’People teach children to fear and obey; the avarice, pride, or timidity of the fathers, instructs the children in economy, arrogance, or submission.  We stir them up to be yet more and more copyists, which they are only too disposed to be, as it is; nobody thinks of making them original, hardy, independent.’

’If instead of dulling the vivacity of children, people did their best to raise the impulsiveness and movement of their characters, what might we 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 the strength 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 same thing.  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 temper may 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, without thinking of it, form an idea of their face and expression from the ruling sentiment of which they are conscious in themselves at the time.  He hints that this is perhaps the reason why a coxcomb always believes himself to be handsome.[54] And in a letter to Mirabeau, he describes pleasantly how sometimes in moments of distraction he pictures himself with an air of loftiness, of majesty, of penetration, according to the idea that is occupying his mind, and how if by chance he sees his face in the mirror, he is nearly as much amazed as if he saw a Cyclops or a Tartar.[55] Yet his nature, if we may trust the portrait, revealed itself in his face; it is one of the most delightful to look upon, even in the cold inarticulateness of an engraving, that the gallery of fair souls contains for us.  We may read the beauty of his character in the soft strength of the brow, the meditative lines of mouth and chin, above all, the striking clearness, the self-collection, the feminine solicitude, that mingle freely and without eagerness or expectancy in his gaze, as though he were hearkening to some ever-flowing inward stream of divine melody.  We think of that gracious touch in Bacon’s picture of the father of Solomon’s House, that ’he had an aspect as though he pitied men.’  If we reproach France in the eighteenth century with its coarseness, artificiality, shallowness, because it produced such men as the rather brutish Duclos, we ought to remember that this was also the century of Vauvenargues, one of the most tender, lofty, cheerful, and delicately sober of all moralists.

[Footnote 1:  Pensees, i. v. 8.]

[Footnote 2:  Ib. i. vi. 16.]

[Footnote 3:  Ib. i. vii. 6.]