
+told that they are miserable earth-gnomes, the slaves of a black
+destiny, but he still placed them a good deal lower than the angels. For
+instance: 'We are too inattentive or too much occupied with ourselves,
+to get to the bottom of one another's characters; _whoever has watched
+masks at a ball dancing together in a friendly manner, and joining hands
+without knowing who the others are, and then parting the moment
+afterwards never to meet again nor ever to regret, or be regretted, can
+form some idea of the world_.'[48] But then, as he said elsewhere: 'We
+can be perfectly aware of our imperfection, without being humiliated by
+the sight. _One of the noblest qualities of our nature is that we are
+able so easily to dispense with greater perfection._'[49] In all this we
+mark the large and rational humaneness of the new time, a tolerant and
+kindly and elevating estimate of men.
+
+The faith in the natural and simple operation of virtue, without the aid
+of all sorts of valetudinarian restrictions, comes out on every
+occasion. The Trappist theory of the conditions of virtue found no
+quarter with him. Mirabeau for instance complained of the atmosphere of
+the Court, as fatal to the practice of virtue. Vauvenargues replied that
+the people there were doubtless no better than they should be, and that
+vice was dominant. 'So much the worse for those who have vices. But when
+you are fortunate enough to possess virtue, it is, to my thinking, a
+very noble ambition to lift up this same virtue in the bosom of
+corruption, to make it succeed, to place it above all, to indulge and
+control the passions without reproach, to overthrow the obstacles to
+them, and to surrender yourself to the inclinations of an upright and
+magnanimous heart, instead of combating or concealing them in retreat,
+without either satisfying or vanquishing them. I know nothing so weak
+and so vain as to flee before vices, or to hate them without measure;
+for people only hate them by way of reprisal because they are afraid of
+them, or else out of vengeance because these vices have played them some
+sorry turn; but a little loftiness of soul, some knowledge of the heart,
+a gentle and tranquil humour, will protect you against the risk of being
+either surprised, or keenly wounded by them.'[50]
+
+There is a tolerably obvious distinction between two principal ways of
+examining character. One is a musing, subjective method of delineation,
+in which the various shades and windings seem to reveal themselves with
+a certain spontaneity, and we follow many recesses and depths in the
+heart of another, such as only music stirs into consciousness in
+ourselves. Besides this rarer poetic method, there is what may be
+styled the diplomatist's method; it classifies characters objectively,
+according to the kinds of outer conduct in which they manifest
+themselves, and according to the best ways of approaching and dealing
+with them. The second of these describes the spirit in which
+Vauvenargues observed men. He is French, and not German, and belongs to
+the eighteenth century, and not to the seventeenth or the nineteenth.
+His _Characters_, very little known in this country, are as excellent as
+any work in this kind that we are acquainted with, or probably as
+excellent as such work can be. They are real and natural, yet while
+abstaining as rigorously as Vauvenargues everywhere does from grotesque
+and extravagant traits, they avoid equally the vice of presenting the
+mere bald and sterile flats of character, which he that runs may read.
+As we have said, he had the quality possessed by so few of those who
+write about men; he watched men, and drew from the life. In a word, he
+studied concrete examples and interrogated his own experience--the only
+sure guarantee that one writing on his themes has anything which it is
+worth our while to listen to. Among other consequences of this reality
+of their source is the agreeable fact that these pictures are free from
+that clever bitterness and easy sarcasm, by which crude and jejune
+observers, thinking more of their own wit than of what they observe,
+sometimes gain a little reputation. Even the coxcombs, self-duping
+knaves, simpletons, braggarts, and other evil or pitiful types whom he
+selects, are drawn with unstrained and simple conformity to reality.
+The pictures have no moral label pinned on to them. Yet Vauvenargues
+took life seriously enough, and it was just because he took it
+seriously, that he had no inclination to air his wit or practise a
+verbal humour upon the stuff out of which happiness and misery are made.
+
+One or two fragments will suffice. Take the Man of the World, for
+instance:
+
+'A man of the world is not he who knows other men best, who has most
+foresight or dexterity in affairs, who is most instructed by experience
+and study; he is neither a good manager, nor a man of science, nor a
+politician, nor a skilful officer, nor a painstaking magistrate. He is a
+man who is ignorant of nothing but who knows nothing; who, doing his own
+business ill, fancies himself very capable of doing that of other
+people; a man who has much useless wit, who has the art of saying
+flattering things which do not flatter, and judicious things which give
+no information; who can persuade nobody, though he speaks well; endowed
+with that sort of eloquence which can bring out trifles, and which
+annihilates great subjects; as penetrating in what is ridiculous and
+external in men, as he is blind to the depths of their minds. One who,
+afraid of being wearisome by reason, is wearisome by his extravagances;
+is jocose without gaiety, and lively without passion.'[51]
+
+Or the two following, the Inconstant Man, and Lycas or the Firm Man:
+
+'Such a man seems really to possess more than one character. A powerful
+imagination makes his soul take the shape of all the objects that affect
+it; he suddenly astonishes the world by acts of generosity and courage
+which were never expected of him; the image of virtue inflames,
+elevates, softens, masters his heart; he receives the impression from
+the loftiest, and he surpasses them. But when his imagination has grown
+cold, his courage droops, his generosity sinks; the vices opposed to
+these virtues take possession of his soul, and after having reigned
+awhile supreme, they make way for other objects.... We cannot say that
+they have a great nature, or strong, or weak, or light; it is a swift
+and imperious imagination which reigns with sovereign power over all
+their being, which subjugates their genius, and which prescribes for
+them in turn those fine actions and those faults, those heights and
+those littlenesses, those flights of enthusiasm and those fits of
+disgust, which we are wrong in charging either with hypocrisy or
+madness.'[52]
+
+'Lycas unites with a self-reliant, bold, and impetuous nature, a spirit
+of reflection and profundity which moderates the counsels of his
+passions, which leads him by inpenetrable motives, and makes him advance
+to his ends by many paths. He is one of those long-sighted men, who
+consider the succession of events from afar off, who always finish a
+design begun; who are capable, I do not say of dissembling either a
+misfortune or an offence, but of rising above either, instead of letting
+it depress them; deep natures, independent by their firmness in daring
+all and suffering all; who, whether they resist their inclinations out
+of foresight, or whether, out of pride and a secret consciousness of
+their resources, they defy what is called prudence, always, in good as
+in evil, cheat the acutest conjectures.'[53]
+
+Let us note that Vauvenargues is almost entirely free from that
+favourite trick of the aphoristic person, which consists in forming a
+series of sentences, the predicates being various qualifications of
+extravagance, vanity, and folly, and the subject being Women. He resists
+this besetting temptation of the modern speaker of apophthegms to
+identify woman and fool. On the one or two occasions in which he begins
+the maxim with the fatal words, _Les femmes_, he is as little profound
+as other people who persist in thinking of man and woman as two
+different species. 'Women,' for example, 'have ordinarily more vanity
+than temperament, and more temperament than virtue'--which is fairly
+true of all human beings, and in so far as it is true, describes men
+just as exactly--and no more so--as it describes women. In truth,
+Vauvenargues felt too seriously about conduct and character to go far in
+this direction. Now and again he is content with a mere smartness, as
+when he says: 'There are some thoroughly excellent people who cannot get
+rid of their _ennui_ except at the expense of society.' But such a mood
+is not common. He is usually grave, and not seldom profoundly weighty,
+delicate without being weak, and subtle without obscurity; as for
+example:
+
+'People teach children to fear and obey; the avarice, pride, or timidity
+of the fathers, instructs the children in economy, arrogance, or
+submission. We stir them up to be yet more and more copyists, which they
+are only too disposed to be, as it is; nobody thinks of making them
+original, hardy, independent.'
+
+'If instead of dulling the vivacity of children, people did their best
+to raise the impulsiveness and movement of their characters, what might
+we not expect from a fine natural temper?'
+
+Again: 'The moderation of the weak is mediocrity.'
+
+'What is arrogance in the weak is elevation in the strong; as the
+strength of a sick man is frenzy, and that of a whole man is vigour.'
+
+'To speak imprudently and to speak boldly are nearly always the same
+thing. But we may speak without prudence, and still speak what is right;
+and it is a mistake to fancy that a man has a shallow intelligence,
+because the boldness of his character or the liveliness of his temper
+may have drawn from him, in spite of himself, some dangerous truth.'
+
+'It is a great sign of mediocrity always to praise moderately.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Vauvenargues has a saying to the effect that men very often, without
+thinking of it, form an idea of their face and expression from the
+ruling sentiment of which they are conscious in themselves at the time.
+He hints that this is perhaps the reason why a coxcomb always believes
+himself to be handsome.[54] And in a letter to Mirabeau, he describes
+pleasantly how sometimes in moments of distraction he pictures himself
+with an air of loftiness, of majesty, of penetration, according to the
+idea that is occupying his mind, and how if by chance he sees his face
+in the mirror, he is nearly as much amazed as if he saw a Cyclops or a
+Tartar.[55] Yet his nature, if we may trust the portrait, revealed
+itself in his face; it is one of the most delightful to look upon, even
+in the cold inarticulateness of an engraving, that the gallery of fair
+souls contains for us. We may read the beauty of his character in the
+soft strength of the brow, the meditative lines of mouth and chin, above
+all, the striking clearness, the self-collection, the feminine
+solicitude, that mingle freely and without eagerness or expectancy in
+his gaze, as though he were hearkening to some ever-flowing inward
+stream of divine melody. We think of that gracious touch in Bacon's
+picture of the father of Solomon's House, that 'he had an aspect as
+though he pitied men.' If we reproach France in the eighteenth century
+with its coarseness, artificiality, shallowness, because it produced
+such men as the rather brutish Duclos, we ought to remember that this
+was also the century of Vauvenargues, one of the most tender, lofty,
+cheerful, and delicately sober of all moralists.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: _Pensées_, i. v. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Ib._ i. vi. 16.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Ib._ i. vii. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 4: M. Gilbert's edition of the _Works and Correspondence of
+Vauvenargues_ (2 vols. Paris: Furne, 1857), ii. 133.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Éloge de P.H. de Seytres_. _OEuv._ i. 141-150.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _OEuv._ ii. 233. See too p. 267.]
+
+[Footnote 7: No. 579, i. 455.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Réflexions sur Divers Sujets_, i. 104.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _OEuv._ ii. 249.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Ib._ ii. 265.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Ib._ ii. 266.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Conseils à un Jeune Homme_, i. 124.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _OEuv._ ii. 252.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Ib._ ii. 272.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Mémoires de Marmontel_, vol. i. 189.]
+
+[Footnote 16: The reader of Marmontel's _Mémoires_ will remember the
+extraordinary and grotesque circumstances under which a younger brother
+of Mirabeau, (of _l'ami des hommes_, that is) appealed to the memory of
+Vauvenargues. See vol. i. 256-260.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _OEuv._ i. 225-232.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Letter to Saint-Vincens_, ii. 146.]
+
+[Footnote 19: No. 318.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Napoleon said on some occasion, '_Il faut vouloir vivre et
+savoir mourir_.' M. Littré prefaces the third volume of that heroic
+monument of learning and industry, his _Dictionary of the French
+Language_, by the words: 'He who wishes to employ his life seriously
+ought always to act as if he had long to live, and to govern himself as
+if he would have soon to die.']
+
+[Footnote 21: No. 223.]
+
+[Footnote 22: No. 300.]
+
+[Footnote 23: No. 264.]
+
+[Footnote 24: _Réflexions Critiques sur quelques Poètes_, i. 237.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _OEuv_. i. 248.]
+
+[Footnote 26: _Réflexions Critiques sur quelques Poètes_, i. 238.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _OEuv._ i. 243.]
+
+[Footnote 28: _OEuv._ i. 275.]
+
+[Footnote 29: _Correspondance_. _OEuv._ ii. 131, 207.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Long-winded and tortuous and difficult to seize as
+Shaftesbury is as a whole, in detached sentences he shows marked
+aphoristic quality; _e.g._ 'The most ingenious way of becoming foolish
+is by a system;' 'The liker anything is to wisdom, if it be not plainly
+the thing itself, the more directly it becomes its opposite.']
+
+[Footnote 31: No. 278 (i. 411).]
+
+[Footnote 32: _OEuv._ ii. 115.]
+
+[Footnote 33: _Ib._ i. 87.]
+
+[Footnote 34:
+                                     Doch
+    Zuweilen ist des Sinns in einer Sache
+    Auch mehr, als wir vermuthen; und es wäre
+    So unerhört doch nicht, dass uns der Heiland
+    Auf Wegen zu sich zöge, die der Kluge
+    Von selbst nicht leicht betreten würde.
+
+    _Nathan der Weise_, iii. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 35: _Reflections on the French Revolution_, Works (ed. 1842),
+i. 414.]
+
+[Footnote 36: _OEuv._ ii. 170.]
+
+[Footnote 37: No. 111.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _OEuv._ ii. 74.]
+
+[Footnote 39: No. 285.]
+
+[Footnote 40: 'A man may as well pretend to cure himself of love by
+viewing his mistress through the artificial medium of a microscope or
+prospect, and beholding there the coarseness of her skin and monstrous
+disproportion of her features, as hope to excite or moderate any passion
+by the artificial arguments of a Seneca or an Epictetus.'--Hume's
+_Essays_ (xviii. _The Sceptic_).]
+
+[Footnote 41: _OEuv._ i. 163.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Nos. 296-298, 148.]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Sur le Libre Arbitre_. _OEuv._ i. 199.]
+
+[Footnote 44: _Politique Positive_, iii. 589.]
+
+[Footnote 45: _Ib._ i. 194.]
+
+[Footnote 46: _Politique Positive_, 205.]
+
+[Footnote 47: _Ib._ 206, 207.]
+
+[Footnote 48: No. 330.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Nos. 462, 463.]
+
+[Footnote 50: _Correspondance_. _OEuv._ ii. 163.]
+
+[Footnote 51: _OEuv._ i. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 52: _OEuv._ i. 325.]
+
+[Footnote 53: _OEuv._ i. 326.]
+
+[Footnote 54: No. 236.]
