opular
phrase, "more in him than meets the eye." He is indeed a satirist, but
not of the profound order of the Timons of the mind; his satire is
superficial, and under it there flows a lenient curiosity mingled with
a sympathy that fears to be detected.

There is a note of sadness, a mysterious melancholy, which frequently
recurs in the "Caracteres," and this produces a constant variety in
its appeal to the feelings. We find the author amusing himself by
detailing the weaknesses of his fellow-beings, but the entertainment
they offer him soon leaves him dissatisfied and sad. He is overheard
to sigh, he is seen to shake his head, as he turns his clear eyes away
from the self-humiliation of men. There is nothing of this in the hard
superiority of La Rochefoucauld, and one of the most important things
which we have to note is the advance in feeling which the later
moralist makes, in spite of his extremely unpretentious attitude. La
Bruyere attains to a reasoned tolerance which neither his immediate
predecessor nor Pascal nor Bossuet reached or had the least wish to
reach. In him we meet, not commonly nor prominently presented, but
quite plainly enough, the modern virtue of indulgence, of tolerance.
Here is a passage which could scarcely have been written by any other
moralist of the seventeenth century:--

"It is useless to fly into a passion with human beings because of
their harshness, their injustice, their pride, their self-love and
their forgetfulness of others. They are made so, it is their nature,
and to be angry about it is to be angry with the stone for falling or
with the flame for rising."

Here is the voice of the man who had lived and who was still living in
the house of that Prince de Conde of whom Saint Simon said that, "A
pernicious neighbour, he made everybody miserable with whom he had to
do." I like to imagine La Bruyere escaping from some dreadful scene
where Henry Jules had injured his dependants and insulted his
familiars, or had drawn out in public the worst qualities of his son,
"incapable of affection and only too capable of hatred." I imagine him
escaping from the violence and meanness of those intolerable tyrants
up into the asylum of his own hushed apartment at Versailles; there
flinging himself down for a moment in the alcove, on the painted
bedstead, then presently rising, with a smile on his lips and the
fright and anger gone out of his eyes, and advancing to the great
oaken bureau which d