La Bruyère’s[382] contribution is contained in the opening section, “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit,” of his famous _Caractères_. [Sidenote: _The “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit.”_] It is not very long; it is—according to the plan of the work it is not merely entitled but obliged to be—studiously desultory; and it is not perhaps improved by the other necessity of throwing much of it into portraits of imaginary persons, who are sometimes no doubt very close copies of real ones. But it contains some open and undisguised judgments of the great writers of the past, and a number of astonishingly original, pregnant, and monumentally phrased observations of a general character. In fact I should not hesitate to say that La Bruyère is, after Dryden, who had preceded him by twenty years, the first very great man of letters in modern times who gave himself to Criticism with a comparatively unshackled mind, and who has put matter of permanent value in her treasuries without being a professional rhetorician or commentator. [Sidenote: _General observations._] We need not dwell on the famous overture _Tout est dit_, for it is merely a brilliant example of the kind of paradox-shell or rocket, half truth, half falsehood, which a writer of the kind explodes at the beginning of his entertainment, to attract the attention of his readers, and let them see the brilliancy of the stars that drop from it. But how astonishing is it, in the 17th section, to find, two hundred years and more ago, the full Flaubertian doctrine of the “single word” laid down with confidence, and without an apparent sense that the writer is saying anything new![383] No matter that soon after, in 20, we find an old fallacy, ever new, put in the words, “Le plaisir de la critique nous ôte celui d'être vivement touchés de très-belles choses.” If criticism does this it is the wrong criticism—the criticism _à la_ Boileau, and not the criticism after the manner of Longinus. A man may have spent a lifetime in reading “overthwart and endlong” (as the _Morte d’Arthur_ says) in every direction of literature, in reading always critically, and in reading for long years as professional reviewer, and yet feel as keenly as ever the literary charm which age cannot wither nor custom stale,—the “strong pleasure” of the beautiful word. ----- Footnote 382: Editions again innumerable; but none, I think, can compare with that of M. Servois in the _Grands Écrivains de la France_ (Paris, 1865-1882). Footnote 383: “Entre toutes les différentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une seule de nos pensées _il n’y en a qu’une_ qui soit la bonne,” &c.—_Ed. cit._, i. 118. -----