+
+[Footnote 55: _OEuv_. ii. 188.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 2 OF 3) ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16937-8.txt or 16937-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/9/3/16937/
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Luis Amador and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/16937-8.zip b/16937-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5019bbe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16937-8.zip
diff --git a/16937-h.zip b/16937-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..47006f0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16937-h.zip
diff --git a/16937-h/16937-h.htm b/16937-h/16937-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7a1acf2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16937-h/16937-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,1862 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Critical Miscellanies: Vauvenargues, by John Morley.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+    .footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3)
+       Essay 1: Vauvenargues
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: October 25, 2005 [EBook #16937]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 2 OF 3) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Luis Amador and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>CRITICAL
+MISCELLANIES</h1>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h5>VOL. II.</h5>
+
+<h3>Essay 1: Vauvenargues</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">London</p>
+
+<p class="center">MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</p>
+
+<p class="center">1905</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS_OF_VOL_II" id="CONTENTS_OF_VOL_II"></a>CONTENTS OF VOL. II.</h2>
+
+<table summary="Table of Contents" width="80%">
+<tr><td>CHAPTER</td><td align="right">PAGE</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_1">The influence of Pascal</a></td><td align="right">1</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_4">Vauvenargues holds the balance between him and the votaries of Perfectibility</a></td><td align="right"> 4</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_4">Birth, education, and hard life of Vauvenargues</a></td><td align="right">4</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_10">Life in Paris, and friendship with Voltaire</a></td><td align="right">10</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_12">His religious sentiment</a></td><td align="right">12</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_15">His delicacy, reserve, and psychagogic quality</a></td><td align="right">15</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_17">Certain inability to appreciate marked originality</a></td><td align="right">17</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_19">Criticisms on Moli&egrave;re, Racine, and Corneille</a></td><td align="right">19</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_20">Comparison with English aphoristic writers and moralists</a></td><td align="right">20</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_25">Character the key to his theory of greatness</a></td><td align="right">25</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_26">His exaltation of spontaneous feeling, a protest against Rochefoucauld and Pascal</a></td><td align="right">26</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_28">His plea for a normal sense of human relation, the same</a></td><td align="right">28</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_29">His doctrine of the Will connected with his doctrine of
+Character</a></td><td align="right">29</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_33">Antipathy to ascetic restrictions</a></td><td align="right">33</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_34">Two ways of examining character: that followed by Vauvenargues </a></td><td align="right">34</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_36">Examples of his style</a></td><td align="right">36</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#Page_40">The beauty of his nature to be read in his face</a></td><td align="right">40</td></tr>
+
+</table>
+<p class="center">&nbsp;<br />[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book.]</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VAUVENARGUES" id="VAUVENARGUES"></a>VAUVENARGUES.</h2>
+
+
+<p>One of the most important phases of French thought<a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a>
+in the great century of its illumination is only
+thoroughly intelligible, on condition that in studying
+it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force,
+and genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most
+influential representative of that way of viewing
+human nature and its circumstances, which it was
+one of the characteristic glories of the eighteenth
+century to have rebelled against and rejected. More
+than a hundred years after the publication of the
+<i>Pens&eacute;es</i>, Condorcet thought it worth while to prepare
+a new edition of them, with annotations, protesting,
+not without a certain unwonted deference of tone,
+against Pascal's doctrine of the base and desperate
+estate of man. Voltaire also had them reprinted
+with notes of his own, written in the same spirit of
+vivacious deprecation, which we may be sure would
+have been even more vivacious, if Voltaire had not
+remembered that he was speaking of the mightiest
+of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal
+and specific dissents like these, all the writers who
+had drunk most deeply of the spirit of the eighteenth
+century, lived in a constant ferment of revolt against<a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a>
+the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century
+before, who had clothed mere theological mysteries
+with the force and importance of strongly entrenched
+propositions in a consistent philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations
+upon the nothingness of kings, the pitifulness of
+mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip of the hand
+of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather
+filled the mind with exaltation than really depressed
+or humiliated it. From Bossuet to Pascal is to pass
+from the solemn splendour of the church to the chill
+of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional,
+in the first place, and it was purely theological,
+in the second; so the main stream of thought flowed
+away and aside from him. To Pascal it was felt
+necessary that there should be reply and vindication,
+whether in the shape of deliberate and published
+formulas, or in the reasoned convictions of the
+individual intelligence working privately. A syllabus
+of the radical articles of the French creed of the
+eighteenth century would consist largely of the
+contradictions of the main propositions of Pascal.
+The old theological idea of the fall was hard to
+endure, but the idea of the fall was clenched by such
+general laws of human nature as this,&mdash;that 'men
+are so necessarily mad, that it would be to be mad
+by a new form of madness not to be mad;'&mdash;that
+man is nothing but masquerading, lying, and hypocrisy,
+both in what concerns himself and in respect of
+others, wishing not to have the truth told to himself,<a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a>
+and shrinking from telling it to anybody else;<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> that
+the will, the imagination, the disorders of the body,
+the thousand concealed infirmities of the intelligence,
+conspire to reduce our discovery of justice and truth
+to a process of haphazard, in which we more often
+miss the mark than hit.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Pleasure, ambition, industry,
+are only means of distracting men from the otherwise
+unavoidable contemplation of their own misery. How
+speak of the dignity of the race and its history, when
+we know that a grain of sand in Cromwell's bladder
+altered the destinies of a kingdom, and that if
+Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole surface
+of the earth would be different? Imagine, in a word,
+'a number of men in chains, and all condemned to
+death; some of them each day butchered in the sight
+of the others, while those who remain watch their
+own condition in that of their fellows, and eyeing
+one another in anguish and hopelessness, wait their
+turn; such is the situation of man.'<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p>It was hardly possible to push the tragical side of
+the verities of life beyond this, and there was soon
+an instinctive reaction towards realities. The sensations
+with their conditions of pleasure no less than of
+pain; the intelligence with its energetic aptitudes for
+the discovery of protective and fruitful knowledge;
+the affections with their large capacities for giving
+and receiving delight; the spontaneous inner impulse
+towards action and endurance in the face of outward<a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a>
+circumstances&mdash;all these things reassured men, and
+restored in theory to them with ample interest what
+in practice they had never lost&mdash;a rational faith and
+exultation in their own faculties, both of finding out
+truth and of feeling a very substantial degree of
+happiness. On this side too, as on the other,
+speculation went to its extreme limit. The hapless
+and despairing wretches of Pascal were transformed
+by the votaries of perfectibility into bright beings
+not any lower than the angels. Between the two
+extremes there was one fine moralist who knew how
+to hold a just balance, perceiving that language is
+the expression of relations and proportions, that when
+we speak of virtue and genius we mean qualities that
+compared with those of mediocre souls deserve these
+high names, that greatness and happiness are comparative
+terms, and that there is nothing to be said
+of the estate of man except relatively. This moralist
+was Vauvenargues.</p>
+
+<p>Vauvenargues was born of a good Proven&ccedil;al stock
+at Aix, in the year 1715. He had scarcely any of
+that kind of education which is usually performed in
+school-classes, and he was never able to read either
+Latin or Greek. Such slight knowledge as he ever
+got of the famous writers among the ancients was in
+translations. Of English literature, though its influence
+and that of our institutions were then becoming
+paramount in France, and though he had a particular
+esteem for the English character, he knew only the
+writings of Locke and Pope, and the Paradise Lost.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
+Vauvenargues must be added to the list of thinkers<a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a>
+and writers whose personal history shows, what men
+of letters sometimes appear to be in a conspiracy to
+make us forget, that for sober, healthy, and robust
+judgment on human nature and life, active and
+sympathetic contact with men in the transaction of
+the many affairs of their daily life is a better
+preparation than any amount of wholly meditative
+seclusion. He is also one of the many who show
+that a weakly constitution of body is not incompatible
+with fine and energetic qualities of mind, even if it
+be not actually friendly to them. Nor was feeble
+health any disqualification for the profession of arms.
+As Arms and the Church were the only alternatives
+for persons of noble birth, Vauvenargues, choosing
+the former, became a subaltern in the King's Own
+Regiment at the age of twenty (1735). Here in time
+he saw active service; for in 1740 the death of
+Charles VI. threw all Europe into confusion, and the
+French Government, falling in with the prodigious
+designs of the Marshal Belle-Isle and his brother,
+took sides against Maria Theresa, and supported the
+claims of the unhappy Elector of Bavaria who afterwards
+became the Emperor Charles VII. The disasters
+which fell upon France in consequence are well
+known. The forces despatched to Bavaria and
+Bohemia, after the brief triumph of the capture of
+Prague, were gradually overwhelmed without a single<a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a>
+great battle, and it was considered a signal piece of
+good fortune when in the winter of 1742-43 Belle-Isle
+succeeded, with a loss of half his force, in leading by
+a long circuit, in the view of the enemy, and amid
+the horrors of famine and intense frost, some thirteen
+thousand men away from Prague. The King's
+Regiment took part in the Bohemian campaign, and
+in this frightful march which closed it; Vauvenargues
+with the rest.</p>
+
+<p>To physical sufferings during two winters was
+added the distress of losing a comrade to whom he
+was deeply attached; he perished in the spring of
+'42 under the hardships of the war. The <i>&Eacute;loge</i> in
+which Vauvenargues commemorates the virtues and
+the pitiful fate of his friend, is too deeply marked
+with the florid and declamatory style of youth to be
+pleasing to a more ripened taste.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> He complained
+that nobody who had read it observed that it was
+touching, not remembering that even the most tender
+feeling fails to touch us, when it has found stilted
+and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of
+affection were prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues.
+Perhaps if his life had been passed in less
+severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might
+have become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he
+loved his friends with a certain patient sweetness and
+equanimity, in which there was never the faintest
+tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any
+of those other vices which betray in men that<a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>
+excessive consciousness of their own personality,
+which lies at the root of most of the obstacles in the
+way of an even and humane life. His nature had
+such depth and quality that the perpetual untowardness
+of circumstances left no evil print upon him;
+hardship made him not sour, but patient and wise,
+and there is no surer sign of noble temper.</p>
+
+<p>The sufferings and bereavements of war were not
+his only trials. Vauvenargues was beset throughout
+the whole of his short life with the sordid and
+humiliating embarrassments of narrow means. His
+letters to Saint-Vincens, the most intimate of his
+friends, disclose the straits to which he was driven.
+The nature of these straits is an old story all over
+the world, and Vauvenargues did the same things
+that young men in want of money have generally
+done. It cannot be said, I fear, that he passed along
+those miry ways without some defilement. He
+bethinks him on one occasion that a rich neighbour
+has daughters. 'Why should I not undertake to
+marry one of them within two years, with a reasonable
+dowry, if he would lend me the money I want and
+provided I should not have repaid it by the time
+fixed?'<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> We must make allowance for the youth of
+the writer, and for a different view of marriage and
+its significance from our own. Even then there
+remains something to regret. Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues,
+in a maxim smacking unwontedly of
+commonplace, cannot debase strong souls, any more<a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a>
+than riches can elevate low souls.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> That depends.
+If poverty means pinching and fretting need of
+money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense,
+but it is extremely likely to wear away a very
+priceless kind of delicacy in a man's estimate of
+human relations and their import.</p>
+
+<p>Vauvenargues has told us what he found the life
+of the camp. Luxurious and indolent living, neglected
+duties, discontented sighing after the delights of
+Paris, the exaltation of rank and mediocrity, an
+insolent contempt for merit; these were the characteristics
+of the men in high military place. The
+lower officers meantime were overwhelmed by an
+expenditure that the luxury of their superiors
+introduced and encouraged; and they were speedily
+driven to retire by the disorder of their affairs, or by
+the impossibility of promotion, because men of spirit
+could not long endure the sight of flagrant injustice,
+and because those who labour for fame cannot tie
+themselves to a condition where there is nothing to
+be gathered but shame and humiliation.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>To these considerations of an extravagant expenditure
+and the absence of every chance of promotion,
+there was added in the case of Vauvenargues the still
+more powerful drawback of irretrievably broken
+health. The winter-march from Prague to Egra had
+sown fatal seed. His legs had been frost-bitten, and
+before they could be cured he was stricken by
+small-pox, which left him disfigured and almost blind.<a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a>
+So after a service of nine years, he quitted military
+life (1744). He vainly solicited employment as a
+diplomatist. The career was not yet open to the
+talents, and in the memorial which Vauvenargues
+drew up he dwelt less on his conduct than on his
+birth, being careful to show that he had an authentic
+ancestor who was Governor of Hy&egrave;res in the early
+part of the fourteenth century.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> But the only road
+to employment lay through the Court. The claims
+even of birth counted for nothing, unless they were
+backed by favour among the ignoble creatures who
+haunted Versailles. For success it was essential to
+be not only high-born, but a parasite as well. 'Permit
+me to assure you, sir,' Vauvenargues wrote courageously
+to Amelot, then the minister, 'that it is this
+moral impossibility for a gentleman, with only zeal to
+commend him, of ever reaching the King his master,
+which causes the discouragement that is observed
+among the nobility of the provinces, and which
+extinguishes all ambition.'<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> Amelot, to oblige Voltaire,
+eager as usual in good offices for his friend,
+answered the letters which Vauvenargues wrote, and
+promised to lay his name before the King as soon as
+a favourable opportunity should present itself.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<p>Vauvenargues was probably enough of a man of
+the world to take fair words of this sort at their
+value, and he had enough of qualities that do not
+belong to the man of the world to enable him to
+confront the disappointment with cheerful fortitude<a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a>
+'Misfortune itself,' he had once written, 'has its
+charms in great extremities; for this opposition of
+fortune raises a courageous mind, and makes it collect
+all the forces that before were unemployed: it is in
+indolence and littleness that virtue suffers, when a
+timid prudence prevents it from rising in flight and
+forces it to creep along in bonds.'<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> He was true to
+the counsel which he had thus given years before,
+and with the consciousness that death was rapidly
+approaching, and that all hope of advancement in
+the ordinary way was at an end, even if there were
+any chance of his life, he persevered in his project of
+going to Paris, there to earn the fame which he
+instinctively felt that he had it in him to achieve.
+Neither scantiness of means nor the vehement
+protests of friends and relations&mdash;always the worst
+foes to superior character on critical occasions&mdash;could
+detain him in the obscurity of Provence. In 1745
+he took up his quarters in Paris in a humble house
+near the School of Medicine. Literature had not yet
+acquired that importance in France which it was so
+soon to obtain. The Encyclop&aelig;dia was still unconceived,
+and the momentous work which that famous
+design was to accomplish, of organising the philosophers
+and men of letters into an army with banners,
+was still unexecuted. Voltaire, indeed, had risen, if
+not to the full height of his reputation, yet high
+enough both to command the admiration of people of
+quality, and to be the recognised chief of the new<a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a>
+school of literature and thought. Voltaire had been
+struck by a letter in which Vauvenargues, then
+unknown to him, had sent a criticism comparing
+Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Coming
+from a young officer, the member of a profession
+which Voltaire frankly described as 'very noble, in
+truth, but slightly barbarous,' this criticism was
+peculiarly striking. A great many years afterwards
+Voltaire was surprised in the same way, to find that
+an officer could write such a book as the <i>F&eacute;licit&eacute;
+Publique</i> of the Marquis de Chastellux. To Vauvenargues
+he replied with many compliments, and pointed
+out with a good deal of pains the injustice which the
+young critic had done to the great author of <i>Cinna</i>.
+'<i>It is the part of a man like you</i>,' he said admirably,
+'<i>to have preferences, but no exclusions.</i>'<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> The correspondence
+thus begun was kept up with ever-growing
+warmth and mutual respect. 'If you had been born
+a few years earlier,' Voltaire wrote to him, 'my
+works would be worth all the more for it; but at
+any rate, even at the close of my career, you confirm
+me in the path that you pursue.'<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>
+
+<p>The personal impression was as fascinating as that
+which had been conveyed by Vauvenargues' letters.
+Voltaire took every opportunity of visiting his
+unfortunate friend, then each day drawing nearer
+to the grave. Men of humbler stature were equally
+attracted. 'It was at this time,' says the light-hearted
+Marmontel, 'that I first saw at home the man who<a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a>
+had a charm for me beyond all the rest of the world,
+the good, the virtuous, the wise Vauvenargues.
