CRITICAL MISCELLANIES

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. II. 

Essay 1: Vauvenargues

London

MACMILLAN AND CO. , Limited

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1905

CONTENTS OF VOL. II. PAGE

The influence of Pascal 1

Vauvenargues holds the balance between him and thevotaries of Perfectibility 4

Birth, education, and hard life of Vauvenargues 4

Life in Paris, and friendship with Voltaire 10

His religious sentiment 12

His delicacy, reserve, and psychagogic quality 15

Certain inability to appreciate marked originality 17

Criticisms on Molière, Racine, and Corneille 19

Comparison with English aphoristic writers and moralists 20

Character the key to his theory of greatness 25

His exaltation of spontaneous feeling, a protest againstRochefoucauld and Pascal 26

His plea for a normal sense of human relation, the same 28

His doctrine of the Will connected with his doctrine ofCharacter 29

Antipathy to ascetic restrictions 33

Two ways of examining character: that followed byVauvenargues 34

Examples of his style 36

The beauty of his nature to be read in his face 40

[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book. ]

VAUVENARGUES. 

One of the most important phases of French thought in the great centuryof its illumination is only thoroughly intelligible, on condition thatin studying it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force, andgenius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most influentialrepresentative of that way of viewing human nature and itscircumstances, which it was one of the characteristic glories of theeighteenth century to have rebelled against and rejected. More than ahundred years after the publication of the _Pensées_, Condorcet thoughtit worth while to prepare a new edition of them, with annotations, protesting, not without a certain unwonted deference of tone, againstPascal's doctrine of the base and desperate estate of man. Voltaire alsohad them reprinted with notes of his own, written in the same spirit ofvivacious deprecation, which we may be sure would have been even morevivacious, if Voltaire had not remembered that he was speaking of themightiest of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal andspecific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeplyof the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment ofrevolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the centurybefore, who had clothed mere theological mysteries with the force andimportance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistentphilosophy. 

The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingnessof kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready gripof the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather filledthe mind with exaltation than really depressed or humiliated it. FromBossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn splendour of the church tothe chill of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional, inthe first place, and it was purely theological, in the second; so themain stream of thought flowed away and aside from him. To Pascal it wasfelt necessary that there should be reply and vindication, whether inthe shape of deliberate and published formulas, or in the reasonedconvictions of the individual intelligence working privately. A syllabusof the radical articles of the French creed of the eighteenth centurywould consist largely of the contradictions of the main propositions ofPascal. The old theological idea of the fall was hard to endure, but theidea of the fall was clenched by such general laws of human nature asthis, --that 'men are so necessarily mad, that it would be to be mad by anew form of madness not to be mad;'--that man is nothing butmasquerading, lying, and hypocrisy, both in what concerns himself and inrespect of others, wishing not to have the truth told to himself, andshrinking from telling it to anybody else;[1] that the will, theimagination, the disorders of the body, the thousand concealedinfirmities of the intelligence, conspire to reduce our discovery ofjustice and truth to a process of haphazard, in which we more often missthe mark than hit. [2] Pleasure, ambition, industry, are only means ofdistracting men from the otherwise unavoidable contemplation of theirown misery. How speak of the dignity of the race and its history, whenwe know that a grain of sand in Cromwell's bladder altered the destiniesof a kingdom, and that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the wholesurface of the earth would be different? Imagine, in a word, 'a numberof men in chains, and all condemned to death; some of them each daybutchered in the sight of the others, while those who remain watch theirown condition in that of their fellows, and eyeing one another inanguish and hopelessness, wait their turn; such is the situation ofman. '[3]

It was hardly possible to push the tragical side of the verities of lifebeyond this, and there was soon an instinctive reaction towardsrealities. The sensations with their conditions of pleasure no less thanof pain; the intelligence with its energetic aptitudes for the discoveryof protective and fruitful knowledge; the affections with their largecapacities for giving and receiving delight; the spontaneous innerimpulse towards action and endurance in the face of outwardcircumstances--all these things reassured men, and restored in theory tothem with ample interest what in practice they had never lost--arational faith and exultation in their own faculties, both of findingout truth and of feeling a very substantial degree of happiness. Onthis side too, as on the other, speculation went to its extreme limit. The hapless and despairing wretches of Pascal were transformed by thevotaries of perfectibility into bright beings not any lower than theangels. Between the two extremes there was one fine moralist who knewhow to hold a just balance, perceiving that language is the expressionof relations and proportions, that when we speak of virtue and genius wemean qualities that compared with those of mediocre souls deserve thesehigh names, that greatness and happiness are comparative terms, and thatthere is nothing to be said of the estate of man except relatively. Thismoralist was Vauvenargues. 

Vauvenargues was born of a good Provençal stock at Aix, in the year1715. He had scarcely any of that kind of education which is usuallyperformed in school-classes, and he was never able to read either Latinor Greek. Such slight knowledge as he ever got of the famous writersamong the ancients was in translations. Of English literature, thoughits influence and that of our institutions were then becoming paramountin France, and though he had a particular esteem for the Englishcharacter, he knew only the writings of Locke and Pope, and the ParadiseLost. [4] Vauvenargues must be added to the list of thinkers and writerswhose personal history shows, what men of letters sometimes appear to bein a conspiracy to make us forget, that for sober, healthy, and robustjudgment on human nature and life, active and sympathetic contact withmen in the transaction of the many affairs of their daily life is abetter preparation than any amount of wholly meditative seclusion. He isalso one of the many who show that a weakly constitution of body is notincompatible with fine and energetic qualities of mind, even if it benot actually friendly to them. Nor was feeble health anydisqualification for the profession of arms. As Arms and the Church werethe only alternatives for persons of noble birth, Vauvenargues, choosingthe former, became a subaltern in the King's Own Regiment at the age oftwenty (1735). Here in time he saw active service; for in 1740 the deathof Charles VI. Threw all Europe into confusion, and the FrenchGovernment, falling in with the prodigious designs of the MarshalBelle-Isle and his brother, took sides against Maria Theresa, andsupported the claims of the unhappy Elector of Bavaria who afterwardsbecame the Emperor Charles VII. The disasters which fell upon France inconsequence are well known. The forces despatched to Bavaria andBohemia, after the brief triumph of the capture of Prague, weregradually overwhelmed without a single great battle, and it wasconsidered a signal piece of good fortune when in the winter of 1742-43Belle-Isle succeeded, with a loss of half his force, in leading by along circuit, in the view of the enemy, and amid the horrors of famineand intense frost, some thirteen thousand men away from Prague. TheKing's Regiment took part in the Bohemian campaign, and in thisfrightful march which closed it; Vauvenargues with the rest. 

