s 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