+Cruelly used by nature in his body, he was in soul
+one of her rarest masterpieces. I seemed to see in
+him F&eacute;nelon weak and suffering. I could make a
+good book of his conversations, if I had had a chance
+of collecting them. You see some traces of it in the
+selection that he has left of his thoughts and
+meditations. But all eloquent and full of feeling as
+he is in his writings, he was even more so still in his
+conversation.'<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> Marmontel felt sincere grief when
+Vauvenargues died, and in the <i>Epistle to Voltaire</i>
+expressed his sorrow in some fair lines. They
+contain the happy phrase applied to Vauvenargues,
+'<i>ce c&#339;ur sto&iuml;que et tendre</i>.'<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>
+
+<p>In religious sentiment Vauvenargues was out of
+the groove of his time. That is to say, he was not
+unsusceptible of religion. Accepting no dogma, so
+far as we can judge, and complying with no observances,
+very faint and doubtful as to even the fundamentals&mdash;God,
+immortality, and the like&mdash;he never
+partook of the furious and bitter antipathy of the
+best men of that century against the church, its
+creeds, and its book. At one time, as will be seen
+from a passage which will be quoted by and by, his
+leanings were towards that vague and indefinable<a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>
+doctrine which identifies God with all the forces and
+their manifestations in the universe. Afterwards even
+this adumbration of a theistic explanation of the
+world seems to have passed from him, and he lived,
+as many other not bad men have lived, with that fair
+working substitute for a religious doctrine which is
+provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance in
+a devotional spirit, of all larger mortal experiences
+and higher human impressions. There is a <i>Meditation
+on the Faith</i>, including a <i>Prayer</i>, among his writings;
+and there can be little doubt, in spite of Condorcet's
+incredible account of the circumstances of its composition,
+that it is the expression of what was at the time
+a sincere feeling.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> It is, however, rather the straining
+and ecstatic rhapsody of one who ardently seeks
+faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who
+already possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by
+temperament, but he could not entirely resist the
+intellectual influences of the period. The one fact
+delivered him from dogma and superstition, and the
+other from scoffing and harsh unspirituality. He saw
+that apart from the question of the truth or falsehood
+of its historic basis, there was a balance to be struck
+between the consolations and the afflictions of the
+faith.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> Practically he was content to leave this
+balance unstruck, and to pass by on the other side.
+Scarcely any of his maxims concern religion. One of
+these few is worth quoting, where he says: 'The
+strength or weakness of our belief depends more on<a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>
+our courage than our light; not all those who mock
+at auguries have more intellect than those who believe
+in them.'<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<p>The end came in the spring of 1747, when Vauvenargues
+was no more than thirty-two. Perhaps, in
+spite of his physical miseries, these two years in Paris
+were the least unhappy time in his life. He was in
+the great centre where the fame which he longed for
+was earned and liberally awarded. A year of intercourse
+with so full and alert and brilliant a mind as
+Voltaire's, must have been more to one so appreciative
+of mental greatness as Vauvenargues, than many years
+of intercourse with subalterns in the Regiment of the
+King. With death, now known to be very near at
+hand, he had made his account before. 'To execute
+great things,' he had written in a maxim which gained
+the lively praise of Voltaire, 'a man must live as
+though he had never to die.'<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> This mood was
+common among the Greeks and Romans; but the
+religion which Europe accepted in the time of its
+deepest corruption and depravation, retained the
+mark of its dismal origin nowhere so strongly as in
+the distorted prominence which it gave in the minds
+of its votaries to the dissolution of the body. It was<a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>
+one of the first conditions of the Revival of Reason
+that the dreary <i>memento mori</i> and its hateful emblems
+should be deliberately effaced. 'The thought of
+death,' said Vauvenargues, 'leads us astray, because
+it makes us forget to live.' He did not understand
+living in the sense which the dissolute attach to it.
+The libertinism of his regiment called no severe
+rebuke from him, but his meditative temper drew him
+away from it even in his youth. It is not impossible
+that if his days had not been cut short, he might
+have impressed Parisian society with ideas and a
+sentiment, that would have left to it all its cheerfulness,
+and yet prevented that laxity which so fatally
+weakened it. Turgot, the only other conspicuous
+man who could have withstood the license of the
+time, had probably too much of that austerity which
+is in the fibre of so many great characters, to make
+any moral counsels that he might have given widely
+effective.</p>
+
+<p>Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint
+of the pedagogue or the preacher to have dispelled
+the sophisms of licence, less by argument than by the
+gracious attraction of virtue in his own character.
+The stock moralist, like the commonplace orator of
+the pulpit, fails to touch the hearts of men or to
+affect their lives, for lack of delicacy, of sympathy,
+and of freshness; he attempts to compensate for this
+by excess of emphasis, and that more often disgusts
+us than persuades. Vauvenargues, on the other
+hand, is remarkable for delicacy and half-reserved<a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>
+tenderness. Everything that he has said is coloured
+and warmed with feeling for the infirmities of men.
+He writes not merely as an analytical outsider.
+Hence, unlike most moralists, he is no satirist. He
+had borne the burdens. 'The looker-on,' runs one of
+his maxims, 'softly lying in a carpeted chamber,
+inveighs against the soldier, who passes winter nights
+on the river's edge, and keeps watch in silence over
+the safety of the land.'<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> Vauvenargues had been
+something very different from the safe and sheltered
+critic of other men's battles, and this is the secret of
+the hold which his words have upon us. They are
+real, with the reality that can only come from two
+sources; from high poetic imagination, which Vauvenargues
+did not possess, or else from experience of life
+acting on and strengthening a generous nature. 'The
+cause of most books of morality being so insipid,' he
+says, 'is that their authors are not sincere; is that,
+being feeble echoes of one another, they could not
+venture to publish their own real maxims and private
+sentiments.'<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> One of the secrets of his own freedom
+from this ordinary insipidity of moralists was his
+freedom also from their pretentiousness and insincerity.</p>
+
+<p>Besides these positive merits, he had, as we have
+said, the negative distinction of never being emphatic.
+His sayings are nearly always moderate and persuasive,
+alike in sentiment and in phrase. Sometimes
+they are almost tentative in the diffidence of their turn.<a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>
+Compared with him La Rochefoucauld's manner is
+hard, and that of La Bruy&egrave;re sententious. In the
+moralist who aspires to move and win men by their
+best side instead of their worst, the absence of this
+hardness and the presence of a certain lambency and
+play even in the exposition of truths of perfect assurance,
+are essential conditions of psychagogic quality.
+In religion such law does not hold, and the contagion
+of fanaticism is usually most rapidly spread by a
+rigorous and cheerless example.</p>
+
+<p>We may notice in passing that Vauvenargues has
+the defects of his qualities, and that with his aversion
+to emphasis was bound up a certain inability to appreciate
+even grandeur and originality, if they were too
+strongly and boldly marked. 'It is easy to criticise
+an author,' he has said, 'but hard to estimate him.'<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a>
+This was never more unfortunately proved than in
+the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the great
+Moli&egrave;re. There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a
+writer who can say that 'La Bruy&egrave;re, animated with
+nearly the same genius, painted the crookedness of
+men with as much truth and as much force as Moli&egrave;re;
+but I believe that there is more eloquence and more
+elevation to be found in La Bruy&egrave;re's images.'<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> Without
+at all undervaluing La Bruy&egrave;re, one of the acutest
+and finest of writers, we may say that this is a truly
+disastrous piece of criticism. Quite as unhappy is the
+preference given to Racine over Moli&egrave;re, not merely
+for the conclusion arrived at, but for the reasons on<a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>
+which it is founded. Moli&egrave;re's subjects, we read, are
+low, his language negligent and incorrect, his characters
+bizarre and eccentric. Racine, on the other
+hand, takes sublime themes, presents us with noble
+types, and writes with simplicity and elegance. It
+is not enough to concede to Racine the glory of art,
+while giving to Moli&egrave;re or Corneille the glory of genius.
+'When people speak of the art of Racine&mdash;the art
+which puts things in their place; which characterises
+men, their passions, manners, genius; which banishes
+obscurities, superfluities, false brilliancies; which
+paints nature with fire, sublimity, and grace&mdash;what
+can we think of such art as this, except that it is the
+genius of extraordinary men, and the origin of those
+rules that writers without genius embrace with so
+much zeal and so little success?'<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> And it is certainly
+true that the art of Racine implied genius. The
+defect of the criticism lies, as usual, in a failure to see
+that there is glory enough in both; in the art of
+highly-finished composition and presentation, and in
+the art of bold and striking creation. Yet Vauvenargues
+was able to discern the secret of the popularity
+of Moli&egrave;re, and the foundation of the common opinion
+that no other dramatist had carried his own kind of
+art so far as Moli&egrave;re had carried his; 'the reason is,
+I fancy, that he is more natural than any of the
+others, and this is an important lesson for everybody
+who wishes to write.'<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> He did not see how nearly
+everything went in this concession, that Moli&egrave;re was,<a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>
+above all, natural. With equal truth of perception
+he condemned the affectation of grandeur lent by the
+French tragedians to classical personages who were
+in truth simple and natural, as the principal defect
+of the national drama, and the common rock on which
+their poets made shipwreck.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> Let us, however,
+rejoice for the sake of the critical reputation of
+Vauvenargues that he was unable to read Shakespeare.
+One for whom Moli&egrave;re is too eccentric,
+grotesque, inelegant, was not likely to do much
+justice to the mightiest but most irregular of all
+dramatists.</p>
+
+<p>A man's prepossessions in dramatic poetry, supposing
+him to be cultivated enough to have any prepossessions,
+furnish the most certain clue that we can
+get to the spirit in which he inwardly regards character
+and conduct. The uniform and reasoned preference
+which Vauvenargues had for Racine over
+Moli&egrave;re and Corneille, was only the transfer to art of
+that balanced, moderate, normal, and emphatically
+harmonious temper, which he brought to the survey
+of human nature. Excess was a condition of thought,
+feeling, and speech, that in every form was disagreeable
+to him; alike in the gloom of Pascal's reveries,
+and in the inflation of speech of some of the heroes
+of Corneille. He failed to relish even Montaigne as
+he ought to have done, because Montaigne's method
+was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, his egoism
+too manifest, and because he did not produce complete<a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>
+and artistic wholes.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>
+
+<p>Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues'
+thinking; balance, evenness, purity of vision,
+penetration finely toned with indulgence. He is never
+betrayed into criticism of men from the point of view
+of immutable first principles. Perhaps this was what
+the elder Mirabeau meant when he wrote to Vauvenargues,
+who was his cousin: 'You have the English
+genius to perfection,' and what Vauvenargues meant
+when he wrote of himself to Mirabeau: 'Nobody in
+the world has a mind less French than I.'<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> These
+international comparisons are among the least fruitful
+of literary amusements, even when they happen
+not to be extremely misleading; as when, for example,
+Voltaire called Locke the English Pascal, a description
+which can only be true on condition that the
+qualifying adjective is meant to strip either Locke or
+Pascal of most of his characteristic traits. And if we
+compare Vauvenargues with any of our English aphoristic
+writers, there is not resemblance enough to
+make the contrast instructive. The obvious truth is
+that in this department our literature is particularly
+weak, while French literature is particularly strong in
+it. With the exception of Bacon, we have no writer
+of apophthegms of the first order; and the difference
+between Bacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues,
+is the difference between Polonius's famous
+discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy of Hamlet.</p>
+
+<p>Bacon's precepts refer rather to external conduct and<a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>
+worldly fortune than to the inner composition of character,
+or to the 'wide, gray, lampless' depths of
+human destiny. We find the same national characteristic,
+though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin's
+oracular saws. Among the French sages a psychological
+element is predominant, as well as an occasional
+transcendent loftiness of feeling, not to be found
+in Bacon's wisest maxims, and from his point of view
+in their composition we could not expect to find
+them there. We seek in vain amid the positivity of
+Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox of Browne,
+or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any of that
+poetic pensiveness which is strong in Vauvenargues,
+and reaches tragic heights in Pascal.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a>Addison may
+have the delicacy of Vauvenargues, but it is a delicacy
+that wants the stir and warmth of feeling. It seems
+as if with English writers poetic sentiment naturally
+sought expression in poetic forms, while the Frenchmen
+of nearly corresponding temperament were restrained
+within the limits of prose by reason of the
+vigorously prescribed stateliness and stiffness of their
+verse at that time. A man in this country with the
+quality of Vauvenargues, with his delicacy, tenderness,
+elevation, would have composed lyrics. We
+have undoubtedly lost much by the laxity and irregularity<a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>
+of our verse, but as undoubtedly we owe to
+its freedom some of the most perfect and delightful
+of the minor figures that adorn the noble gallery of
+English poets.</p>
+
+<p>It would be an error to explain the superiority of
+the great French moralists by supposing in them a
+fancy and imagination too defective for poetic art. It
+was the circumstances of the national literature during
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which made
+Vauvenargues for instance a composer of aphorisms,
+rather than a moral poet like Pope. Let us remember
+some of his own most discriminating words. 'Who
+has more imagination,' he asks, 'than Bossuet, Montaigne,
+Descartes, Pascal, all of them great philosophers?
+Who more judgment and wisdom than Racine, Boileau,
+La Fontaine, Moli&egrave;re, all of them poets full of genius?
+<i>It is not true, then, that the ruling qualities exclude the
+others; on the contrary, they suppose them.</i> I should be
+much surprised if a great poet were without vivid
+lights on philosophy, at any rate moral philosophy, and
+it will very seldom happen for a true philosopher to
+be totally devoid of imagination.'<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> With imagination
+in the highest sense Vauvenargues was not largely
+endowed, but he had as much as is essential to reveal
+to one that the hard and sober-judging faculty is not
+the single, nor even the main element, in a wise and
+full intelligence. 'All my philosophy,' he wrote to
+Mirabeau, when only four or five and twenty years
+old, an age when the intellect is usually most exigent<a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>
+of supremacy, 'all my philosophy has its source in my
+heart.'<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>
+
+<p>In the same spirit he had well said that there is
+more cleverness in the world than greatness of soul,
+more people with talent than with lofty character.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a>
+Hence some of the most peculiarly characteristic and
+impressive of his aphorisms; that famous one, for
+instance, '<i>Great thoughts come from the heart,</i>' and the
+rest which hang upon the same idea. 'Virtuous
+instinct has no need of reason, but supplies it.'
+'Reason misleads us more often than nature.' 'Reason
+does not know the interests of the heart.' 'Perhaps
+we owe to the passions the greatest advantages of the
+intellect.' Such sayings are only true on condition
+that instinct and nature and passion have been already
+moulded under the influence of reason; just as this
+other saying, which won the warm admiration of
+Voltaire, '<i>Magnanimity owes no account of its motives to
+prudence</i>,' is only true on condition that by magnanimity
+we understand a mood not out of accord with
+the loftiest kind of prudence.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> But in the eighteenth
+century reason and prudence were words current in
+their lower and narrower sense, and thus one coming<a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>
+like Vauvenargues to see this lowness and narrowness,
+sought to invest ideas and terms that in fact only
+involved modifications of these, with a significance of
+direct antagonism. Magnanimity was contrasted
+inimically with prudence, and instinct and nature
+were made to thrust from their throne reason and
+reflection. Carried to its limit, this tendency developed
+the speculative and social excesses of the
+great sentimental school. In Vauvenargues it was
+only the moderate, just, and most seasonable protest
+of a fine observer, against the supremacy among ideals
+of a narrow, deliberative, and calculating spirit.</p>
+
+<p>His exaltation of virtuous instinct over reason is
+in a curious way parallel to Burke's memorable exaltation
+over reason of prejudice. 'Prejudice,' said
+Burke, 'previously engages the mind in a steady
+course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the
+man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical,
+puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's
+virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts;
+through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of
+his nature.'<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> What Burke designated as prejudice,
+Vauvenargues less philosophically styled virtuous instinct;
+each meant precisely the same thing, though
+the difference of phrase implied a different view of its
+origin and growth: and the side opposite to each of
+them was the same&mdash;namely, a sophisticated and
+over-refining intelligence, narrowed to the consideration
+of particular circumstances as they presented<a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Translated into the modern equivalent, the heart,
+nature, instinct of Vauvenargues all mean <i>character</i>.
