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 Bruyère