To physical sufferings during two winters was added the distress oflosing a comrade to whom he was deeply attached; he perished in thespring of '42 under the hardships of the war. The _Éloge_ in whichVauvenargues commemorates the virtues and the pitiful fate of hisfriend, is too deeply marked with the florid and declamatory style ofyouth to be pleasing to a more ripened taste. [5] He complained thatnobody who had read it observed that it was touching, not rememberingthat even the most tender feeling fails to touch us, when it has foundstilted and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection wereprominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had beenpassed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might havebecome fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with acertain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never thefaintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of thoseother vices which betray in men that excessive consciousness of theirown personality, which lies at the root of most of the obstacles in theway of an even and humane life. His nature had such depth and qualitythat the perpetual untowardness of circumstances left no evil print uponhim; hardship made him not sour, but patient and wise, and there is nosurer sign of noble temper. 

The sufferings and bereavements of war were not his only trials. Vauvenargues was beset throughout the whole of his short life with thesordid and humiliating embarrassments of narrow means. His letters toSaint-Vincens, the most intimate of his friends, disclose the straits towhich he was driven. The nature of these straits is an old story allover the world, and Vauvenargues did the same things that young men inwant of money have generally done. It cannot be said, I fear, that hepassed along those miry ways without some defilement. He bethinks him onone occasion that a rich neighbour has daughters. 'Why should I notundertake to marry one of them within two years, with a reasonabledowry, if he would lend me the money I want and provided I should nothave repaid it by the time fixed?'[6] We must make allowance for theyouth of the writer, and for a different view of marriage and itssignificance from our own. Even then there remains something to regret. Poverty, wrote Vauvenargues, in a maxim smacking unwontedly ofcommonplace, cannot debase strong souls, any more than riches canelevate low souls. [7] That depends. If poverty means pinching andfretting need of money, it may not debase the soul in any vital sense, but it is extremely likely to wear away a very priceless kind ofdelicacy in a man's estimate of human relations and their import. 

Vauvenargues has told us what he found the life of the camp. Luxuriousand indolent living, neglected duties, discontented sighing after thedelights of Paris, the exaltation of rank and mediocrity, an insolentcontempt for merit; these were the characteristics of the men in highmilitary place. The lower officers meantime were overwhelmed by anexpenditure that the luxury of their superiors introduced andencouraged; and they were speedily driven to retire by the disorder oftheir affairs, or by the impossibility of promotion, because men ofspirit could not long endure the sight of flagrant injustice, andbecause those who labour for fame cannot tie themselves to a conditionwhere there is nothing to be gathered but shame and humiliation. [8]

To these considerations of an extravagant expenditure and the absence ofevery chance of promotion, there was added in the case of Vauvenarguesthe still more powerful drawback of irretrievably broken health. Thewinter-march from Prague to Egra had sown fatal seed. His legs had beenfrost-bitten, and before they could be cured he was stricken bysmall-pox, which left him disfigured and almost blind. So after aservice of nine years, he quitted military life (1744). He vainlysolicited employment as a diplomatist. The career was not yet open tothe talents, and in the memorial which Vauvenargues drew up he dweltless on his conduct than on his birth, being careful to show that he hadan authentic ancestor who was Governor of Hyères in the early part ofthe fourteenth century. [9] But the only road to employment lay throughthe Court. The claims even of birth counted for nothing, unless theywere backed by favour among the ignoble creatures who hauntedVersailles. For success it was essential to be not only high-born, but aparasite as well. 'Permit me to assure you, sir, ' Vauvenargues wrotecourageously to Amelot, then the minister, 'that it is this moralimpossibility for a gentleman, with only zeal to commend him, of everreaching the King his master, which causes the discouragement that isobserved among the nobility of the provinces, and which extinguishes allambition. '[10] Amelot, to oblige Voltaire, eager as usual in goodoffices for his friend, answered the letters which Vauvenargues wrote, and promised to lay his name before the King as soon as a favourableopportunity should present itself. [11]

Vauvenargues was probably enough of a man of the world to take fairwords of this sort at their value, and he had enough of qualities thatdo not belong to the man of the world to enable him to confront thedisappointment with cheerful fortitude 'Misfortune itself, ' he had oncewritten, 'has its charms in great extremities; for this opposition offortune raises a courageous mind, and makes it collect all the forcesthat before were unemployed: it is in indolence and littleness thatvirtue suffers, when a timid prudence prevents it from rising in flightand forces it to creep along in bonds. '[12] He was true to the counselwhich he had thus given years before, and with the consciousness thatdeath was rapidly approaching, and that all hope of advancement in theordinary way was at an end, even if there were any chance of his life, he persevered in his project of going to Paris, there to earn the famewhich he instinctively felt that he had it in him to achieve. Neitherscantiness of means nor the vehement protests of friends andrelations--always the worst foes to superior character on criticaloccasions--could detain him in the obscurity of Provence. In 1745 hetook up his quarters in Paris in a humble house near the School ofMedicine. Literature had not yet acquired that importance in Francewhich it was so soon to obtain. The Encyclopædia was still unconceived, and the momentous work which that famous design was to accomplish, oforganising the philosophers and men of letters into an army withbanners, was still unexecuted. Voltaire, indeed, had risen, if not tothe full height of his reputation, yet high enough both to command theadmiration of people of quality, and to be the recognised chief of thenew school of literature and thought. Voltaire had been struck by aletter in which Vauvenargues, then unknown to him, had sent a criticismcomparing Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Coming from a youngofficer, the member of a profession which Voltaire frankly described as'very noble, in truth, but slightly barbarous, ' this criticism waspeculiarly striking. A great many years afterwards Voltaire wassurprised in the same way, to find that an officer could write such abook as the _Félicité Publique_ of the Marquis de Chastellux. ToVauvenargues he replied with many compliments, and pointed out with agood deal of pains the injustice which the young critic had done to thegreat author of _Cinna_. '_It is the part of a man like you, _' he saidadmirably, '_to have preferences, but no exclusions. _'[13] Thecorrespondence thus begun was kept up with ever-growing warmth andmutual respect. 'If you had been born a few years earlier, ' Voltairewrote to him, 'my works would be worth all the more for it; but at anyrate, even at the close of my career, you confirm me in the path thatyou pursue. '[14]