+He insisted upon spontaneous impulse as a condition
+of all greatest thought and action. Men think and
+work on the highest level when they move without
+conscious and deliberate strain after virtue: when, in
+other words, their habitual motives, aims, methods,
+their character, in short, naturally draw them into
+the region of what is virtuous. '<i>It is by our ideas
+that we ennoble our passions or we debase them; they
+rise high or sink low according to the man's soul</i>.'<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> All
+this has ceased to be new to our generation, but a
+hundred and thirty years ago, and indeed much nearer
+to us than that, the key to all nobleness was thought
+to be found only by cool balancing and prudential
+calculation. A book like <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i> shows us
+this prudential and calculating temper underneath a
+varnish of sentimentalism and fine feelings, an incongruous
+and extremely displeasing combination, particularly
+characteristic of certain sets and circles in
+that century. One of the distinctions of Vauvenargues
+is that exaltation of sentiment did not with
+him cloak a substantial adherence to a low prudence,
+nor to that fragment of reason which has so constantly
+usurped the name and place of the whole. He
+eschewed the too common compromise which the
+sentimentalist makes with reflection and calculation,
+and it was this which saved him from being a sentimentalist.</p>
+
+<p>That doctrine of the predominance of the heart<a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>
+over the head, which has brought forth so many pernicious
+and destructive fantasies in the history of
+social thought, represented in his case no more than a
+reaction against the great detractors of humanity.
+Rochefoucauld had surveyed mankind exclusively
+from the point of their vain and egoistic propensities,
+and his aphorisms are profoundly true of all persons
+in whom these propensities are habitually supreme,
+and of all the world in so far as these propensities
+happen to influence them. Pascal, on the one hand,
+leaving the affections and inclinations of a man very
+much on one side, had directed all his efforts to showing
+the pitiful feebleness and incurable helplessness
+of man in the sphere of the understanding. Vauvenargues
+is thus confronted by two sinister pictures of
+humanity&mdash;the one of its moral meanness and littleness,
+the other of its intellectual poverty and impotency.
+He turned away from both of them, and found
+in magnanimous and unsophisticated feeling, of which
+he was conscious in himself and observant in others,
+a compensation alike for the selfishness of some men
+and the intellectual limitations of all men. This
+compensation was ample enough to restore the human
+self-respect that Pascal and Rochefoucauld had done
+their best to weaken.</p>
+
+<p>The truth in that disparagement was indisputable
+so far as it went. It was not a kind of truth, however,
+on which it is good for the world much to dwell,<a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>
+and it is the thinkers like Vauvenargues who build
+up and inspire high resolve. 'Scarcely any maxim,'
+runs one of his own, 'is true in all respects.'<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> We
+must take them in pairs to find out the mean truth;
+and to understand the ways of men, so far as words
+about men can help us, we must read with appreciation
+not only Vauvenargues, who said that great thoughts
+come from the heart, but La Rochefoucauld, who
+called the intelligence the dupe of the heart, and
+Pascal, who saw only desperate creatures, miserably
+perishing before one another's eyes in the grim dungeon
+of the universe. Yet it is the observer in the spirit
+of Vauvenargues, of whom we must always say that
+he has chosen the better part. Vauvenargues' own
+estimate was sound. 'The Duke of La Rochefoucauld
+seized to perfection the weak side of human nature;
+maybe he knew its strength too; and only contested
+the merit of so many splendid actions in order to
+unmask false wisdom. Whatever his design, the
+effect seems to me mischievous; his book, filled with
+delicate invective against hypocrisy, even to this day
+turns men away from virtue, by persuading them that
+it is never genuine.'<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> Or, as he put it elsewhere,
+without express personal reference: 'You must arouse
+in men the feeling of their prudence and strength, if
+you would raise their character; those who only apply
+themselves to bring out the absurdities and weaknesses
+of mankind, enlighten the judgment of the public far
+less than they deprave its inclination.'<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> This principle<a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>
+was implied in Goethe's excellent saying, that if
+you would improve a man, it is best to begin by persuading
+him that he is already that which you would
+have him to be.</p>
+
+<p>To talk in this way was to bring men out from
+the pits which cynicism on the one side, and asceticism
+on the other, had dug so deep for them, back to the
+warm precincts of the cheerful day. The cynic and
+the ascetic had each looked at life through a microscope,
+exaggerating blemishes, distorting proportions,
+filling the eye with ugly and disgusting illusions.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a>
+Humanity, as was said, was in disgrace with the
+thinkers. The maxims of Vauvenargues were a plea
+for a return to a healthy and normal sense of relations.
+'These philosophers,' he cried, 'are men, yet
+they do not speak in human language; they change
+all the ideas of things, and misuse all their terms.'<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a>
+These are some of the most direct of his retorts upon
+Pascal and La Rochefoucauld:</p>
+
+<p>'I have always felt it to be absurd for philosophers
+to fabricate a Virtue that is incompatible with the
+nature of humanity, and then after having pretended
+this, to declare coldly that there is no virtue. If they<a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>
+are speaking of the phantom of their imagination,
+they may of course abandon or destroy it as they
+please, for they invented it; but true virtue&mdash;which
+they cannot be brought to call by this name, because
+it is not in conformity with their definitions; which
+is the work of nature and not their own; and which
+consists mainly in goodness and vigour of soul&mdash;that
+does not depend on their fancies, and will last
+for ever with characters that cannot possibly be
+effaced.'</p>
+
+<p>'The body has its graces, the intellect its talents;
+is the heart then to have nothing but vices? And
+must man, who is capable of reason, be incapable of
+virtue?'</p>
+
+<p>'We are susceptible of friendship, justice, humanity,
+compassion, and reason. O my friends, what then is
+virtue?'</p>
+
+<p>'Disgust is no mark of health, nor is appetite a
+disorder; quite the reverse. Thus we think of the
+body, but we judge the soul on other principles. We
+suppose that a strong soul is one that is exempt from
+passions, and as youth is more active and ardent than
+later age, we look on it as a time of fever, and place
+the strength of man in his decay.'<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The theological speculator insists that virtue lies
+in a constant and fierce struggle between the will
+and the passions, between man and human nature.</p>
+
+<p>Vauvenargues founded his whole theory of life on the<a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a>
+doctrine that the will is not something independent
+of passions, inclinations, and ideas, but on the contrary
+is a mere index moved and fixed by them, as
+the hand of a clock follows the operation of the
+mechanical forces within. Character is an integral
+unit. 'Whether it is reason or passion that moves
+us, it is we who determine ourselves; it would be
+madness to distinguish one's thoughts and sentiments
+from one's self.... No will in men, which does not
+owe its direction to their temperament, their reasoning,
+and their actual feelings.'<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> Virtue, then, is not
+necessarily a condition of strife between the will and
+the rest of our faculties and passions; no such strife
+is possible, for the will obeys the preponderant passion
+or idea, or group of passions and ideas; and the contest
+lies between one passion or group and another.
+Hence, in right character there is no struggle at all,
+for the virtuous inclinations naturally and easily
+direct our will and actions; virtue is then independent
+of struggle; and the circumstance of our finding
+pleasure in this or that practice, is no reason why
+both the practice and the pleasure should not be
+unimpeachably virtuous.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to see the connection between this theory
+of the dependence of the will, and the prominence
+which Vauvenargues is ever giving to the passions.
+These are the key to the movements of the will. To
+direct and shape the latter, you must educate the
+former. It was for his perception of this truth, we<a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>
+may notice in passing, that Comte awarded to Vauvenargues
+a place in the Positivist Calendar; 'for his
+direct effort, in spite of the universal desuetude into
+which it had fallen, to reorganise the culture of the
+heart according to a better knowledge of human
+nature, of which this noble thinker discerned the
+centre to be affective.'<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a></p>
+
+<p>This theory of the will, however, was not allowed
+to rest here; the activity of man was connected with
+the universal order. 'What prevents the mind from
+perceiving the motive of its actions, is only their
+infinite quickness. Our thoughts perish at the moment
+in which their effects make themselves known; when
+the action commences, the principle has vanished;
+the will appears, the feeling is gone; we cannot find
+it ourselves, and so doubt if we ever had it. But it
+would be an enormous defect to have a will without
+a principle; our actions would be all haphazard; the
+world would be nothing but caprice; all order would
+be overturned. It is not enough, then, to admit it
+to be true that it is reflection or sentiment that leads
+us: we must add further that it would be monstrous
+for this to be otherwise.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> ...</p>
+
+<p>'The will recalls or suspends our ideas; our ideas
+shape or vary the laws of the will; the laws of the will
+are thus dependent on the laws of creation; but the laws
+of creation are not foreign to ourselves, they constitute
+our being, and form our essence, and are entirely
+our own, and we can say boldly that we act by ourselves,<a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>
+when we only act by them.<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> ...</p>
+
+<p>'Let us recognise here, then, our profound subjection....
+Let us rend the melancholy veil which
+hides from our eyes the eternal chain of the world
+and the glory of the Creator.... External objects
+form ideas in the mind, these ideas form sentiments,
+these sentiments volitions, these volitions actions in
+ourselves and outside of ourselves. So noble a
+dependence in all the parts of this vast universe must
+conduct our reflections to the unity of its principle;
+this subordination makes the true greatness of the
+beings subordinated. The excellence of man is in his
+dependence; his subjection displays two marvellous
+images&mdash;the infinite power of God, and the dignity
+of our own soul.... Man independent would be an
+object of contempt; the feeling of his own imperfection
+would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling,
+when we admit his dependence, is the foundation
+of his sweetest hope; it reveals to him the nothingness
+of finite good, and leads him back to his principle,
+which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone
+can satisfy his desires in the possession of himself.'<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a></p>
+
+<p>Vauvenargues showed his genuine healthiness not
+more by a plenary rejection of the doctrine of the
+incurable vileness and frenzy of man, than by his
+freedom from the boisterous and stupid transcendental
+optimism which has too many votaries in our time.
+He would not have men told that they are miserable
+earth-gnomes, the slaves of a black destiny, but he<a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>
+still placed them a good deal lower than the angels.
+For instance: 'We are too inattentive or too much
+occupied with ourselves, to get to the bottom of one
+another's characters; <i>whoever has watched masks at a
+ball dancing together in a friendly manner, and joining
+hands without knowing who the others are, and then parting
+the moment afterwards never to meet again nor ever
+to regret, or be regretted, can form some idea of the world</i>.'<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a>
+But then, as he said elsewhere: 'We can be perfectly
+aware of our imperfection, without being humiliated
+by the sight. <i>One of the noblest qualities of our nature
+is that we are able so easily to dispense with greater perfection.</i>'<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a>
+In all this we mark the large and rational
+humaneness of the new time, a tolerant and kindly
+and elevating estimate of men.</p>
+
+<p>The faith in the natural and simple operation of
+virtue, without the aid of all sorts of valetudinarian
+restrictions, comes out on every occasion. The
+Trappist theory of the conditions of virtue found no
+quarter with him. Mirabeau for instance complained
+of the atmosphere of the Court, as fatal to the practice
+of virtue. Vauvenargues replied that the people there
+were doubtless no better than they should be, and
+that vice was dominant. 'So much the worse for
+those who have vices. But when you are fortunate
+enough to possess virtue, it is, to my thinking, a very
+noble ambition to lift up this same virtue in the
+bosom of corruption, to make it succeed, to place it
+above all, to indulge and control the passions without<a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>
+reproach, to overthrow the obstacles to them, and to
+surrender yourself to the inclinations of an upright
+and magnanimous heart, instead of combating or
+concealing them in retreat, without either satisfying
+or vanquishing them. I know nothing so weak and
+so vain as to flee before vices, or to hate them without
+measure; for people only hate them by way of reprisal
+because they are afraid of them, or else out of
+vengeance because these vices have played them some
+sorry turn; but a little loftiness of soul, some knowledge
+of the heart, a gentle and tranquil humour, will
+protect you against the risk of being either surprised,
+or keenly wounded by them.'<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a></p>
+
+<p>There is a tolerably obvious distinction between
+two principal ways of examining character. One is a
+musing, subjective method of delineation, in which
+the various shades and windings seem to reveal themselves
+with a certain spontaneity, and we follow many
+recesses and depths in the heart of another, such as
+only music stirs into consciousness in ourselves.
