prophetic," and I do
not know that any one has attempted to explain this rather curious
phrase. But we may adopt it in the light of more than two centuries
which were unknown to Boileau. More than any other writer of the end
of the seventeenth century La Bruyere prophesied of a good time
coming. He did not speak out very plainly, but it is the privilege of
prophets to be obscure, and their predictions are commonly not
comprehensible until after the event. But we may claim for La Bruyere
the praise of being a great civilizer of French thought; more than
that, he widened human social intelligence throughout Europe. He is
the direct ancestor of the Frenchman of to-day who observes closely
and clearly, who has the power to define what he sees, and who retains
the colour and movement of it. To this day, as may be amply seen in
the records and episodes of the war, in the correspondence of officers
at the front, in the general intellectual conduct of the contest,
Frenchmen rarely experience a difficulty in finding the exact word
they want. These men who arrest for our pleasure an impression, who
rebuild before us the fabric of their experience, descend in direct
line from La Bruyere. It was he who taught their nation to seize the
attitude and to photograph the gesture.

La Bruyere's express aim is to clarify our minds, to make us think
lucidly and in consequence speak with precision. We have already seen
what value he sets on the right word in the right place. He is the
enemy of all those who shamble along in the supposition that an
inaccurate phrase will "do well enough," and that any slipshod
definition is excused by our saying, "Oh, you know what I mean!" His
own style is finished up to the highest point, and it is brightened
and varied with such skill that the author never ceases to hold the
attention of the reader. He reaches the very ideal of that elegant
wandering art of writing which the Latins called _sermo pedestris_.
Indeed, he gives so much attention to the perfect mode of saying
things that some critics have brought it as a charge against him that
he overdoes it, that in fact his style is more weighty than his
subject. This, I think, is a very hasty judgment, founded a little, no
doubt, upon a certain dread on La Bruyere's part of being commonplace.
He was dealing, as every moralist is bound to deal, with ideas of a
more or less primitive character, to which sparkle and force must be
given by illustrative example