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 int