A man’s prepossessions in dramatic poetry, supposing him to be cultivated enough to have any prepossessions, furnish the most certain clue that we can get to the spirit in which he inwardly regards character and conduct.  The uniform and reasoned preference which Vauvenargues had for Racine over Moliere and Corneille, was only the transfer to art of that balanced, moderate, normal, and emphatically harmonious temper, which he brought to the survey of human nature.  Excess was a condition of thought, feeling, and speech, that in every form 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.  He failed to relish even Montaigne as he ought to have done, because Montaigne’s method was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, his egoism too manifest, and because he did not produce complete and artistic wholes.[28]

Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues’ thinking; balance, evenness, purity of vision, penetration finely toned with indulgence.  He is never betrayed into criticism of men from the point of view of immutable first principles.  Perhaps this was what the elder Mirabeau meant when he wrote to Vauvenargues, who was his cousin:  ’You have the English genius to perfection,’ and what Vauvenargues meant when he wrote of himself to Mirabeau:  ’Nobody in the world has a mind less French than I.’[29] These international comparisons are among the least fruitful of literary amusements, even when they happen not to be extremely misleading; as when, for example, Voltaire called Locke the English Pascal, a description which can only be true on condition that the qualifying adjective is meant to strip either Locke or Pascal of most of his characteristic traits.  And if we compare Vauvenargues with any of our English aphoristic writers, there is not resemblance enough to make the contrast instructive.  The obvious truth is that in this department our literature is particularly weak, while French literature is particularly strong in it.  With the exception of Bacon, we have no writer of apophthegms of the first order; and the difference between Bacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues, is the difference between Polonius’s famous discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy of Hamlet.

Bacon’s precepts refer rather to external conduct and worldly fortune than to the inner composition of character, or to the ’wide, gray, lampless’ depths of human destiny.  We find the same national characteristic, though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin’s oracular saws.  Among the French sages a psychological element is predominant, as well as an occasional transcendent loftiness of feeling, not to be found in Bacon’s wisest maxims, and from his point of view in their composition we could not expect to find them there.  We seek in vain amid the positivity of Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox of Browne, or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any of that poetic pensiveness