The personal impression was as fascinating as that which had beenconveyed by Vauvenargues' letters. Voltaire took every opportunity ofvisiting his unfortunate friend, then each day drawing nearer to thegrave. Men of humbler stature were equally attracted. 'It was at thistime, ' says the light-hearted Marmontel, 'that I first saw at home theman who had a charm for me beyond all the rest of the world, the good, the virtuous, the wise Vauvenargues. Cruelly used by nature in his body, he was in soul one of her rarest masterpieces. I seemed to see in himFénelon weak and suffering. I could make a good book of hisconversations, if I had had a chance of collecting them. You see sometraces of it in the selection that he has left of his thoughts andmeditations. But all eloquent and full of feeling as he is in hiswritings, he was even more so still in his conversation. '[15] Marmontelfelt sincere grief when Vauvenargues died, and in the _Epistle toVoltaire_ expressed his sorrow in some fair lines. They contain thehappy phrase applied to Vauvenargues, '_ce coeur stoïque ettendre_. '[16]

In religious sentiment Vauvenargues was out of the groove of his time. That is to say, he was not unsusceptible of religion. Accepting nodogma, so far as we can judge, and complying with no observances, veryfaint and doubtful as to even the fundamentals--God, immortality, andthe like--he never partook of the furious and bitter antipathy of thebest men of that century against the church, its creeds, and its book. At one time, as will be seen from a passage which will be quoted by andby, his leanings were towards that vague and indefinable doctrine whichidentifies God with all the forces and their manifestations in theuniverse. Afterwards even this adumbration of a theistic explanation ofthe world seems to have passed from him, and he lived, as many other notbad men have lived, with that fair working substitute for a religiousdoctrine which is provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance ina devotional spirit, of all larger mortal experiences and higher humanimpressions. There is a _Meditation on the Faith_, including a _Prayer_, among his writings; and there can be little doubt, in spite ofCondorcet's incredible account of the circumstances of its composition, that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling. [17]It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one whoardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him whoalready possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but hecould not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the period. Theone fact delivered him from dogma and superstition, and the other fromscoffing and harsh unspirituality. He saw that apart from the questionof the truth or falsehood of its historic basis, there was a balance tobe struck between the consolations and the afflictions of the faith. [18]Practically he was content to leave this balance unstruck, and to passby on the other side. Scarcely any of his maxims concern religion. Oneof these few is worth quoting, where he says: 'The strength or weaknessof our belief depends more on our courage than our light; not all thosewho mock at auguries have more intellect than those who believe inthem. '[19]

The end came in the spring of 1747, when Vauvenargues was no more thanthirty-two. Perhaps, in spite of his physical miseries, these two yearsin Paris were the least unhappy time in his life. He was in the greatcentre where the fame which he longed for was earned and liberallyawarded. A year of intercourse with so full and alert and brilliant amind as Voltaire's, must have been more to one so appreciative of mentalgreatness as Vauvenargues, than many years of intercourse withsubalterns in the Regiment of the King. With death, now known to be verynear at hand, he had made his account before. 'To execute great things, 'he had written in a maxim which gained the lively praise of Voltaire, 'aman must live as though he had never to die. '[20] This mood was commonamong the Greeks and Romans; but the religion which Europe accepted inthe time of its deepest corruption and depravation, retained the mark ofits dismal origin nowhere so strongly as in the distorted prominencewhich it gave in the minds of its votaries to the dissolution of thebody. It was one of the first conditions of the Revival of Reason thatthe dreary _memento mori_ and its hateful emblems should be deliberatelyeffaced. 'The thought of death, ' said Vauvenargues, 'leads us astray, because it makes us forget to live. ' He did not understand living in thesense which the dissolute attach to it. The libertinism of his regimentcalled no severe rebuke from him, but his meditative temper drew himaway from it even in his youth. It is not impossible that if his dayshad not been cut short, he might have impressed Parisian society withideas and a sentiment, that would have left to it all its cheerfulness, and yet prevented that laxity which so fatally weakened it. Turgot, theonly other conspicuous man who could have withstood the license of thetime, had probably too much of that austerity which is in the fibre ofso many great characters, to make any moral counsels that he might havegiven widely effective. 

Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint of the pedagogue orthe preacher to have dispelled the sophisms of licence, less by argumentthan by the gracious attraction of virtue in his own character. Thestock moralist, like the commonplace orator of the pulpit, fails totouch the hearts of men or to affect their lives, for lack of delicacy, of sympathy, and of freshness; he attempts to compensate for this byexcess of emphasis, and that more often disgusts us than persuades. Vauvenargues, on the other hand, is remarkable for delicacy andhalf-reserved tenderness. Everything that he has said is coloured andwarmed with feeling for the infirmities of men. He writes not merely asan analytical outsider. Hence, unlike most moralists, he is no satirist. He had borne the burdens. 'The looker-on, ' runs one of his maxims, 'softly lying in a carpeted chamber, inveighs against the soldier, whopasses winter nights on the river's edge, and keeps watch in silenceover the safety of the land. '[21] Vauvenargues had been something verydifferent from the safe and sheltered critic of other men's battles, and this is the secret of the hold which his words have upon us. Theyare real, with the reality that can only come from two sources; fromhigh poetic imagination, which Vauvenargues did not possess, or elsefrom experience of life acting on and strengthening a generous nature. 'The cause of most books of morality being so insipid, ' he says, 'isthat their authors are not sincere; is that, being feeble echoes of oneanother, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims andprivate sentiments. '[22] One of the secrets of his own freedom from thisordinary insipidity of moralists was his freedom also from theirpretentiousness and insincerity. 

Besides these positive merits, he had, as we have said, the negativedistinction of never being emphatic. His sayings are nearly alwaysmoderate and persuasive, alike in sentiment and in phrase. Sometimesthey are almost tentative in the diffidence of their turn. Compared withhim La Rochefoucauld's manner is hard, and that of La Bruyèresententious. In the moralist who aspires to move and win men by theirbest side instead of their worst, the absence of this hardness and thepresence of a certain lambency and play even in the exposition of truthsof perfect assurance, are essential conditions of psychagogic quality. In religion such law does not hold, and the contagion of fanaticism isusually most rapidly spread by a rigorous and cheerless example. 

