ries,
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 Pasc