+Besides this rarer poetic method, there is what may
+be styled the diplomatist's method; it classifies
+characters objectively, according to the kinds of outer
+conduct in which they manifest themselves, and
+according to the best ways of approaching and dealing
+with them. The second of these describes the
+spirit in which Vauvenargues observed men. He is
+French, and not German, and belongs to the eighteenth
+century, and not to the seventeenth or the nineteenth.<a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>
+His <i>Characters</i>, very little known in this country, are
+as excellent as any work in this kind that we are
+acquainted with, or probably as excellent as such
+work can be. They are real and natural, yet while
+abstaining as rigorously as Vauvenargues everywhere
+does from grotesque and extravagant traits, they
+avoid equally the vice of presenting the mere bald
+and sterile flats of character, which he that runs may
+read. As we have said, he had the quality possessed
+by so few of those who write about men; he watched
+men, and drew from the life. In a word, he studied
+concrete examples and interrogated his own experience&mdash;the
+only sure guarantee that one writing on his
+themes has anything which it is worth our while to
+listen to. Among other consequences of this reality
+of their source is the agreeable fact that these pictures
+are free from that clever bitterness and easy sarcasm,
+by which crude and jejune observers, thinking more
+of their own wit than of what they observe, sometimes
+gain a little reputation. Even the coxcombs, self-duping
+knaves, simpletons, braggarts, and other evil
+or pitiful types whom he selects, are drawn with
+unstrained and simple conformity to reality. The
+pictures have no moral label pinned on to them. Yet
+Vauvenargues took life seriously enough, and it was
+just because he took it seriously, that he had no
+inclination to air his wit or practise a verbal humour
+upon the stuff out of which happiness and misery are
+made.</p>
+
+<p>One or two fragments will suffice. Take the Man<a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>
+of the World, for instance:</p>
+
+<p>'A man of the world is not he who knows other
+men best, who has most foresight or dexterity in
+affairs, who is most instructed by experience and
+study; he is neither a good manager, nor a man of
+science, nor a politician, nor a skilful officer, nor a
+painstaking magistrate. He is a man who is ignorant
+of nothing but who knows nothing; who, doing his
+own business ill, fancies himself very capable of doing
+that of other people; a man who has much useless
+wit, who has the art of saying flattering things which
+do not flatter, and judicious things which give no
+information; who can persuade nobody, though he
+speaks well; endowed with that sort of eloquence
+which can bring out trifles, and which annihilates
+great subjects; as penetrating in what is ridiculous
+and external in men, as he is blind to the depths of
+their minds. One who, afraid of being wearisome
+by reason, is wearisome by his extravagances; is
+jocose without gaiety, and lively without passion.'<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a></p>
+
+<p>Or the two following, the Inconstant Man, and
+Lycas or the Firm Man:</p>
+
+<p>'Such a man seems really to possess more than
+one character. A powerful imagination makes his
+soul take the shape of all the objects that affect it; he
+suddenly astonishes the world by acts of generosity
+and courage which were never expected of him; the
+image of virtue inflames, elevates, softens, masters his
+heart; he receives the impression from the loftiest,<a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>
+and he surpasses them. But when his imagination
+has grown cold, his courage droops, his generosity
+sinks; the vices opposed to these virtues take possession
+of his soul, and after having reigned awhile
+supreme, they make way for other objects.... We
+cannot say that they have a great nature, or strong, or
+weak, or light; it is a swift and imperious imagination
+which reigns with sovereign power over all their
+being, which subjugates their genius, and which
+prescribes for them in turn those fine actions and
+those faults, those heights and those littlenesses, those
+flights of enthusiasm and those fits of disgust, which
+we are wrong in charging either with hypocrisy or
+madness.'<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a></p>
+
+<p>'Lycas unites with a self-reliant, bold, and impetuous
+nature, a spirit of reflection and profundity which
+moderates the counsels of his passions, which leads
+him by inpenetrable motives, and makes him advance
+to his ends by many paths. He is one of those long-sighted
+men, who consider the succession of events
+from afar off, who always finish a design begun; who
+are capable, I do not say of dissembling either a
+misfortune or an offence, but of rising above either,
+instead of letting it depress them; deep natures,
+independent by their firmness in daring all and
+suffering all; who, whether they resist their inclinations
+out of foresight, or whether, out of pride and a
+secret consciousness of their resources, they defy what
+is called prudence, always, in good as in evil, cheat
+the acutest conjectures.'<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a></p>
+
+<p>Let us note that Vauvenargues is almost entirely<a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>
+free from that favourite trick of the aphoristic person,
+which consists in forming a series of sentences, the
+predicates being various qualifications of extravagance,
+vanity, and folly, and the subject being Women. He
+resists this besetting temptation of the modern speaker
+of apophthegms to identify woman and fool. On the
+one or two occasions in which he begins the maxim
+with the fatal words, <i>Les femmes</i>, he is as little
+profound as other people who persist in thinking of
+man and woman as two different species. 'Women,'
+for example, 'have ordinarily more vanity than
+temperament, and more temperament than virtue'&mdash;which
+is fairly true of all human beings, and in so far
+as it is true, describes men just as exactly&mdash;and no
+more so&mdash;as it describes women. In truth, Vauvenargues
+felt too seriously about conduct and character
+to go far in this direction. Now and again he is
+content with a mere smartness, as when he says:
+'There are some thoroughly excellent people who
+cannot get rid of their <i>ennui</i> except at the expense of
+society.' But such a mood is not common. He is
+usually grave, and not seldom profoundly weighty,
+delicate without being weak, and subtle without
+obscurity; as for example:</p>
+
+<p>'People teach children to fear and obey; the
+avarice, pride, or timidity of the fathers, instructs the
+children in economy, arrogance, or submission. We<a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>
+stir them up to be yet more and more copyists, which
+they are only too disposed to be, as it is; nobody
+thinks of making them original, hardy, independent.'</p>
+
+<p>'If instead of dulling the vivacity of children,
+people did their best to raise the impulsiveness and
+movement of their characters, what might we not
+expect from a fine natural temper?'</p>
+
+<p>Again: 'The moderation of the weak is mediocrity.'</p>
+
+<p>'What is arrogance in the weak is elevation in the
+strong; as the strength of a sick man is frenzy, and
+that of a whole man is vigour.'</p>
+
+<p>'To speak imprudently and to speak boldly are
+nearly always the same thing. But we may speak
+without prudence, and still speak what is right; and
+it is a mistake to fancy that a man has a shallow
+intelligence, because the boldness of his character or
+the liveliness of his temper may have drawn from
+him, in spite of himself, some dangerous truth.'</p>
+
+<p>'It is a great sign of mediocrity always to praise
+moderately.'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Vauvenargues has a saying to the effect that men
+very often, without thinking of it, form an idea of
+their face and expression from the ruling sentiment
+of which they are conscious in themselves at the time.
+He hints that this is perhaps the reason why a coxcomb
+always believes himself to be handsome.<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> And
+in a letter to Mirabeau, he describes pleasantly how
+sometimes in moments of distraction he pictures himself<a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>
+with an air of loftiness, of majesty, of penetration,
+according to the idea that is occupying his mind, and
+how if by chance he sees his face in the mirror, he is
+nearly as much amazed as if he saw a Cyclops or a
+Tartar.<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> Yet his nature, if we may trust the portrait,
+revealed itself in his face; it is one of the most
+delightful to look upon, even in the cold inarticulateness
+of an engraving, that the gallery of fair souls
+contains for us. We may read the beauty of his
+character in the soft strength of the brow, the meditative
+lines of mouth and chin, above all, the striking
+clearness, the self-collection, the feminine solicitude,
+that mingle freely and without eagerness or expectancy
+in his gaze, as though he were hearkening to some ever-flowing
+inward stream of divine melody. We think of
+that gracious touch in Bacon's picture of the father of
+Solomon's House, that 'he had an aspect as though he
+pitied men.' If we reproach France in the eighteenth
+century with its coarseness, artificiality, shallowness,
+because it produced such men as the rather brutish
+Duclos, we ought to remember that this was also the
+century of Vauvenargues, one of the most tender,
+lofty, cheerful, and delicately sober of all moralists.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Pens&eacute;es</i>, i. v. 8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> i. vi. 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> i. vii. 6.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> M. Gilbert's edition of the <i>Works and Correspondence of
+Vauvenargues</i> (2 vols. Paris: Furne, 1857), ii. 133.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>&Eacute;loge de P.H. de Seytres</i>. <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 141-150.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 233. See too p. 267.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> No. 579, i. 455.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <i>R&eacute;flexions sur Divers Sujets</i>, i. 104.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 249.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> ii. 265.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> ii. 266.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>Conseils &agrave; un Jeune Homme</i>, i. 124.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 252.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> ii. 272.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <i>M&eacute;moires de Marmontel</i>, vol. i. 189.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> The reader of Marmontel's <i>M&eacute;moires</i> will remember the
+extraordinary and grotesque circumstances under which a
+younger brother of Mirabeau, (of <i>l'ami des hommes</i>, that is)
+appealed to the memory of Vauvenargues. See vol. i. 256-260.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 225-232.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>Letter to Saint-Vincens</i>, ii. 146.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> No. 318.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> Napoleon said on some occasion, '<i>Il faut vouloir vivre et
+savoir mourir</i>.' M. Littr&eacute; prefaces the third volume of that
+heroic monument of learning and industry, his <i>Dictionary of the
+French Language</i>, by the words: 'He who wishes to employ
+his life seriously ought always to act as if he had long to live,
+and to govern himself as if he would have soon to die.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> No. 223.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> No. 300.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> No. 264.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> <i>R&eacute;flexions Critiques sur quelques Po&egrave;tes</i>, i. 237.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv</i>. i. 248.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> <i>R&eacute;flexions Critiques sur quelques Po&egrave;tes</i>, i. 238.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 243.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 275.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>Correspondance</i>. <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 131, 207.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Long-winded and tortuous and difficult to seize as Shaftesbury
+is as a whole, in detached sentences he shows marked aphoristic quality; <i>e.g.</i> 'The most ingenious way of becoming
+foolish is by a system;' 'The liker anything is to wisdom, if it be not plainly the thing itself, the more directly it becomes its opposite.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> No. 278 (i. 411).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 115.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> i. 87.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">Doch</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Zuweilen ist des Sinns in einer Sache<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Auch mehr, als wir vermuthen; und es w&auml;re<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">So unerh&ouml;rt doch nicht, dass uns der Heiland<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Auf Wegen zu sich z&ouml;ge, die der Kluge<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Von selbst nicht leicht betreten w&uuml;rde.<br /></span>
+</p>
+<p><span style="margin-left: 10em;"><i>Nathan der Weise</i>, iii. 10.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <i>Reflections on the French Revolution</i>, Works (ed. 1842), i. 414.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 170.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> No. 111.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 74.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> No. 285.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> 'A man may as well pretend to cure himself of love by
+viewing his mistress through the artificial medium of a microscope
+or prospect, and beholding there the coarseness of her
+skin and monstrous disproportion of her features, as hope to
+excite or moderate any passion by the artificial arguments of a
+Seneca or an Epictetus.'&mdash;Hume's <i>Essays</i> (xviii. <i>The Sceptic</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 163.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Nos. 296-298, 148.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> <i>Sur le Libre Arbitre</i>. <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 199.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>Politique Positive</i>, iii. 589.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> i. 194.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> <i>Politique Positive</i>, 205.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i> 206, 207.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> No. 330.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Nos. 462, 463.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> <i>Correspondance</i>. <i>&#338;uv.</i> ii. 163.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 310.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 325.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv.</i> i. 326.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> No. 236.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> <i>&#338;uv</i>. ii. 188.</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 2 OF 3) ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16937-h.htm or 16937-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/9/3/16937/
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Luis Amador and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/16937.txt b/16937.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c2ebcee
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16937.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1509 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3)
+       Essay 1: Vauvenargues
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: October 25, 2005 [EBook #16937]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 2 OF 3) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Luis Amador and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+VOL. II.
+
+Essay 1: Vauvenargues
+
+London
+
+MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
+
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+1905
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. II.                                           PAGE
+
+The influence of Pascal                                           1
+
+Vauvenargues holds the balance between him and the
+votaries of Perfectibility                                        4
+
+Birth, education, and hard life of Vauvenargues                   4
+
+Life in Paris, and friendship with Voltaire                      10
+
+His religious sentiment                                          12
+
+His delicacy, reserve, and psychagogic quality                   15
+
+Certain inability to appreciate marked originality               17
+
+Criticisms on Moliere, Racine, and Corneille                     19
+
+Comparison with English aphoristic writers and moralists         20
+
+Character the key to his theory of greatness                     25
+
+His exaltation of spontaneous feeling, a protest against
+Rochefoucauld and Pascal                                         26
+
+His plea for a normal sense of human relation, the same          28
+
+His doctrine of the Will connected with his doctrine of
+Character                                                        29
+
+Antipathy to ascetic restrictions                                33
+
+Two ways of examining character: that followed by
+Vauvenargues                                                     34
+
+Examples of his style                                            36
+
+The beauty of his nature to be read in his face                  40
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book.]
+
+
+
+
+VAUVENARGUES.
+
+
+One of the most important phases of French thought in the great century
+of its illumination is only thoroughly intelligible, on condition that
+in studying it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force, and
+genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most influential
+representative of that way of viewing human nature and its
+circumstances, which it was one of the characteristic glories of the
+eighteenth century to have rebelled against and rejected. More than a
+hundred years after the publication of the _Pensees_, Condorcet thought
+it worth while to prepare a new edition of them, with annotations,
+protesting, not without a certain unwonted deference of tone, against
+Pascal's doctrine of the base and desperate estate of man. Voltaire also
+had them reprinted with notes of his own, written in the same spirit of
+vivacious deprecation, which we may be sure would have been even more
+vivacious, if Voltaire had not remembered that he was speaking of the
+mightiest of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal and
+specific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeply
+of the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment of
+revolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century
+before, who had clothed mere theological mysteries with the force and
+importance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistent
+philosophy.
+
+The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingness
+of kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip
+of the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather filled
+the mind with exaltation than really depressed or humiliated it. From
+Bossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn splendour of the church to
+the chill of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional, in
+the first place, and it was purely theological, in the second; so the
+main stream of thought flowed away and aside from him. To Pascal it was
+felt necessary that there should be reply and vindication, whether in
+the shape of deliberate and published formulas, or in the reasoned
+convictions of the individual intelligence working privately. A syllabus
+of the radical articles of the French creed of the eighteenth century
+would consist largely of the contradictions of the main propositions of
+Pascal. The old theological idea of the fall was hard to endure, but the
+idea of the fall was clenched by such general laws of human nature as
+this,--that 'men are so necessarily mad, that it would be to be mad by a
+new form of madness not to be mad;'--that man is nothing but
+masquerading, lying, and hypocrisy, both in what concerns himself and in
+respect of others, wishing not to have the truth told to himself, and
+shrinking from telling it to anybody else;[1] that the will, the
+imagination, the disorders of the body, the thousand concealed
+infirmities of the intelligence, conspire to reduce our discovery of
+justice and truth to a process of haphazard, in which we more often miss
+the mark than hit.[2] Pleasure, ambition, industry, are only means of
+distracting men from the otherwise unavoidable contemplation of their
+own misery. How speak of the dignity of the race and its history, when
+we know that a grain of sand in Cromwell's bladder altered the destinies
+of a kingdom, and that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole
+surface of the earth would be different? Imagine, in a word, 'a number
+of men in chains, and all condemned to death; some of them each day
+butchered in the sight of the others, while those who remain watch their
+own condition in that of their fellows, and eyeing one another in
+anguish and hopelessness, wait their turn; such is the situation of
+man.'[3]
+
+It was hardly possible to push the tragical side of the verities of life
+beyond this, and there was soon an instinctive reaction towards
+realities. The sensations with their conditions of pleasure no less than
+of pain; the intelligence with its energetic aptitudes for the discovery
+of protective and fruitful knowledge; the affections with their large
+capacities for giving and receiving delight; the spontaneous inner
+impulse towards action and endurance in the face of outward
+circumstances--all these things reassured men, and restored in theory to
+them with ample interest what in practice they had never lost--a
+rational faith and exultation in their own faculties, both of finding
+out truth and of feeling a very substantial degree of happiness. On
+this side too, as on the other, speculation went to its extreme limit.
+The hapless and despairing wretches of Pascal were transformed by the
+votaries of perfectibility into bright beings not any lower than the
+angels. Between the two extremes there was one fine moralist who knew
+how to hold a just balance, perceiving that language is the expression
+of relations and proportions, that when we speak of virtue and genius we
+mean qualities that compared with those of mediocre souls deserve these
+high names, that greatness and happiness are comparative terms, and that
+there is nothing to be said of the estate of man except relatively. This
+moralist was Vauvenargues.
+
+Vauvenargues was born of a good Provencal stock at Aix, in the year
+1715. He had scarcely any of that kind of education which is usually
+performed in school-classes, and he was never able to read either Latin
+or Greek. Such slight knowledge as he ever got of the famous writers
+among the ancients was in translations. Of English literature, though
+its influence and that of our institutions were then becoming paramount
+in France, and though he had a particular esteem for the English
+character, he knew only the writings of Locke and Pope, and the Paradise
+Lost.[4] Vauvenargues must be added to the list of thinkers and writers
+whose personal history shows, what men of letters sometimes appear to be
+in a conspiracy to make us forget, that for sober, healthy, and robust
+judgment on human nature and life, active and sympathetic contact with
+men in the transaction of the many affairs of their daily life is a
+better preparation than any amount of wholly meditative seclusion. He is
+also one of the many who show that a weakly constitution of body is not
+incompatible with fine and energetic qualities of mind, even if it be
+not actually friendly to them. Nor was feeble health any
+disqualification for the profession of arms. As Arms and the Church were
+the only alternatives for persons of noble birth, Vauvenargues, choosing
+the former, became a subaltern in the King's Own Regiment at the age of
+twenty (1735). Here in time he saw active service; for in 1740 the death
+of Charles VI. threw all Europe into confusion, and the French
+Government, falling in with the prodigious designs of the Marshal
+Belle-Isle and his brother, took sides against Maria Theresa, and
+supported the claims of the unhappy Elector of Bavaria who afterwards
+became the Emperor Charles VII. The disasters which fell upon France in
+consequence are well known. The forces despatched to Bavaria and
+Bohemia, after the brief triumph of the capture of Prague, were
+gradually overwhelmed without a single great battle, and it was
+considered a signal piece of good fortune when in the winter of 1742-43
+Belle-Isle succeeded, with a loss of half his force, in leading by a
+long circuit, in the view of the enemy, and amid the horrors of famine
+and intense frost, some thirteen thousand men away from Prague. The
+King's Regiment took part in the Bohemian campaign, and in this
+frightful march which closed it; Vauvenargues with the rest.