We may notice in passing that Vauvenargues has the defects of hisqualities, and that with his aversion to emphasis was bound up a certaininability to appreciate even grandeur and originality, if they were toostrongly and boldly marked. 'It is easy to criticise an author, ' he hassaid, 'but hard to estimate him. '[23] This was never more unfortunatelyproved than in the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the greatMolière. There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a writer who can saythat 'La Bruyère, animated with nearly the same genius, painted thecrookedness of men with as much truth and as much force as Molière; butI believe that there is more eloquence and more elevation to be found inLa Bruyère's images. '[24] Without at all undervaluing La Bruyère, one ofthe acutest and finest of writers, we may say that this is a trulydisastrous piece of criticism. Quite as unhappy is the preference givento Racine over Molière, not merely for the conclusion arrived at, butfor the reasons on which it is founded. Molière's subjects, we read, arelow, his language negligent and incorrect, his characters bizarre andeccentric. Racine, on the other hand, takes sublime themes, presents uswith noble types, and writes with simplicity and elegance. It is notenough to concede to Racine the glory of art, while giving to Molière orCorneille the glory of genius. 'When people speak of the art ofRacine--the art which puts things in their place; which characterisesmen, their passions, manners, genius; which banishes obscurities, superfluities, false brilliancies; which paints nature with fire, sublimity, and grace--what can we think of such art as this, except thatit is the genius of extraordinary men, and the origin of those rulesthat writers without genius embrace with so much zeal and so littlesuccess?'[25] And it is certainly true that the art of Racine impliedgenius. The defect of the criticism lies, as usual, in a failure to seethat there is glory enough in both; in the art of highly-finishedcomposition and presentation, and in the art of bold and strikingcreation. Yet Vauvenargues was able to discern the secret of thepopularity of Molière, and the foundation of the common opinion that noother dramatist had carried his own kind of art so far as Molière hadcarried his; 'the reason is, I fancy, that he is more natural than anyof the others, and this is an important lesson for everybody who wishesto write. '[26] He did not see how nearly everything went in thisconcession, that Molière was, above all, natural. With equal truth ofperception he condemned the affectation of grandeur lent by the Frenchtragedians to classical personages who were in truth simple and natural, as the principal defect of the national drama, and the common rock onwhich their poets made shipwreck. [27] Let us, however, rejoice for thesake of the critical reputation of Vauvenargues that he was unable toread Shakespeare. One for whom Molière is too eccentric, grotesque, inelegant, was not likely to do much justice to the mightiest but mostirregular of all dramatists. 

A man's prepossessions in dramatic poetry, supposing him to becultivated enough to have any prepossessions, furnish the most certainclue that we can get to the spirit in which he inwardly regardscharacter and conduct. The uniform and reasoned preference whichVauvenargues had for Racine over Molière and Corneille, was only thetransfer to art of that balanced, moderate, normal, and emphaticallyharmonious temper, which he brought to the survey of human nature. Excess was a condition of thought, feeling, and speech, that in everyform was disagreeable to him; alike in the gloom of Pascal's reveries, and in the inflation of speech of some of the heroes of Corneille. Hefailed to relish even Montaigne as he ought to have done, becauseMontaigne's method was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, hisegoism too manifest, and because he did not produce complete andartistic wholes. [28]

Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues' thinking; balance, evenness, purity of vision, penetration finely toned with indulgence. Heis never betrayed into criticism of men from the point of view ofimmutable first principles. Perhaps this was what the elder Mirabeaumeant when he wrote to Vauvenargues, who was his cousin: 'You have theEnglish genius to perfection, ' and what Vauvenargues meant when he wroteof himself to Mirabeau: 'Nobody in the world has a mind less French thanI. '[29] These international comparisons are among the least fruitful ofliterary amusements, even when they happen not to be extremelymisleading; as when, for example, Voltaire called Locke the EnglishPascal, a description which can only be true on condition that thequalifying adjective is meant to strip either Locke or Pascal of most ofhis characteristic traits. And if we compare Vauvenargues with any ofour English aphoristic writers, there is not resemblance enough to makethe contrast instructive. The obvious truth is that in this departmentour literature is particularly weak, while French literature isparticularly strong in it. With the exception of Bacon, we have nowriter of apophthegms of the first order; and the difference betweenBacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues, is the differencebetween Polonius's famous discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy ofHamlet. 

Bacon's precepts refer rather to external conduct and worldly fortunethan to the inner composition of character, or to the 'wide, gray, lampless' depths of human destiny. We find the same nationalcharacteristic, though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin'soracular saws. Among the French sages a psychological element ispredominant, as well as an occasional transcendent loftiness of feeling, not to be found in Bacon's wisest maxims, and from his point of view intheir composition we could not expect to find them there. We seek invain amid the positivity of Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox ofBrowne, or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any of that poeticpensiveness which is strong in Vauvenargues, and reaches tragic heightsin Pascal. [30] Addison may have the delicacy of Vauvenargues, but it isa delicacy that wants the stir and warmth of feeling. It seems as ifwith English writers poetic sentiment naturally sought expression inpoetic forms, while the Frenchmen of nearly corresponding temperamentwere restrained within the limits of prose by reason of the vigorouslyprescribed stateliness and stiffness of their verse at that time. A manin this country with the quality of Vauvenargues, with his delicacy, tenderness, elevation, would have composed lyrics. We have undoubtedlylost much by the laxity and irregularity of our verse, but asundoubtedly we owe to its freedom some of the most perfect anddelightful of the minor figures that adorn the noble gallery of Englishpoets. 

