A singular charm in the French character lies in its gift for composite action. Frenchmen prefer marching towards victory in a body to a scattered effort of individual energy. It was part of the constructive genius of Vauvenargues to find the aim and joy of life in a combination of sentiment and action, in a community of rivals amiably striving for the crown with fellowmen of like instincts and of like experience. He was of all moralists the least solitary; he had spent his life as a soldier among soldiers, among those who did their best, in the midst of hardships, to live a life of pleasure without reflection. He was no prig, but he had formed the habit of giving 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_.