+
+To physical sufferings during two winters was added the distress of
+losing a comrade to whom he was deeply attached; he perished in the
+spring of '42 under the hardships of the war. The _Eloge_ in which
+Vauvenargues commemorates the virtues and the pitiful fate of his
+friend, is too deeply marked with the florid and declamatory style of
+youth to be pleasing to a more ripened taste.[5] He complained that
+nobody who had read it observed that it was touching, not remembering
+that even the most tender feeling fails to touch us, when it has found
+stilted and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection were
+prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been
+passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have
+become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a
+certain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never the
+faintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of those
+other vices which betray in men that excessive consciousness of their
+own personality, which lies at the root of most of the obstacles in the
+way of an even and humane life. His nature had such depth and quality
+that the perpetual untowardness of circumstances left no evil print upon
+him; hardship made him not sour, but patient and wise, and there is no
+surer sign of noble temper.
+
+The sufferings and bereavements of war were not his only trials.
+Vauvenargues was beset throughout the whole of his short life with the
+sordid and humiliating embarrassments of narrow means. His letters to
+Saint-Vincens, the most intimate of his friends, disclose the straits to
+which he was driven. The nature of these straits is an old story all
+over the world, and Vauvenargues did the same things that young men in
+want of money have generally done. It cannot be said, I fear, that he
+passed along those miry ways without some defilement. He bethinks him on
+one occasion that a rich neighbour has daughters. 'Why should I not
+undertake to marry one of them within two years, with a reasonable
+dowry, if he would lend me the money I want and provided I should not
+have repaid it by the time fixed?'[6] We must make allowance for the
+youth of the writer, and for a different view of marriage and its
+significance from our own. Even then there remains something to regret.
+Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues, in a maxim smacking unwontedly of
+commonplace, cannot debase strong souls, any more than riches can
+elevate low souls.[7] That depends. If poverty means pinching and
+fretting need of money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense,
+but it is extremely likely to wear away a very priceless kind of
+delicacy in a man's estimate of human relations and their import.
+
+Vauvenargues has told us what he found the life of the camp. Luxurious
+and indolent living, neglected duties, discontented sighing after the
+delights of Paris, the exaltation of rank and mediocrity, an insolent
+contempt for merit; these were the characteristics of the men in high
+military place. The lower officers meantime were overwhelmed by an
+expenditure that the luxury of their superiors introduced and
+encouraged; and they were speedily driven to retire by the disorder of
+their affairs, or by the impossibility of promotion, because men of
+spirit could not long endure the sight of flagrant injustice, and
+because those who labour for fame cannot tie themselves to a condition
+where there is nothing to be gathered but shame and humiliation.[8]
+
+To these considerations of an extravagant expenditure and the absence of
+every chance of promotion, there was added in the case of Vauvenargues
+the still more powerful drawback of irretrievably broken health. The
+winter-march from Prague to Egra had sown fatal seed. His legs had been
+frost-bitten, and before they could be cured he was stricken by
+small-pox, which left him disfigured and almost blind. So after a
+service of nine years, he quitted military life (1744). He vainly
+solicited employment as a diplomatist. The career was not yet open to
+the talents, and in the memorial which Vauvenargues drew up he dwelt
+less on his conduct than on his birth, being careful to show that he had
+an authentic ancestor who was Governor of Hyeres in the early part of
+the fourteenth century.[9] But the only road to employment lay through
+the Court. The claims even of birth counted for nothing, unless they
+were backed by favour among the ignoble creatures who haunted
+Versailles. For success it was essential to be not only high-born, but a
+parasite as well. 'Permit me to assure you, sir,' Vauvenargues wrote
+courageously to Amelot, then the minister, 'that it is this moral
+impossibility for a gentleman, with only zeal to commend him, of ever
+reaching the King his master, which causes the discouragement that is
+observed among the nobility of the provinces, and which extinguishes all
+ambition.'[10] Amelot, to oblige Voltaire, eager as usual in good
+offices for his friend, answered the letters which Vauvenargues wrote,
+and promised to lay his name before the King as soon as a favourable
+opportunity should present itself.[11]
+
+Vauvenargues was probably enough of a man of the world to take fair
+words of this sort at their value, and he had enough of qualities that
+do not belong to the man of the world to enable him to confront the
+disappointment with cheerful fortitude 'Misfortune itself,' he had once
+written, 'has its charms in great extremities; for this opposition of
+fortune raises a courageous mind, and makes it collect all the forces
+that before were unemployed: it is in indolence and littleness that
+virtue suffers, when a timid prudence prevents it from rising in flight
+and forces it to creep along in bonds.'[12] He was true to the counsel
+which he had thus given years before, and with the consciousness that
+death was rapidly approaching, and that all hope of advancement in the
+ordinary way was at an end, even if there were any chance of his life,
+he persevered in his project of going to Paris, there to earn the fame
+which he instinctively felt that he had it in him to achieve. Neither
+scantiness of means nor the vehement protests of friends and
+relations--always the worst foes to superior character on critical
+occasions--could detain him in the obscurity of Provence. In 1745 he
+took up his quarters in Paris in a humble house near the School of
+Medicine. Literature had not yet acquired that importance in France
+which it was so soon to obtain. The Encyclopaedia was still unconceived,
+and the momentous work which that famous design was to accomplish, of
+organising the philosophers and men of letters into an army with
+banners, was still unexecuted. Voltaire, indeed, had risen, if not to
+the full height of his reputation, yet high enough both to command the
+admiration of people of quality, and to be the recognised chief of the
+new school of literature and thought. Voltaire had been struck by a
+letter in which Vauvenargues, then unknown to him, had sent a criticism
+comparing Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Coming from a young
+officer, the member of a profession which Voltaire frankly described as
+'very noble, in truth, but slightly barbarous,' this criticism was
+peculiarly striking. A great many years afterwards Voltaire was
+surprised in the same way, to find that an officer could write such a
+book as the _Felicite Publique_ of the Marquis de Chastellux. To
+Vauvenargues he replied with many compliments, and pointed out with a
+good deal of pains the injustice which the young critic had done to the
+great author of _Cinna_. '_It is the part of a man like you,_' he said
+admirably, '_to have preferences, but no exclusions._'[13] The
+correspondence thus begun was kept up with ever-growing warmth and
+mutual respect. 'If you had been born a few years earlier,' Voltaire
+wrote to him, 'my works would be worth all the more for it; but at any
+rate, even at the close of my career, you confirm me in the path that
+you pursue.'[14]
+
+The personal impression was as fascinating as that which had been
+conveyed by Vauvenargues' letters. Voltaire took every opportunity of
+visiting his unfortunate friend, then each day drawing nearer to the
+grave. Men of humbler stature were equally attracted. 'It was at this
+time,' says the light-hearted Marmontel, 'that I first saw at home the
+man who had a charm for me beyond all the rest of the world, the good,
+the virtuous, the wise Vauvenargues. Cruelly used by nature in his body,
+he was in soul one of her rarest masterpieces. I seemed to see in him
+Fenelon weak and suffering. I could make a good book of his
+conversations, if I had had a chance of collecting them. You see some
+traces of it in the selection that he has left of his thoughts and
+meditations. But all eloquent and full of feeling as he is in his
+writings, he was even more so still in his conversation.'[15] Marmontel
+felt sincere grief when Vauvenargues died, and in the _Epistle to
+Voltaire_ expressed his sorrow in some fair lines. They contain the
+happy phrase applied to Vauvenargues, '_ce coeur stoique et
+tendre_.'[16]
+
+In religious sentiment Vauvenargues was out of the groove of his time.
+That is to say, he was not unsusceptible of religion. Accepting no
+dogma, so far as we can judge, and complying with no observances, very
+faint and doubtful as to even the fundamentals--God, immortality, and
+the like--he never partook of the furious and bitter antipathy of the
+best men of that century against the church, its creeds, and its book.
+At one time, as will be seen from a passage which will be quoted by and
+by, his leanings were towards that vague and indefinable doctrine which
+identifies God with all the forces and their manifestations in the
+universe. Afterwards even this adumbration of a theistic explanation of
+the world seems to have passed from him, and he lived, as many other not
+bad men have lived, with that fair working substitute for a religious
+doctrine which is provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance in
+a devotional spirit, of all larger mortal experiences and higher human
+impressions. There is a _Meditation on the Faith_, including a _Prayer_,
+among his writings; and there can be little doubt, in spite of
+Condorcet's incredible account of the circumstances of its composition,
+that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling.[17]
+It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one who
+ardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who
+already possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but he
+could not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the period. The
+one fact delivered him from dogma and superstition, and the other from
+scoffing and harsh unspirituality. He saw that apart from the question
+of the truth or falsehood of its historic basis, there was a balance to
+be struck between the consolations and the afflictions of the faith.[18]
+Practically he was content to leave this balance unstruck, and to pass
+by on the other side. Scarcely any of his maxims concern religion. One
+of these few is worth quoting, where he says: 'The strength or weakness
+of our belief depends more on our courage than our light; not all those
+who mock at auguries have more intellect than those who believe in
+them.'[19]
+
+The end came in the spring of 1747, when Vauvenargues was no more than
+thirty-two. Perhaps, in spite of his physical miseries, these two years
+in Paris were the least unhappy time in his life. He was in the great
+centre where the fame which he longed for was earned and liberally
+awarded. A year of intercourse with so full and alert and brilliant a
+mind as Voltaire's, must have been more to one so appreciative of mental
+greatness as Vauvenargues, than many years of intercourse with
+subalterns in the Regiment of the King. With death, now known to be very
+near at hand, he had made his account before. 'To execute great things,'
+he had written in a maxim which gained the lively praise of Voltaire, 'a
+man must live as though he had never to die.'[20] This mood was common
+among the Greeks and Romans; but the religion which Europe accepted in
+the time of its deepest corruption and depravation, retained the mark of
+its dismal origin nowhere so strongly as in the distorted prominence
+which it gave in the minds of its votaries to the dissolution of the
+body. It was one of the first conditions of the Revival of Reason that
+the dreary _memento mori_ and its hateful emblems should be deliberately
+effaced. 'The thought of death,' said Vauvenargues, 'leads us astray,
+because it makes us forget to live.' He did not understand living in the
+sense which the dissolute attach to it. The libertinism of his regiment
+called no severe rebuke from him, but his meditative temper drew him
+away from it even in his youth. It is not impossible that if his days
+had not been cut short, he might have impressed Parisian society with
+ideas and a sentiment, that would have left to it all its cheerfulness,
+and yet prevented that laxity which so fatally weakened it. Turgot, the
+only other conspicuous man who could have withstood the license of the
+time, had probably too much of that austerity which is in the fibre of
+so many great characters, to make any moral counsels that he might have
+given widely effective.
+
+Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint of the pedagogue or
+the preacher to have dispelled the sophisms of licence, less by argument
+than by the gracious attraction of virtue in his own character. The
+stock moralist, like the commonplace orator of the pulpit, fails to
+touch the hearts of men or to affect their lives, for lack of delicacy,
+of sympathy, and of freshness; he attempts to compensate for this by
+excess of emphasis, and that more often disgusts us than persuades.
+Vauvenargues, on the other hand, is remarkable for delicacy and
+half-reserved tenderness. Everything that he has said is coloured and
+warmed with feeling for the infirmities of men. He writes not merely as
+an analytical outsider. Hence, unlike most moralists, he is no satirist.
+He had borne the burdens. 'The looker-on,' runs one of his maxims,
+'softly lying in a carpeted chamber, inveighs against the soldier, who
+passes winter nights on the river's edge, and keeps watch in silence
+over the safety of the land.'[21] Vauvenargues had been something very
+different from the safe and sheltered critic of other men's battles,
+and this is the secret of the hold which his words have upon us. They
+are real, with the reality that can only come from two sources; from
+high poetic imagination, which Vauvenargues did not possess, or else
+from experience of life acting on and strengthening a generous nature.
+'The cause of most books of morality being so insipid,' he says, 'is
+that their authors are not sincere; is that, being feeble echoes of one
+another, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims and
+private sentiments.'[22] One of the secrets of his own freedom from this
+ordinary insipidity of moralists was his freedom also from their
+pretentiousness and insincerity.
+
+Besides these positive merits, he had, as we have said, the negative
+distinction of never being emphatic. His sayings are nearly always
+moderate and persuasive, alike in sentiment and in phrase. Sometimes
+they are almost tentative in the diffidence of their turn. Compared with
+him La Rochefoucauld's manner is hard, and that of La Bruyere
+sententious. In the moralist who aspires to move and win men by their
+best side instead of their worst, the absence of this hardness and the
+presence of a certain lambency and play even in the exposition of truths
+of perfect assurance, are essential conditions of psychagogic quality.
+In religion such law does not hold, and the contagion of fanaticism is
+usually most rapidly spread by a rigorous and cheerless example.
+
+We may notice in passing that Vauvenargues has the defects of his
+qualities, and that with his aversion to emphasis was bound up a certain
+inability to appreciate even grandeur and originality, if they were too
+strongly and boldly marked. 'It is easy to criticise an author,' he has
+said, 'but hard to estimate him.'[23] This was never more unfortunately
+proved than in the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the great
+Moliere. There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a writer who can say
+that 'La Bruyere, animated with nearly the same genius, painted the
+crookedness of men with as much truth and as much force as Moliere; but
+I believe that there is more eloquence and more elevation to be found in
+La Bruyere's images.'[24] Without at all undervaluing La Bruyere, one of
+the acutest and finest of writers, we may say that this is a truly
+disastrous piece of criticism. Quite as unhappy is the preference given
+to Racine over Moliere, not merely for the conclusion arrived at, but
+for the reasons on which it is founded. Moliere's subjects, we read, are
+low, his language negligent and incorrect, his characters bizarre and
+eccentric. Racine, on the other hand, takes sublime themes, presents us
+with noble types, and writes with simplicity and elegance. It is not
+enough to concede to Racine the glory of art, while giving to Moliere or
+Corneille the glory of genius. 'When people speak of the art of
+Racine--the art which puts things in their place; which characterises
+men, their passions, manners, genius; which banishes obscurities,
+superfluities, false brilliancies; which paints nature with fire,
+sublimity, and grace--what can we think of such art as this, except that
+it is the genius of extraordinary men, and the origin of those rules
+that writers without genius embrace with so much zeal and so little
+success?'[25] And it is certainly true that the art of Racine implied
+genius. The defect of the criticism lies, as usual, in a failure to see
+that there is glory enough in both; in the art of highly-finished
+composition and presentation, and in the art of bold and striking
+creation. Yet Vauvenargues was able to discern the secret of the
+popularity of Moliere, and the foundation of the common opinion that no
+other dramatist had carried his own kind of art so far as Moliere had
+carried his; 'the reason is, I fancy, that he is more natural than any
+of the others, and this is an important lesson for everybody who wishes
+to write.'[26] He did not see how nearly everything went in this
+concession, that Moliere was, above all, natural. With equal truth of
+perception he condemned the affectation of grandeur lent by the French
+tragedians to classical personages who were in truth simple and natural,
+as the principal defect of the national drama, and the common rock on
+which their poets made shipwreck.[27] Let us, however, rejoice for the
+sake of the critical reputation of Vauvenargues that he was unable to
+read Shakespeare. One for whom Moliere is too eccentric, grotesque,
+inelegant, was not likely to do much justice to the mightiest but most
+irregular of all dramatists.