It would be an error to explain the superiority of the great Frenchmoralists by supposing in them a fancy and imagination too defective forpoetic art. It was the circumstances of the national literature duringthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which made Vauvenargues forinstance a composer of aphorisms, rather than a moral poet like Pope. Let us remember some of his own most discriminating words. 'Who has moreimagination, ' he asks, 'than Bossuet, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, allof them great philosophers? Who more judgment and wisdom than Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Molière, all of them poets full of genius? _It isnot true, then, that the ruling qualities exclude the others; on thecontrary, they suppose them. _ I should be much surprised if a great poetwere without vivid lights on philosophy, at any rate moral philosophy, and it will very seldom happen for a true philosopher to be totallydevoid of imagination. '[31] With imagination in the highest senseVauvenargues was not largely endowed, but he had as much as is essentialto reveal to one that the hard and sober-judging faculty is not thesingle, nor even the main element, in a wise and full intelligence. 'Allmy philosophy, ' he wrote to Mirabeau, when only four or five and twentyyears old, an age when the intellect is usually most exigent ofsupremacy, 'all my philosophy has its source in my heart. '[32]

In the same spirit he had well said that there is more cleverness in theworld than greatness of soul, more people with talent than with loftycharacter. [33] Hence some of the most peculiarly characteristic andimpressive of his aphorisms; that famous one, for instance, '_Greatthoughts come from the heart, _' and the rest which hang upon the sameidea. 'Virtuous instinct has no need of reason, but supplies it. ''Reason misleads us more often than nature. ' 'Reason does not know theinterests of the heart. ' 'Perhaps we owe to the passions the greatestadvantages of the intellect. ' Such sayings are only true on conditionthat instinct and nature and passion have been already moulded under theinfluence of reason; just as this other saying, which won the warmadmiration of Voltaire, '_Magnanimity owes no account of its motives toprudence_, ' is only true on condition that by magnanimity we understanda mood not out of accord with the loftiest kind of prudence. [34] But inthe eighteenth century reason and prudence were words current in theirlower and narrower sense, and thus one coming like Vauvenargues to seethis lowness and narrowness, sought to invest ideas and terms that infact only involved modifications of these, with a significance of directantagonism. Magnanimity was contrasted inimically with prudence, andinstinct and nature were made to thrust from their throne reason andreflection. Carried to its limit, this tendency developed thespeculative and social excesses of the great sentimental school. InVauvenargues it was only the moderate, just, and most seasonable protestof a fine observer, against the supremacy among ideals of a narrow, deliberative, and calculating spirit. 

His exaltation of virtuous instinct over reason is in a curious wayparallel to Burke's memorable exaltation over reason of prejudice. 'Prejudice, ' said Burke, 'previously engages the mind in a steady courseof wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in themoment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudicerenders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts;through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature. '[35] WhatBurke designated as prejudice, Vauvenargues less philosophically styledvirtuous instinct; each meant precisely the same thing, though thedifference of phrase implied a different view of its origin and growth:and the side opposite to each of them was the same--namely, asophisticated and over-refining intelligence, narrowed to theconsideration of particular circumstances as they presented themselves. 

Translated into the modern equivalent, the heart, nature, instinct ofVauvenargues all mean _character_. He insisted upon spontaneous impulseas a condition of all greatest thought and action. Men think and work onthe highest level when they move without conscious and deliberate strainafter virtue: when, in other words, their habitual motives, aims, methods, their character, in short, naturally draw them into the regionof what is virtuous. '_It is by our ideas that we ennoble our passionsor we debase them; they rise high or sink low according to the man'ssoul_. '[36] All this has ceased to be new to our generation, but ahundred 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 balancingand prudential calculation. A book like _Clarissa Harlowe_ shows us thisprudential and calculating temper underneath a varnish ofsentimentalism and fine feelings, an incongruous and extremelydispleasing combination, particularly characteristic of certain sets andcircles in that century. One of the distinctions of Vauvenargues is thatexaltation of sentiment did not with him cloak a substantial adherenceto a low prudence, nor to that fragment of reason which has soconstantly usurped the name and place of the whole. He eschewed the toocommon compromise which the sentimentalist makes with reflection andcalculation, and it was this which saved him from being asentimentalist. 

That doctrine of the predominance of the heart over the head, which hasbrought forth so many pernicious and destructive fantasies in thehistory of social thought, represented in his case no more than areaction against the great detractors of humanity. Rochefoucauld hadsurveyed mankind exclusively from the point of their vain and egoisticpropensities, and his aphorisms are profoundly true of all persons inwhom these propensities are habitually supreme, and of all the world inso far as these propensities happen to influence them. Pascal, on theone hand, leaving the affections and inclinations of a man very much onone side, had directed all his efforts to showing the pitiful feeblenessand incurable helplessness of man in the sphere of the understanding. Vauvenargues is thus confronted by two sinister pictures ofhumanity--the one of its moral meanness and littleness, the other of itsintellectual poverty and impotency. He turned away from both of them, and found in magnanimous and unsophisticated feeling, of which he wasconscious in himself and observant in others, a compensation alike forthe selfishness of some men and the intellectual limitations of all men. This compensation was ample enough to restore the human self-respectthat Pascal and Rochefoucauld had done their best to weaken. 

The truth in that disparagement was indisputable so far as it went. Itwas not a kind of truth, however, on which it is good for the world muchto dwell, and it is the thinkers like Vauvenargues who build up andinspire high resolve. 'Scarcely any maxim, ' runs one of his own, 'istrue in all respects. '[37] We must take them in pairs to find out themean truth; and to understand the ways of men, so far as words about mencan help us, we must read with appreciation not only Vauvenargues, whosaid that great thoughts come from the heart, but La Rochefoucauld, whocalled the intelligence the dupe of the heart, and Pascal, who saw onlydesperate creatures, miserably perishing before one another's eyes inthe grim dungeon of the universe. Yet it is the observer in the spiritof Vauvenargues, of whom we must always say that he has chosen thebetter part. Vauvenargues' own estimate was sound. 'The Duke of LaRochefoucauld seized to perfection the weak side of human nature; maybehe knew its strength too; and only contested the merit of so manysplendid actions in order to unmask false wisdom. Whatever his design, the effect seems to me mischievous; his book, filled with delicateinvective against hypocrisy, even to this day turns men away fromvirtue, by persuading them that it is never genuine. '[38] Or, as he putit elsewhere, without express personal reference: 'You must arouse inmen the feeling of their prudence and strength, if you would raise theircharacter; those who only apply themselves to bring out the absurditiesand weaknesses of mankind, enlighten the judgment of the public far lessthan they deprave its inclination. '[39] This principle was implied inGoethe's excellent saying, that if you would improve a man, it is bestto begin by persuading him that he is already that which you would havehim to be. 

