INTRODUCTION V

Lés Caractères also reflect the traditions of their âge. We cannot expect that their author would be independent of the great moralists and essayists who had preceded him. He had read them ail and nieditated upon them. He had even assimilated much of their thought. While the person, the individual, he is sketching, quite surely had a being in the Paris of the eighties, the portrayal of that person is affected by réminiscences of Montaigne, or Descartes, or Pascal, or La Rochefoucauld, or perhaps Bossuet — as in the pictures of Louis XIV and the Prince de Condé. The Discours sur Théophraste, which serves as a préface, to Les Caractères, acknowledges this varied indebtedness in a comparison which our author makes between Pascal's Pensées and La Rochefoucauld's Mcucimes on the one hand and Les Caractères on the other: " Moins sublime que le premier et moins délicat que le second, il \Les Caractères"] ne tend qu^à rendre Phomme raisonnable." The purpose thus avowed might also be attributed to Descartes.

In ail this we do not claim that La Bruyère intended to écho the ideas of his forerunners, French or Greek, though he imitâtes Theophrastus on many a page. He differentiated himself quite successfuily f rom them ail by the spîrit which moved him. His predecessors in the study of man took humanity as it was. They did not wish to change its extemal conditions. They aimed at the soûl which could be regenerated by itself if it were evil. They did not présume to intimate that the world could be improved in any other than a moral way. Not so with La Bruyère. Moral régénération as a cure for human ills is admitted by him, but to this remedy he adds another. The passive contemplation of man ceases in Les Caractères, and the active commences. The intellectual, moral or spiritual conception of this great subject yields to the social. Unlike the earlier essa3rists, La Bruyère had felt the inequalities of rank and wealth. He was not content to rest under the established social conditions, and he used his study of man to give relief to his own sufferings as