se
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 simplic