rated the secrets
of human nature: "The esprit of conversation consists much less in
displaying itself than in drawing out the wit of others... Men do not
like to admire you, they wish to please; they seek less to be instructed
or even to be entertained, than to be appreciated and applauded, and the
most delicate pleasure is to make that of others." "To please others,"
says La Rochefoucauld, "one must speak of the things they love and which
concern them, avoid disputes upon indifferent maters, ask questions
rarely, and never let them think that one is more in the right than
themselves."

Many among the great writers of the age touch in the same tone upon
the philosophy underlying the various rules of manners and conversation
which were first discussed at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and which have
passed into permanent though unwritten laws--unfortunately a little out
of fashion in the present generation.

It is difficult to estimate the impulse given to intelligence and
literary taste by this breaking up of old social crystallizations. What
the savant had learned in his closet passed more or less into current
coin. Conversation gave point to thought, clearness to expression,
simplicity to language. Women of rank and recognized ability imposed
the laws of good taste, and their vivid imaginations changed lifeless
abstractions into something concrete and artistic. Men of letters, who
had held an inferior and dependent position, were penetrated with the
spirit of a refined society, while men of the world, in a circle where
wit and literary skill were distinctions, began to aspire to the role
of a bel esprit, to pride themselves upon some intellectual gift and the
power to write without labor and without pedantry, as became their rank.
Many of them lacked seriousness, dealing mainly with delicate fancies
and trivial incidents, but pleasures of the intellect and taste became
the fashion. Burlesques and chansons disputed the palm with madrigals
and sonnets. A neatly turned epigram or a clever letter made a social
success.

Perhaps it was not a school for genius of the first order. Society
favors graces of form and expression rather than profound and serious
thought. No Homer, nor Aeschylus, nor Milton, nor Dante is the outgrowth
of such a soil. The prophet or seer shines by the light of his own soul.
He deals with problems and emotions that lie deep in the pulsing heart
of humanity, but he does not best interpret his generati