iving
fatherly counsel which was much beyond his years. He observes that
"the advice of old men is like winter sunshine that gives out light
without warmth," but that the words of a wise and genial young man may
radiate heat and glow. His own advice, given first to his
fellow-officers, then to a circle of literary friends, then to France
so long as her classic literature finds readers, was identical. He
hated conscientious subterfuges which equalize good and evil. He looked
upon "gloire" and "vertu" as the two great motive forces of a sane and
beneficent life. In this he was unique; Voltaire notes that
Vauvenargues soared, in an age of mediocrities, _un siecle des
petitesses_, by his refusal to adopt the spirit of the world. He was a
puritan of the intelligence, and for the ideal of Sully or Villars he
put up the ideal of Oliver Cromwell.

The moral grandeur and spiritual force of Vauvenargues' philosophy
demanded in the disciple a constant exercise of energy and will. Faith
inspired by effort was to be pursued through sacrifice to the utmost
limits of endurance, and with no ultimate reward but _gloire_. This
was, however, modified, as it is in the most strenuous direction of
character in the Frenchmen of to-day, by an illuminating humanity.
Lofty as was the aim of Vauvenargues, nothing could have been more
tender than his practice. We are told that the expression in the eyes
of a sick animal, the moan of a wounded deer in the forest, moved him
to compassion. He carried this tolerance into human affairs, for he
was pre-eminently a human being; "the least of citizens has a right to
the honours of his country." He set a high moral value on courtesy,
and exposed, as a fallacy, the pretence that to be polite is to lack
sincerity. His disposition was easy-going, although his intellect was
such a high-flyer; in pagan times he would have believed in ridiculous
divinities rather than set himself up as an atheist. He did not
believe that excess of knowledge gives firmness to the judgment, and
he remarks that the opulence of learned men often leads to more errors
than the poverty of those who depend on the native virtues of instinct
and experience. He has phrases which seem meant to condemn the
mechanical emptiness of the modern German system of _kultur_.

Full of ardour for all that is beautiful and good, tortured by disease
and pinched by poverty, but never allowing his personal misfortunes to
affect his view of life, or to c