CRITICALMISCELLANIES

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. II.

Essay 1: Vauvenargues

London

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1905

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

CHAPTER	PAGE
The influence of Pascal	1
Vauvenargues holds the balance between him and the votaries of Perfectibility	4
Birth, education, and hard life of Vauvenargues	4
Life in Paris, and friendship with Voltaire	10
His religious sentiment	12
His delicacy, reserve, and psychagogic quality	15
Certain inability to appreciate marked originality	17
Criticisms on Molière, Racine, and Corneille	19
Comparison with English aphoristic writers and moralists	20
Character the key to his theory of greatness	25
His exaltation of spontaneous feeling, a protest against Rochefoucauld and Pascal	26
His plea for a normal sense of human relation, the same	28
His doctrine of the Will connected with his doctrine ofCharacter	29
Antipathy to ascetic restrictions	33
Two ways of examining character: that followed by Vauvenargues	34
Examples of his style	36
The beauty of his nature to be read in his face	40

[Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book.]

VAUVENARGUES.

One of the most important phases of French thoughtin the great century of its illumination is onlythoroughly intelligible, on condition that in studyingit we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force,and genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and mostinfluential representative of that way of viewinghuman nature and its circumstances, which it wasone of the characteristic glories of the eighteenthcentury to have rebelled against and rejected. Morethan a hundred years after the publication of thePensées, Condorcet thought it worth while to preparea new edition of them, with annotations, protesting,not without a certain unwonted

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