To talk in this way was to bring men out from the pits which cynicism onthe one side, and asceticism on the other, had dug so deep for them, back to the warm precincts of the cheerful day. The cynic and theascetic had each looked at life through a microscope, exaggeratingblemishes, distorting proportions, filling the eye with ugly anddisgusting illusions. [40] Humanity, as was said, was in disgrace withthe thinkers. The maxims of Vauvenargues were a plea for a return to ahealthy and normal sense of relations. 'These philosophers, ' he cried, 'are men, yet they do not speak in human language; they change all theideas of things, and misuse all their terms. '[41] These are some of themost direct of his retorts upon Pascal and La Rochefoucauld:

'I have always felt it to be absurd for philosophers to fabricate aVirtue that is incompatible with the nature of humanity, and then afterhaving pretended this, to declare coldly that there is no virtue. Ifthey are speaking of the phantom of their imagination, they may ofcourse abandon or destroy it as they please, for they invented it; buttrue virtue--which they cannot be brought to call by this name, becauseit is not in conformity with their definitions; which is the work ofnature and not their own; and which consists mainly in goodness andvigour of soul--that does not depend on their fancies, and will lastfor ever with characters that cannot possibly be effaced. '

'The body has its graces, the intellect its talents; is the heart thento have nothing but vices? And must man, who is capable of reason, beincapable of virtue?'

'We are susceptible of friendship, justice, humanity, compassion, andreason. O my friends, what then is virtue?'

'Disgust is no mark of health, nor is appetite a disorder; quite thereverse. Thus we think of the body, but we judge the soul on otherprinciples. We suppose that a strong soul is one that is exempt frompassions, and as youth is more active and ardent than later age, we lookon it as a time of fever, and place the strength of man in hisdecay. '[42]

 * * * * *

The theological speculator insists that virtue lies in a constant andfierce struggle between the will and the passions, between man and humannature. 

Vauvenargues founded his whole theory of life on the doctrine that thewill is not something independent of passions, inclinations, and ideas, but on the contrary is a mere index moved and fixed by them, as the handof a clock follows the operation of the mechanical forces within. Character is an integral unit. 'Whether it is reason or passion thatmoves us, it is we who determine ourselves; it would be madness todistinguish one's thoughts and sentiments from one's self. . . . No will inmen, which does not owe its direction to their temperament, theirreasoning, and their actual feelings. '[43] Virtue, then, is notnecessarily a condition of strife between the will and the rest of ourfaculties and passions; no such strife is possible, for the will obeysthe preponderant passion or idea, or group of passions and ideas; andthe contest lies between one passion or group and another. Hence, inright character there is no struggle at all, for the virtuousinclinations naturally and easily direct our will and actions; virtue isthen independent of struggle; and the circumstance of our findingpleasure in this or that practice, is no reason why both the practiceand the pleasure should not be unimpeachably virtuous. 

It is easy to see the connection between this theory of the dependenceof the will, and the prominence which Vauvenargues is ever giving to thepassions. These are the key to the movements of the will. To direct andshape the latter, you must educate the former. It was for his perceptionof this truth, we may notice in passing, that Comte awarded toVauvenargues a place in the Positivist Calendar; 'for his direct effort, in spite of the universal desuetude into which it had fallen, toreorganise the culture of the heart according to a better knowledge ofhuman nature, of which this noble thinker discerned the centre to beaffective. '[44]

This theory of the will, however, was not allowed to rest here; theactivity of man was connected with the universal order. 'What preventsthe mind from perceiving the motive of its actions, is only theirinfinite quickness. Our thoughts perish at the moment in which theireffects make themselves known; when the action commences, the principlehas vanished; the will appears, the feeling is gone; we cannot find itourselves, and so doubt if we ever had it. But it would be an enormousdefect to have a will without a principle; our actions would be allhaphazard; the world would be nothing but caprice; all order would beoverturned. It is not enough, then, to admit it to be true that it isreflection or sentiment that leads us: we must add further that it wouldbe monstrous for this to be otherwise. [45] . . . 

'The will recalls or suspends our ideas; our ideas shape or vary thelaws of the will; the laws of the will are thus dependent on the laws ofcreation; but the laws of creation are not foreign to ourselves, theyconstitute our being, and form our essence, and are entirely our own, and we can say boldly that we act by ourselves, when we only act bythem. [46] . . . 

'Let us recognise here, then, our profound subjection. . . . Let us rendthe melancholy veil which hides from our eyes the eternal chain of theworld and the glory of the Creator. . . . External objects form ideas inthe mind, these ideas form sentiments, these sentiments volitions, thesevolitions actions in ourselves and outside of ourselves. So noble adependence in all the parts of this vast universe must conduct ourreflections to the unity of its principle; this subordination makes thetrue greatness of the beings subordinated. The excellence of man is inhis dependence; his subjection displays two marvellous images--theinfinite power of God, and the dignity of our own soul. . . . Manindependent would be an object of contempt; the feeling of his ownimperfection would be his eternal torture. But the same feeling, when weadmit his dependence, is the foundation of his sweetest hope; it revealsto him the nothingness of finite good, and leads him back to hisprinciple, which insists on joining itself to him, and which alone cansatisfy his desires in the possession of himself. '[47]

Vauvenargues showed his genuine healthiness not more by a plenaryrejection of the doctrine of the incurable vileness and frenzy of man, than by his freedom from the boisterous and stupid transcendentaloptimism which has too many votaries in our time. He would not have mentold that they are miserable earth-gnomes, the slaves of a blackdestiny, but he still placed them a good deal lower than the angels. Forinstance: 'We are too inattentive or too much occupied with ourselves, to get to the bottom of one another's characters; _whoever has watchedmasks at a ball dancing together in a friendly manner, and joining handswithout knowing who the others are, and then parting the momentafterwards never to meet again nor ever to regret, or be regretted, canform some idea of the world_. '[48] But then, as he said elsewhere: 'Wecan be perfectly aware of our imperfection, without being humiliated bythe sight. _One of the noblest qualities of our nature is that we areable so easily to dispense with greater perfection. _'[49] In all this wemark the large and rational humaneness of the new time, a tolerant andkindly and elevating estimate of men. 