+
+A man's prepossessions in dramatic poetry, supposing him to be
+cultivated enough to have any prepossessions, furnish the most certain
+clue that we can get to the spirit in which he inwardly regards
+character and conduct. The uniform and reasoned preference which
+Vauvenargues had for Racine over Moliere and Corneille, was only the
+transfer to art of that balanced, moderate, normal, and emphatically
+harmonious temper, which he brought to the survey of human nature.
+Excess was a condition of thought, feeling, and speech, that in every
+form was disagreeable to him; alike in the gloom of Pascal's reveries,
+and in the inflation of speech of some of the heroes of Corneille. He
+failed to relish even Montaigne as he ought to have done, because
+Montaigne's method was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, his
+egoism too manifest, and because he did not produce complete and
+artistic wholes.[28]
+
+Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues' thinking; balance,
+evenness, purity of vision, penetration finely toned with indulgence. He
+is never betrayed into criticism of men from the point of view of
+immutable first principles. Perhaps this was what the elder Mirabeau
+meant when he wrote to Vauvenargues, who was his cousin: 'You have the
+English genius to perfection,' and what Vauvenargues meant when he wrote
+of himself to Mirabeau: 'Nobody in the world has a mind less French than
+I.'[29] These international comparisons are among the least fruitful of
+literary amusements, even when they happen not to be extremely
+misleading; as when, for example, Voltaire called Locke the English
+Pascal, a description which can only be true on condition that the
+qualifying adjective is meant to strip either Locke or Pascal of most of
+his characteristic traits. And if we compare Vauvenargues with any of
+our English aphoristic writers, there is not resemblance enough to make
+the contrast instructive. The obvious truth is that in this department
+our literature is particularly weak, while French literature is
+particularly strong in it. With the exception of Bacon, we have no
+writer of apophthegms of the first order; and the difference between
+Bacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues, is the difference
+between Polonius's famous discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy of
+Hamlet.
+
+Bacon's precepts refer rather to external conduct and worldly fortune
+than to the inner composition of character, or to the 'wide, gray,
+lampless' depths of human destiny. We find the same national
+characteristic, though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin's
+oracular saws. Among the French sages a psychological element is
+predominant, as well as an occasional transcendent loftiness of feeling,
+not to be found in Bacon's wisest maxims, and from his point of view in
+their composition we could not expect to find them there. We seek in
+vain amid the positivity of Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox of
+Browne, or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any of that poetic
+pensiveness which is strong in Vauvenargues, and reaches tragic heights
+in Pascal.[30] Addison may have the delicacy of Vauvenargues, but it is
+a delicacy that wants the stir and warmth of feeling. It seems as if
+with English writers poetic sentiment naturally sought expression in
+poetic forms, while the Frenchmen of nearly corresponding temperament
+were restrained within the limits of prose by reason of the vigorously
+prescribed stateliness and stiffness of their verse at that time. A man
+in this country with the quality of Vauvenargues, with his delicacy,
+tenderness, elevation, would have composed lyrics. We have undoubtedly
+lost much by the laxity and irregularity of our verse, but as
+undoubtedly we owe to its freedom some of the most perfect and
+delightful of the minor figures that adorn the noble gallery of English
+poets.
+
+It would be an error to explain the superiority of the great French
+moralists by supposing in them a fancy and imagination too defective for
+poetic art. It was the circumstances of the national literature during
+the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which made Vauvenargues for
+instance a composer of aphorisms, rather than a moral poet like Pope.
+Let us remember some of his own most discriminating words. 'Who has more
+imagination,' he asks, 'than Bossuet, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, all
+of them great philosophers? Who more judgment and wisdom than Racine,
+Boileau, La Fontaine, Moliere, all of them poets full of genius? _It is
+not true, then, that the ruling qualities exclude the others; on the
+contrary, they suppose them._ I should be much surprised if a great poet
+were without vivid lights on philosophy, at any rate moral philosophy,
+and it will very seldom happen for a true philosopher to be totally
+devoid of imagination.'[31] With imagination in the highest sense
+Vauvenargues was not largely endowed, but he had as much as is essential
+to reveal to one that the hard and sober-judging faculty is not the
+single, nor even the main element, in a wise and full intelligence. 'All
+my philosophy,' he wrote to Mirabeau, when only four or five and twenty
+years old, an age when the intellect is usually most exigent of
+supremacy, 'all my philosophy has its source in my heart.'[32]
+
+In the same spirit he had well said that there is more cleverness in the
+world than greatness of soul, more people with talent than with lofty
+character.[33] Hence some of the most peculiarly characteristic and
+impressive of his aphorisms; that famous one, for instance, '_Great
+thoughts come from the heart,_' and the rest which hang upon the same
+idea. 'Virtuous instinct has no need of reason, but supplies it.'
+'Reason misleads us more often than nature.' 'Reason does not know the
+interests of the heart.' 'Perhaps we owe to the passions the greatest
+advantages of the intellect.' Such sayings are only true on condition
+that instinct and nature and passion have been already moulded under the
+influence of reason; just as this other saying, which won the warm
+admiration of Voltaire, '_Magnanimity owes no account of its motives to
+prudence_,' is only true on condition that by magnanimity we understand
+a mood not out of accord with the loftiest kind of prudence.[34] But in
+the eighteenth century reason and prudence were words current in their
+lower and narrower sense, and thus one coming like Vauvenargues to see
+this lowness and narrowness, sought to invest ideas and terms that in
+fact only involved modifications of these, with a significance of direct
+antagonism. Magnanimity was contrasted inimically with prudence, and
+instinct and nature were made to thrust from their throne reason and
+reflection. Carried to its limit, this tendency developed the
+speculative and social excesses of the great sentimental school. In
+Vauvenargues it was only the moderate, just, and most seasonable protest
+of a fine observer, against the supremacy among ideals of a narrow,
+deliberative, and calculating spirit.
+
+His exaltation of virtuous instinct over reason is in a curious way
+parallel to Burke's memorable exaltation over reason of prejudice.
+'Prejudice,' said Burke, 'previously engages the mind in a steady course
+of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the
+moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice
+renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts;
+through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature.'[35] What
+Burke designated as prejudice, Vauvenargues less philosophically styled
+virtuous instinct; each meant precisely the same thing, though the
+difference of phrase implied a different view of its origin and growth:
+and the side opposite to each of them was the same--namely, a
+sophisticated and over-refining intelligence, narrowed to the
+consideration of particular circumstances as they presented themselves.
+
+Translated into the modern equivalent, the heart, nature, instinct of
+Vauvenargues all mean _character_. He insisted upon spontaneous impulse
+as a condition of all greatest thought and action. Men think and work on
+the highest level when they move without conscious and deliberate strain
+after virtue: when, in other words, their habitual motives, aims,
+methods, their character, in short, naturally draw them into the region
+of what is virtuous. '_It is by our ideas that we ennoble our passions
+or we debase them; they rise high or sink low according to the man's
+soul_.'[36] All this has ceased to be new to our generation, but a
+hundred and thirty years ago, and indeed much nearer to us than that,
+the key to all nobleness was thought to be found only by cool balancing
+and prudential calculation. A book like _Clarissa Harlowe_ shows us this
+prudential and calculating temper underneath a varnish of
+sentimentalism and fine feelings, an incongruous and extremely
+displeasing combination, particularly characteristic of certain sets and
+circles in that century. One of the distinctions of Vauvenargues is that
+exaltation of sentiment did not with him cloak a substantial adherence
+to a low prudence, nor to that fragment of reason which has so
+constantly usurped the name and place of the whole. He eschewed the too
+common compromise which the sentimentalist makes with reflection and
+calculation, and it was this which saved him from being a
+sentimentalist.
+
+That doctrine of the predominance of the heart over the head, which has
+brought forth so many pernicious and destructive fantasies in the
+history of social thought, represented in his case no more than a
+reaction against the great detractors of humanity. Rochefoucauld had
+surveyed mankind exclusively from the point of their vain and egoistic
+propensities, and his aphorisms are profoundly true of all persons in
+whom these propensities are habitually supreme, and of all the world in
+so far as these propensities happen to influence them. Pascal, on the
+one hand, leaving the affections and inclinations of a man very much on
+one side, had directed all his efforts to showing the pitiful feebleness
+and incurable helplessness of man in the sphere of the understanding.
+Vauvenargues is thus confronted by two sinister pictures of
+humanity--the one of its moral meanness and littleness, the other of its
+intellectual poverty and impotency. He turned away from both of them,
+and found in magnanimous and unsophisticated feeling, of which he was
+conscious in himself and observant in others, a compensation alike for
+the selfishness of some men and the intellectual limitations of all men.
+This compensation was ample enough to restore the human self-respect
+that Pascal and Rochefoucauld had done their best to weaken.
+
+The truth in that disparagement was indisputable so far as it went. It
+was not a kind of truth, however, on which it is good for the world much
+to dwell, and it is the thinkers like Vauvenargues who build up and
+inspire high resolve. 'Scarcely any maxim,' runs one of his own, 'is
+true in all respects.'[37] We must take them in pairs to find out the
+mean truth; and to understand the ways of men, so far as words about men
+can help us, we must read with appreciation not only Vauvenargues, who
+said that great thoughts come from the heart, but La Rochefoucauld, who
+called the intelligence the dupe of the heart, and Pascal, who saw only
+desperate creatures, miserably perishing before one another's eyes in
+the grim dungeon of the universe. Yet it is the observer in the spirit
+of Vauvenargues, of whom we must always say that he has chosen the
+better part. Vauvenargues' own estimate was sound. 'The Duke of La
+Rochefoucauld seized to perfection the weak side of human nature; maybe
+he knew its strength too; and only contested the merit of so many
+splendid actions in order to unmask false wisdom. Whatever his design,
+the effect seems to me mischievous; his book, filled with delicate
+invective against hypocrisy, even to this day turns men away from
+virtue, by persuading them that it is never genuine.'[38] Or, as he put
+it elsewhere, without express personal reference: 'You must arouse in
+men the feeling of their prudence and strength, if you would raise their
+character; those who only apply themselves to bring out the absurdities
+and weaknesses of mankind, enlighten the judgment of the public far less
+than they deprave its inclination.'[39] This principle was implied in
+Goethe's excellent saying, that if you would improve a man, it is best
+to begin by persuading him that he is already that which you would have
+him to be.
+
+To talk in this way was to bring men out from the pits which cynicism on
+the one side, and asceticism on the other, had dug so deep for them,
+back to the warm precincts of the cheerful day. The cynic and the
+ascetic had each looked at life through a microscope, exaggerating
+blemishes, distorting proportions, filling the eye with ugly and
+disgusting illusions.[40] Humanity, as was said, was in disgrace with
+the thinkers. The maxims of Vauvenargues were a plea for a return to a
+healthy and normal sense of relations. 'These philosophers,' he cried,
+'are men, yet they do not speak in human language; they change all the
+ideas of things, and misuse all their terms.'[41] These are some of the
+most direct of his retorts upon Pascal and La Rochefoucauld:
+
+'I have always felt it to be absurd for philosophers to fabricate a
+Virtue that is incompatible with the nature of humanity, and then after
+having pretended this, to declare coldly that there is no virtue. If
+they are speaking of the phantom of their imagination, they may of
+course abandon or destroy it as they please, for they invented it; but
+true virtue--which they cannot be brought to call by this name, because
+it is not in conformity with their definitions; which is the work of
+nature and not their own; and which consists mainly in goodness and
+vigour of soul--that does not depend on their fancies, and will last
+for ever with characters that cannot possibly be effaced.'
+
+'The body has its graces, the intellect its talents; is the heart then
+to have nothing but vices? And must man, who is capable of reason, be
+incapable of virtue?'
+
+'We are susceptible of friendship, justice, humanity, compassion, and
+reason. O my friends, what then is virtue?'
+
+'Disgust is no mark of health, nor is appetite a disorder; quite the
+reverse. Thus we think of the body, but we judge the soul on other
+principles. We suppose that a strong soul is one that is exempt from
+passions, and as youth is more active and ardent than later age, we look
+on it as a time of fever, and place the strength of man in his
+decay.'[42]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The theological speculator insists that virtue lies in a constant and
+fierce struggle between the will and the passions, between man and human
+nature.
+
+Vauvenargues founded his whole theory of life on the doctrine that the
+will is not something independent of passions, inclinations, and ideas,
+but on the contrary is a mere index moved and fixed by them, as the hand
+of a clock follows the operation of the mechanical forces within.
+Character is an integral unit. 'Whether it is reason or passion that
+moves us, it is we who determine ourselves; it would be madness to
+distinguish one's thoughts and sentiments from one's self.... No will in
+men, which does not owe its direction to their temperament, their
+reasoning, and their actual feelings.'[43] Virtue, then, is not
+necessarily a condition of strife between the will and the rest of our
+faculties and passions; no such strife is possible, for the will obeys
+the preponderant passion or idea, or group of passions and ideas; and
+the contest lies between one passion or group and another. Hence, in
+right character there is no struggle at all, for the virtuous
+inclinations naturally and easily direct our will and actions; virtue is
+then independent of struggle; and the circumstance of our finding
+pleasure in this or that practice, is no reason why both the practice
+and the pleasure should not be unimpeachably virtuous.
+
+It is easy to see the connection between this theory of the dependence
+of the will, and the prominence which Vauvenargues is ever giving to the
+passions. These are the key to the movements of the will. To direct and
+shape the latter, you must educate the former. It was for his perception
+of this truth, we may notice in passing, that Comte awarded to
+Vauvenargues a place in the Positivist Calendar; 'for his direct effort,
+in spite of the universal desuetude into which it had fallen, to
+reorganise the culture of the heart according to a better knowledge of
+human nature, of which this noble thinker discerned the centre to be
+affective.'[44]
+
+This theory of the will, however, was not allowed to rest here; the
+activity of man was connected with the universal order. 'What prevents
+the mind from perceiving the motive of its actions, is only their
+infinite quickness. Our thoughts perish at the moment in which their
+effects make themselves known; when the action commences, the principle
+has vanished; the will appears, the feeling is gone; we cannot find it
+ourselves, and so doubt if we ever had it. But it would be an enormous
+defect to have a will without a principle; our actions would be all
+haphazard; the world would be nothing but caprice; all order would be
+overturned. It is not enough, then, to admit it to be true that it is
+reflection or sentiment that leads us: we must add further that it would
+be monstrous for this to be otherwise.[45] ...
+
+'The will recalls or suspends our ideas; our ideas shape or vary the
+laws of the will; the laws of the will are thus dependent on the laws of
+creation; but the laws of creation are not foreign to ourselves, they
+constitute our being, and form our essence, and are entirely our own,
+and we can say boldly that we act by ourselves, when we only act by
+them.[46] ...
