198                   GOUVERNEUR MORRIS.
shrewd as they are humorous, prove how little
he respected their philosophy, and how com-
pletely indifferent he was to their claims to
social preeminence.
Much has been written about the pleasure-
loving, highly cultured society of eighteenth-
century France; but to a man like Morris, of
real ability and with an element of sturdiness
in his make-up, both the culture and knowl-
edge looked a little like veneering ; the polish
partook of effeminacy ; the pleasure so eagerly
sought after could be called pleasure only by
people of ignoble ambition ; and the life that
was lived seemed narrow and petty, agreeable
enough for a change, but dreary beyond meas-
ure if followed too long. The authors, philoso-
phers, and statesmen of the salon were rarely,
almost never, men of real greatness ; their
metal did not ring true ; they were shams, and
the life of which they were a part was a sham.
Not only was the existence hollow, unwhole-
some, effeminate, but also in the end tedious :
the silent, decorous dullness of life in the drea-
riest country town is not more insufferable
than, after a time, become the endless chatter,
the small witticisms, the mock enthusiasms, and
vapid affectations of an aristocratic society as
artificial and unsound as that of the Parisian
drawing-rooms in the last century.