The faith in the natural and simple operation of virtue, without the aidof all sorts of valetudinarian restrictions, comes out on everyoccasion. The Trappist theory of the conditions of virtue found noquarter with him. Mirabeau for instance complained of the atmosphere ofthe Court, as fatal to the practice of virtue. Vauvenargues replied thatthe people there were doubtless no better than they should be, and thatvice was dominant. 'So much the worse for those who have vices. But whenyou are fortunate enough to possess virtue, it is, to my thinking, avery noble ambition to lift up this same virtue in the bosom ofcorruption, to make it succeed, to place it above all, to indulge andcontrol the passions without reproach, to overthrow the obstacles tothem, and to surrender yourself to the inclinations of an upright andmagnanimous heart, instead of combating or concealing them in retreat, without either satisfying or vanquishing them. I know nothing so weakand so vain as to flee before vices, or to hate them without measure;for people only hate them by way of reprisal because they are afraid ofthem, or else out of vengeance because these vices have played them somesorry turn; but a little loftiness of soul, some knowledge of the heart, a gentle and tranquil humour, will protect you against the risk of beingeither surprised, or keenly wounded by them. '[50]

There is a tolerably obvious distinction between two principal ways ofexamining character. One is a musing, subjective method of delineation, in which the various shades and windings seem to reveal themselves witha certain spontaneity, and we follow many recesses and depths in theheart of another, such as only music stirs into consciousness inourselves. Besides this rarer poetic method, there is what may bestyled the diplomatist's method; it classifies characters objectively, according to the kinds of outer conduct in which they manifestthemselves, and according to the best ways of approaching and dealingwith them. The second of these describes the spirit in whichVauvenargues observed men. He is French, and not German, and belongs tothe eighteenth century, and not to the seventeenth or the nineteenth. His _Characters_, very little known in this country, are as excellent asany work in this kind that we are acquainted with, or probably asexcellent as such work can be. They are real and natural, yet whileabstaining as rigorously as Vauvenargues everywhere does from grotesqueand extravagant traits, they avoid equally the vice of presenting themere bald and sterile flats of character, which he that runs may read. As we have said, he had the quality possessed by so few of those whowrite about men; he watched men, and drew from the life. In a word, hestudied concrete examples and interrogated his own experience--the onlysure guarantee that one writing on his themes has anything which it isworth our while to listen to. Among other consequences of this realityof their source is the agreeable fact that these pictures are free fromthat clever bitterness and easy sarcasm, by which crude and jejuneobservers, thinking more of their own wit than of what they observe, sometimes gain a little reputation. Even the coxcombs, self-dupingknaves, simpletons, braggarts, and other evil or pitiful types whom heselects, are drawn with unstrained and simple conformity to reality. The pictures have no moral label pinned on to them. Yet Vauvenarguestook life seriously enough, and it was just because he took itseriously, that he had no inclination to air his wit or practise averbal humour upon the stuff out of which happiness and misery are made. 

One or two fragments will suffice. Take the Man of the World, forinstance:

'A man of the world is not he who knows other men best, who has mostforesight or dexterity in affairs, who is most instructed by experienceand study; he is neither a good manager, nor a man of science, nor apolitician, nor a skilful officer, nor a painstaking magistrate. He is aman who is ignorant of nothing but who knows nothing; who, doing his ownbusiness ill, fancies himself very capable of doing that of otherpeople; a man who has much useless wit, who has the art of sayingflattering things which do not flatter, and judicious things which giveno information; who can persuade nobody, though he speaks well; endowedwith that sort of eloquence which can bring out trifles, and whichannihilates great subjects; as penetrating in what is ridiculous andexternal in men, as he is blind to the depths of their minds. One who, afraid of being wearisome by reason, is wearisome by his extravagances;is jocose without gaiety, and lively without passion. '[51]

Or the two following, the Inconstant Man, and Lycas or the Firm Man:

'Such a man seems really to possess more than one character. A powerfulimagination makes his soul take the shape of all the objects that affectit; he suddenly astonishes the world by acts of generosity and couragewhich were never expected of him; the image of virtue inflames, elevates, softens, masters his heart; he receives the impression fromthe loftiest, and he surpasses them. But when his imagination has growncold, his courage droops, his generosity sinks; the vices opposed tothese virtues take possession of his soul, and after having reignedawhile supreme, they make way for other objects. . . . We cannot say thatthey have a great nature, or strong, or weak, or light; it is a swiftand imperious imagination which reigns with sovereign power over alltheir being, which subjugates their genius, and which prescribes forthem in turn those fine actions and those faults, those heights andthose littlenesses, those flights of enthusiasm and those fits ofdisgust, which we are wrong in charging either with hypocrisy ormadness. '[52]

'Lycas unites with a self-reliant, bold, and impetuous nature, a spiritof reflection and profundity which moderates the counsels of hispassions, which leads him by inpenetrable motives, and makes him advanceto his ends by many paths. He is one of those long-sighted men, whoconsider the succession of events from afar off, who always finish adesign begun; who are capable, I do not say of dissembling either amisfortune or an offence, but of rising above either, instead of lettingit depress them; deep natures, independent by their firmness in daringall and suffering all; who, whether they resist their inclinations outof foresight, or whether, out of pride and a secret consciousness oftheir resources, they defy what is called prudence, always, in good asin evil, cheat the acutest conjectures. '[53]

Let us note that Vauvenargues is almost entirely free from thatfavourite trick of the aphoristic person, which consists in forming aseries of sentences, the predicates being various qualifications ofextravagance, vanity, and folly, and the subject being Women. He resiststhis besetting temptation of the modern speaker of apophthegms toidentify woman and fool. On the one or two occasions in which he beginsthe maxim with the fatal words, _Les femmes_, he is as little profoundas other people who persist in thinking of man and woman as twodifferent species. 'Women, ' for example, 'have ordinarily more vanitythan temperament, and more temperament than virtue'--which is fairlytrue of all human beings, and in so far as it is true, describes menjust as exactly--and no more so--as it describes women. In truth, Vauvenargues felt too seriously about conduct and character to go far inthis direction. Now and again he is content with a mere smartness, aswhen he says: 'There are some thoroughly excellent people who cannot getrid of their _ennui_ except at the expense of society. ' But such a moodis not common. He is usually grave, and not seldom profoundly weighty, delicate without being weak, and subtle without obscurity; as forexample:

'People teach children to fear and obey; the avarice, pride, or timidityof the fathers, instructs the children in economy, arrogance, orsubmission. We stir them up to be yet more and more copyists, which theyare only too disposed to be, as it is; nobody thinks of making themoriginal, hardy, independent. '

'If instead of dulling the vivacity of children, people did their bestto raise the impulsiveness and movement of their characters, what mightwe not expect from a fine natural temper?'