+
+'Let us recognise here, then, our profound subjection.... Let us rend
+the melancholy veil which hides from our eyes the eternal chain of the
+world and the glory of the Creator.... External objects form ideas in
+the mind, these ideas form sentiments, these sentiments volitions, these
+volitions actions in ourselves and outside of ourselves. So noble a
+dependence in all the parts of this vast universe must conduct our
+reflections to the unity of its principle; this subordination makes the
+true greatness of the beings subordinated. The excellence of man is in
+his dependence; his subjection displays two marvellous images--the
+infinite power of God, and the dignity of our own soul.... Man
+independent would be an object of contempt; the feeling of his own
+imperfection would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling, when we
+admit his dependence, is the foundation of his sweetest hope; it reveals
+to him the nothingness of finite good, and leads him back to his
+principle, which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone can
+satisfy his desires in the possession of himself.'[47]
+
+Vauvenargues showed his genuine healthiness not more by a plenary
+rejection of the doctrine of the incurable vileness and frenzy of man,
+than by his freedom from the boisterous and stupid transcendental
+optimism which has too many votaries in our time. He would not have men
+told that they are miserable earth-gnomes, the slaves of a black
+destiny, but he still placed them a good deal lower than the angels. For
+instance: 'We are too inattentive or too much occupied with ourselves,
+to get to the bottom of one another's characters; _whoever has watched
+masks at a ball dancing together in a friendly manner, and joining hands
+without knowing who the others are, and then parting the moment
+afterwards never to meet again nor ever to regret, or be regretted, can
+form some idea of the world_.'[48] But then, as he said elsewhere: 'We
+can be perfectly aware of our imperfection, without being humiliated by
+the sight. _One of the noblest qualities of our nature is that we are
+able so easily to dispense with greater perfection._'[49] In all this we
+mark the large and rational humaneness of the new time, a tolerant and
+kindly and elevating estimate of men.
+
+The faith in the natural and simple operation of virtue, without the aid
+of all sorts of valetudinarian restrictions, comes out on every
+occasion. The Trappist theory of the conditions of virtue found no
+quarter with him. Mirabeau for instance complained of the atmosphere of
+the Court, as fatal to the practice of virtue. Vauvenargues replied that
+the people there were doubtless no better than they should be, and that
+vice was dominant. 'So much the worse for those who have vices. But when
+you are fortunate enough to possess virtue, it is, to my thinking, a
+very noble ambition to lift up this same virtue in the bosom of
+corruption, to make it succeed, to place it above all, to indulge and
+control the passions without reproach, to overthrow the obstacles to
+them, and to surrender yourself to the inclinations of an upright and
+magnanimous heart, instead of combating or concealing them in retreat,
+without either satisfying or vanquishing them. I know nothing so weak
+and so vain as to flee before vices, or to hate them without measure;
+for people only hate them by way of reprisal because they are afraid of
+them, or else out of vengeance because these vices have played them some
+sorry turn; but a little loftiness of soul, some knowledge of the heart,
+a gentle and tranquil humour, will protect you against the risk of being
+either surprised, or keenly wounded by them.'[50]
+
+There is a tolerably obvious distinction between two principal ways of
+examining character. One is a musing, subjective method of delineation,
+in which the various shades and windings seem to reveal themselves with
+a certain spontaneity, and we follow many recesses and depths in the
+heart of another, such as only music stirs into consciousness in
+ourselves. Besides this rarer poetic method, there is what may be
+styled the diplomatist's method; it classifies characters objectively,
+according to the kinds of outer conduct in which they manifest
+themselves, and according to the best ways of approaching and dealing
+with them. The second of these describes the spirit in which
+Vauvenargues observed men. He is French, and not German, and belongs to
+the eighteenth century, and not to the seventeenth or the nineteenth.
+His _Characters_, very little known in this country, are as excellent as
+any work in this kind that we are acquainted with, or probably as
+excellent as such work can be. They are real and natural, yet while
+abstaining as rigorously as Vauvenargues everywhere does from grotesque
+and extravagant traits, they avoid equally the vice of presenting the
+mere bald and sterile flats of character, which he that runs may read.
+As we have said, he had the quality possessed by so few of those who
+write about men; he watched men, and drew from the life. In a word, he
+studied concrete examples and interrogated his own experience--the only
+sure guarantee that one writing on his themes has anything which it is
+worth our while to listen to. Among other consequences of this reality
+of their source is the agreeable fact that these pictures are free from
+that clever bitterness and easy sarcasm, by which crude and jejune
+observers, thinking more of their own wit than of what they observe,
+sometimes gain a little reputation. Even the coxcombs, self-duping
+knaves, simpletons, braggarts, and other evil or pitiful types whom he
+selects, are drawn with unstrained and simple conformity to reality.
+The pictures have no moral label pinned on to them. Yet Vauvenargues
+took life seriously enough, and it was just because he took it
+seriously, that he had no inclination to air his wit or practise a
+verbal humour upon the stuff out of which happiness and misery are made.
+
+One or two fragments will suffice. Take the Man of the World, for
+instance:
+
+'A man of the world is not he who knows other men best, who has most
+foresight or dexterity in affairs, who is most instructed by experience
+and study; he is neither a good manager, nor a man of science, nor a
+politician, nor a skilful officer, nor a painstaking magistrate. He is a
+man who is ignorant of nothing but who knows nothing; who, doing his own
+business ill, fancies himself very capable of doing that of other
+people; a man who has much useless wit, who has the art of saying
+flattering things which do not flatter, and judicious things which give
+no information; who can persuade nobody, though he speaks well; endowed
+with that sort of eloquence which can bring out trifles, and which
+annihilates great subjects; as penetrating in what is ridiculous and
+external in men, as he is blind to the depths of their minds. One who,
+afraid of being wearisome by reason, is wearisome by his extravagances;
+is jocose without gaiety, and lively without passion.'[51]
+
+Or the two following, the Inconstant Man, and Lycas or the Firm Man:
+
+'Such a man seems really to possess more than one character. A powerful
+imagination makes his soul take the shape of all the objects that affect
+it; he suddenly astonishes the world by acts of generosity and courage
+which were never expected of him; the image of virtue inflames,
+elevates, softens, masters his heart; he receives the impression from
+the loftiest, and he surpasses them. But when his imagination has grown
+cold, his courage droops, his generosity sinks; the vices opposed to
+these virtues take possession of his soul, and after having reigned
+awhile supreme, they make way for other objects.... We cannot say that
+they have a great nature, or strong, or weak, or light; it is a swift
+and imperious imagination which reigns with sovereign power over all
+their being, which subjugates their genius, and which prescribes for
+them in turn those fine actions and those faults, those heights and
+those littlenesses, those flights of enthusiasm and those fits of
+disgust, which we are wrong in charging either with hypocrisy or
+madness.'[52]
+
+'Lycas unites with a self-reliant, bold, and impetuous nature, a spirit
+of reflection and profundity which moderates the counsels of his
+passions, which leads him by inpenetrable motives, and makes him advance
+to his ends by many paths. He is one of those long-sighted men, who
+consider the succession of events from afar off, who always finish a
+design begun; who are capable, I do not say of dissembling either a
+misfortune or an offence, but of rising above either, instead of letting
+it depress them; deep natures, independent by their firmness in daring
+all and suffering all; who, whether they resist their inclinations out
+of foresight, or whether, out of pride and a secret consciousness of
+their resources, they defy what is called prudence, always, in good as
+in evil, cheat the acutest conjectures.'[53]
+
+Let us note that Vauvenargues is almost entirely free from that
+favourite trick of the aphoristic person, which consists in forming a
+series of sentences, the predicates being various qualifications of
+extravagance, vanity, and folly, and the subject being Women. He resists
+this besetting temptation of the modern speaker of apophthegms to
+identify woman and fool. On the one or two occasions in which he begins
+the maxim with the fatal words, _Les femmes_, he is as little profound
+as other people who persist in thinking of man and woman as two
+different species. 'Women,' for example, 'have ordinarily more vanity
+than temperament, and more temperament than virtue'--which is fairly
+true of all human beings, and in so far as it is true, describes men
+just as exactly--and no more so--as it describes women. In truth,
+Vauvenargues felt too seriously about conduct and character to go far in
+this direction. Now and again he is content with a mere smartness, as
+when he says: 'There are some thoroughly excellent people who cannot get
+rid of their _ennui_ except at the expense of society.' But such a mood
+is not common. He is usually grave, and not seldom profoundly weighty,
+delicate without being weak, and subtle without obscurity; as for
+example:
+
+'People teach children to fear and obey; the avarice, pride, or timidity
+of the fathers, instructs the children in economy, arrogance, or
+submission. We stir them up to be yet more and more copyists, which they
+are only too disposed to be, as it is; nobody thinks of making them
+original, hardy, independent.'
+
+'If instead of dulling the vivacity of children, people did their best
+to raise the impulsiveness and movement of their characters, what might
+we not expect from a fine natural temper?'
+
+Again: 'The moderation of the weak is mediocrity.'
+
+'What is arrogance in the weak is elevation in the strong; as the
+strength of a sick man is frenzy, and that of a whole man is vigour.'
+
+'To speak imprudently and to speak boldly are nearly always the same
+thing. But we may speak without prudence, and still speak what is right;
+and it is a mistake to fancy that a man has a shallow intelligence,
+because the boldness of his character or the liveliness of his temper
+may have drawn from him, in spite of himself, some dangerous truth.'
+
+'It is a great sign of mediocrity always to praise moderately.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Vauvenargues has a saying to the effect that men very often, without
+thinking of it, form an idea of their face and expression from the
+ruling sentiment of which they are conscious in themselves at the time.
+He hints that this is perhaps the reason why a coxcomb always believes
+himself to be handsome.[54] And in a letter to Mirabeau, he describes
+pleasantly how sometimes in moments of distraction he pictures himself
+with an air of loftiness, of majesty, of penetration, according to the
+idea that is occupying his mind, and how if by chance he sees his face
+in the mirror, he is nearly as much amazed as if he saw a Cyclops or a
+Tartar.[55] Yet his nature, if we may trust the portrait, revealed
+itself in his face; it is one of the most delightful to look upon, even
+in the cold inarticulateness of an engraving, that the gallery of fair
+souls contains for us. We may read the beauty of his character in the
+soft strength of the brow, the meditative lines of mouth and chin, above
+all, the striking clearness, the self-collection, the feminine
+solicitude, that mingle freely and without eagerness or expectancy in
+his gaze, as though he were hearkening to some ever-flowing inward
+stream of divine melody. We think of that gracious touch in Bacon's
+picture of the father of Solomon's House, that 'he had an aspect as
+though he pitied men.' If we reproach France in the eighteenth century
+with its coarseness, artificiality, shallowness, because it produced
+such men as the rather brutish Duclos, we ought to remember that this
+was also the century of Vauvenargues, one of the most tender, lofty,
+cheerful, and delicately sober of all moralists.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: _Pensees_, i. v. 8.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Ib._ i. vi. 16.]
+
+[Footnote 3: _Ib._ i. vii. 6.]
+
+[Footnote 4: M. Gilbert's edition of the _Works and Correspondence of
+Vauvenargues_ (2 vols. Paris: Furne, 1857), ii. 133.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Eloge de P.H. de Seytres_. _OEuv._ i. 141-150.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _OEuv._ ii. 233. See too p. 267.]
+
+[Footnote 7: No. 579, i. 455.]
+
+[Footnote 8: _Reflexions sur Divers Sujets_, i. 104.]
+
+[Footnote 9: _OEuv._ ii. 249.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _Ib._ ii. 265.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Ib._ ii. 266.]
+
+[Footnote 12: _Conseils a un Jeune Homme_, i. 124.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _OEuv._ ii. 252.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Ib._ ii. 272.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Memoires de Marmontel_, vol. i. 189.]
+
+[Footnote 16: The reader of Marmontel's _Memoires_ will remember the
+extraordinary and grotesque circumstances under which a younger brother
+of Mirabeau, (of _l'ami des hommes_, that is) appealed to the memory of
+Vauvenargues. See vol. i. 256-260.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _OEuv._ i. 225-232.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Letter to Saint-Vincens_, ii. 146.]
+
+[Footnote 19: No. 318.]
+
+[Footnote 20: Napoleon said on some occasion, '_Il faut vouloir vivre et
+savoir mourir_.' M. Littre prefaces the third volume of that heroic
+monument of learning and industry, his _Dictionary of the French
+Language_, by the words: 'He who wishes to employ his life seriously
+ought always to act as if he had long to live, and to govern himself as
+if he would have soon to die.']
+
+[Footnote 21: No. 223.]
+
+[Footnote 22: No. 300.]
+
+[Footnote 23: No. 264.]
+
+[Footnote 24: _Reflexions Critiques sur quelques Poetes_, i. 237.]
+
+[Footnote 25: _OEuv_. i. 248.]
+
+[Footnote 26: _Reflexions Critiques sur quelques Poetes_, i. 238.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _OEuv._ i. 243.]
+
+[Footnote 28: _OEuv._ i. 275.]
+
+[Footnote 29: _Correspondance_. _OEuv._ ii. 131, 207.]
+
+[Footnote 30: Long-winded and tortuous and difficult to seize as
+Shaftesbury is as a whole, in detached sentences he shows marked
+aphoristic quality; _e.g._ 'The most ingenious way of becoming foolish
+is by a system;' 'The liker anything is to wisdom, if it be not plainly
+the thing itself, the more directly it becomes its opposite.']
+
+[Footnote 31: No. 278 (i. 411).]
+
+[Footnote 32: _OEuv._ ii. 115.]
+
+[Footnote 33: _Ib._ i. 87.]
+
+[Footnote 34:
+                                     Doch
+    Zuweilen ist des Sinns in einer Sache
+    Auch mehr, als wir vermuthen; und es waere
+    So unerhoert doch nicht, dass uns der Heiland
+    Auf Wegen zu sich zoege, die der Kluge
+    Von selbst nicht leicht betreten wuerde.
+
+    _Nathan der Weise_, iii. 10.]
+
+[Footnote 35: _Reflections on the French Revolution_, Works (ed. 1842),
+i. 414.]
+
+[Footnote 36: _OEuv._ ii. 170.]
+
+[Footnote 37: No. 111.]
+
+[Footnote 38: _OEuv._ ii. 74.]
+
+[Footnote 39: No. 285.]
+
+[Footnote 40: 'A man may as well pretend to cure himself of love by
+viewing his mistress through the artificial medium of a microscope or
+prospect, and beholding there the coarseness of her skin and monstrous
+disproportion of her features, as hope to excite or moderate any passion
+by the artificial arguments of a Seneca or an Epictetus.'--Hume's
+_Essays_ (xviii. _The Sceptic_).]
+
+[Footnote 41: _OEuv._ i. 163.]
+
+[Footnote 42: Nos. 296-298, 148.]
+
+[Footnote 43: _Sur le Libre Arbitre_. _OEuv._ i. 199.]
+
+[Footnote 44: _Politique Positive_, iii. 589.]
+
+[Footnote 45: _Ib._ i. 194.]
+
+[Footnote 46: _Politique Positive_, 205.]
+
+[Footnote 47: _Ib._ 206, 207.]
+
+[Footnote 48: No. 330.]
+
+[Footnote 49: Nos. 462, 463.]
+
+[Footnote 50: _Correspondance_. _OEuv._ ii. 163.]
+
+[Footnote 51: _OEuv._ i. 310.]
+
+[Footnote 52: _OEuv._ i. 325.]
+
+[Footnote 53: _OEuv._ i. 326.]
+
+[Footnote 54: No. 236.]
+
+[Footnote 55: _OEuv_. ii. 188.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 2 OF 3) ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16937.txt or 16937.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/9/3/16937/
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Luis Amador and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/16937.zip b/16937.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..07ac7ba
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16937.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4166a1b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #16937 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16937)