Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint of the pedagogue or the preacher to have dispelled the sophisms of licence, less by argument than by the gracious attraction of virtue in his own character.  The stock moralist, like the commonplace orator of the pulpit, fails to touch the hearts of men or to affect their lives, for lack of delicacy, of sympathy, and of freshness; he attempts to compensate for this by excess of emphasis, and that more often disgusts us than persuades.  Vauvenargues, on the other hand, is remarkable for delicacy and half-reserved tenderness.  Everything that he has said is coloured and warmed with feeling for the infirmities of men.  He writes not merely as an 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, who passes winter nights on the river’s edge, and keeps watch in silence over the safety of the land.’[21] Vauvenargues had been something very different 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.  They are real, with the reality that can only come from two sources; from high poetic imagination, which Vauvenargues did not possess, or else from experience of life acting on and strengthening a generous nature.  ‘The cause of most books of morality being so insipid,’ he says, ’is that their authors are not sincere; is that, being feeble echoes of one another, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims and private sentiments.’[22] One of the secrets of his own freedom from this ordinary insipidity of moralists was his freedom also from their pretentiousness and insincerity.

Besides these positive merits, he had, as we have said, the negative distinction of never being emphatic.  His sayings are nearly always moderate and persuasive, alike in sentiment and in phrase.  Sometimes they are almost tentative in the diffidence of their turn.  Compared with him La Rochefoucauld’s manner is hard, and that of La Bruyere sententious.  In the moralist who aspires to move and win men by their best side instead of their worst, the absence of this hardness and the presence of a certain lambency and play even in the exposition of truths of perfect assurance, are essential conditions of psychagogic quality.  In religion such law does not hold, and the contagion of fanaticism is usually most rapidly spread by a rigorous and cheerless example.

We may notice in passing that Vauvenargues has the defects of his qualities, and that with his aversion to emphasis was bound up a certain inability to appreciate even grandeur and originality, if they were too strongly and boldly marked.  ‘It is easy to criticise an author,’ he has said, ’but hard to estimate him.’[23] This was never more unfortunately proved than in the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the great Moliere.  There is almost a difficulty