Again: 'The moderation of the weak is mediocrity. '

'What is arrogance in the weak is elevation in the strong; as thestrength of a sick man is frenzy, and that of a whole man is vigour. '

'To speak imprudently and to speak boldly are nearly always the samething. But we may speak without prudence, and still speak what is right;and it is a mistake to fancy that a man has a shallow intelligence, because the boldness of his character or the liveliness of his tempermay have drawn from him, in spite of himself, some dangerous truth. '

'It is a great sign of mediocrity always to praise moderately. '

 * * * * *

Vauvenargues has a saying to the effect that men very often, withoutthinking of it, form an idea of their face and expression from theruling sentiment of which they are conscious in themselves at the time. He hints that this is perhaps the reason why a coxcomb always believeshimself to be handsome. [54] And in a letter to Mirabeau, he describespleasantly how sometimes in moments of distraction he pictures himselfwith an air of loftiness, of majesty, of penetration, according to theidea that is occupying his mind, and how if by chance he sees his facein the mirror, he is nearly as much amazed as if he saw a Cyclops or aTartar. [55] Yet his nature, if we may trust the portrait, revealeditself in his face; it is one of the most delightful to look upon, evenin the cold inarticulateness of an engraving, that the gallery of fairsouls contains for us. We may read the beauty of his character in thesoft strength of the brow, the meditative lines of mouth and chin, aboveall, the striking clearness, the self-collection, the femininesolicitude, that mingle freely and without eagerness or expectancy inhis gaze, as though he were hearkening to some ever-flowing inwardstream of divine melody. We think of that gracious touch in Bacon'spicture of the father of Solomon's House, that 'he had an aspect asthough he pitied men. ' If we reproach France in the eighteenth centurywith its coarseness, artificiality, shallowness, because it producedsuch men as the rather brutish Duclos, we ought to remember that thiswas also the century of Vauvenargues, one of the most tender, lofty, cheerful, and delicately sober of all moralists. 

[Footnote 1: _Pensées_, i. V. 8. ]

[Footnote 2: _Ib. _ i. Vi. 16. ]

[Footnote 3: _Ib. _ i. Vii. 6. ]

[Footnote 4: M. Gilbert's edition of the _Works and Correspondence ofVauvenargues_ (2 vols. Paris: Furne, 1857), ii. 133. ]

[Footnote 5: _Éloge de P. H. De Seytres_. _OEuv. _ i. 141-150. ]

[Footnote 6: _OEuv. _ ii. 233. See too p. 267. ]

[Footnote 7: No. 579, i. 455. ]

[Footnote 8: _Réflexions sur Divers Sujets_, i. 104. ]

[Footnote 9: _OEuv. _ ii. 249. ]

[Footnote 10: _Ib. _ ii. 265. ]

[Footnote 11: _Ib. _ ii. 266. ]

[Footnote 12: _Conseils à un Jeune Homme_, i. 124. ]

[Footnote 13: _OEuv. _ ii. 252. ]

[Footnote 14: _Ib. _ ii. 272. ]

[Footnote 15: _Mémoires de Marmontel_, vol. I. 189. ]

[Footnote 16: The reader of Marmontel's _Mémoires_ will remember theextraordinary and grotesque circumstances under which a younger brotherof Mirabeau, (of _l'ami des hommes_, that is) appealed to the memory ofVauvenargues. See vol. I. 256-260. ]

[Footnote 17: _OEuv. _ i. 225-232. ]

[Footnote 18: _Letter to Saint-Vincens_, ii. 146. ]

[Footnote 19: No. 318. ]

[Footnote 20: Napoleon said on some occasion, '_Il faut vouloir vivre etsavoir mourir_. ' M. Littré prefaces the third volume of that heroicmonument of learning and industry, his _Dictionary of the FrenchLanguage_, by the words: 'He who wishes to employ his life seriouslyought always to act as if he had long to live, and to govern himself asif he would have soon to die. ']

[Footnote 21: No. 223. ]

[Footnote 22: No. 300. ]

[Footnote 23: No. 264. ]

[Footnote 24: _Réflexions Critiques sur quelques Poètes_, i. 237. ]

[Footnote 25: _OEuv_. I. 248. ]

[Footnote 26: _Réflexions Critiques sur quelques Poètes_, i. 238. ]

[Footnote 27: _OEuv. _ i. 243. ]

[Footnote 28: _OEuv. _ i. 275. ]

[Footnote 29: _Correspondance_. _OEuv. _ ii. 131, 207. ]

[Footnote 30: Long-winded and tortuous and difficult to seize asShaftesbury is as a whole, in detached sentences he shows markedaphoristic quality; _e. G. _ 'The most ingenious way of becoming foolishis by a system;' 'The liker anything is to wisdom, if it be not plainlythe thing itself, the more directly it becomes its opposite. ']

[Footnote 31: No. 278 (i. 411). ]

[Footnote 32: _OEuv. _ ii. 115. ]

[Footnote 33: _Ib. _ i. 87. ]

[Footnote 34: Doch Zuweilen ist des Sinns in einer Sache Auch mehr, als wir vermuthen; und es wäre So unerhört doch nicht, dass uns der Heiland Auf Wegen zu sich zöge, die der Kluge Von selbst nicht leicht betreten würde. 

 _Nathan der Weise_, iii. 10. ]

[Footnote 35: _Reflections on the French Revolution_, Works (ed. 1842), i. 414. ]

[Footnote 36: _OEuv. _ ii. 170. ]

[Footnote 37: No. 111. ]

[Footnote 38: _OEuv. _ ii. 74. ]

[Footnote 39: No. 285. ]

[Footnote 40: 'A man may as well pretend to cure himself of love byviewing his mistress through the artificial medium of a microscope orprospect, and beholding there the coarseness of her skin and monstrousdisproportion of her features, as hope to excite or moderate any passionby the artificial arguments of a Seneca or an Epictetus. '--Hume's_Essays_ (xviii. _The Sceptic_). ]

[Footnote 41: _OEuv. _ i. 163. ]

[Footnote 42: Nos. 296-298, 148. ]

[Footnote 43: _Sur le Libre Arbitre_. _OEuv. _ i. 199. ]

[Footnote 44: _Politique Positive_, iii. 589. ]

[Footnote 45: _Ib. _ i. 194. ]

[Footnote 46: _Politique Positive_, 205. ]

[Footnote 47: _Ib. _ 206, 207. ]

[Footnote 48: No. 330. ]

[Footnote 49: Nos. 462, 463. ]

[Footnote 50: _Correspondance_. _OEuv. _ ii. 163. ]

[Footnote 51: _OEuv. _ i. 310. ]

[Footnote 52: _OEuv. _ i. 325. ]

[Footnote 53: _OEuv. _ i. 326. ]

[Footnote 54: No. 236. ]

[Footnote 55: _OEuv_. Ii. 188. ]