There are minds that run to maxims as Messrs. Holloway and Beecham ran
to pills. From the fields and mines of experience they cull their secret
ingredients, concentrate them in the alembic of wit, mould them into
compact and serviceable form, and put them upon the market of publicity
for the universal benefit of mankind. Such essence of wisdom will surely
cure all ills; such maxims must be worth a guinea a box. When the wise
and the worldly have condensed their knowledge and observation into
portable shape, why go further and pay more for a medicine of the soul,
or, indeed, for the soul's sustenance? Pills, did we say? Are there not
tabloids that supply the body with oxygen, hydrogen, calorics, or
whatever else is essential to life in the common hundredweights and
gallons of bread, meat, and drink? Why not feed our souls on maxims,
like those who spread the board for courses of a bovril lozenge apiece,
two grains of phosphorus, three of nitrogen, one of saccharine, a
dewdrop of alcohol, and half a scruple of caffeine to conclude?
It is a stimulating thought, encouraging to economy of time and space.
We read to acquire wisdom, and no one grudges zeal in that pursuit. But
still, the time spent upon it, especially in our own country, is what
old journalists used to call "positively appalling," and in some books,
perhaps, we may draw blank. Read only maxims, and in the twinkling of an
eye you catch the thing that you pursue. It is not "Wisdom while you
wait"; there is no waiting at all. It is a "lightning lunch," a "kill"
without the risk and fatigue of hunting. The find and the death are
simultaneous. And as to space, a poacher's pocket will hold your
library; where now the sewers of Bloomsbury crack beneath the
accumulating masses of superfluous print, one single shelf will contain
all that man needs to know; and Mr. Carnegie's occupation will be gone.
For these reasons, one heartily welcomes Messrs. Methuen's re-issue of
an old and excellent translation of Rochefoucauld's _Maxims_, edited by
Mr. George Powell. The book is a little large for tabloids. It runs to
nearly two hundred pages, and it might have been more conveniently
divided by ten or even by a hundred. But still, as Rochefoucauld is the
very medicine-man of maxims, we will leave it at that. He united every
quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor. He lived in an
artificial and highly intellectualised society. He was a contemporary
and friend of great wits. He haunted salons, and was graciously received
by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue. He mingled in
a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion.
He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and
he used the language that Providence made for maxims. But, above all, he
had the acid or tang of poison needed to make the true, the medicinal
maxim. His present editor compares him with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius,
and Bacon--great names, but gnomic philosophers rather than authors of
maxims proper. Nor were the splendid figures of the eighteenth century,
who wrote so eloquently about love, virtue, and humanity, real
inventors of maxims. Their sugar-coating was spread too thick. Often
their teaching was sugar to the core--a sweetmeat, not a pill; or, like
the fraudulent patents in the trade, it revealed soft soap within the
covering, and nothing more. George Meredith had a natural love of
maxims, and an instinct for them. One remembers the "Pilgrim's Scrip" in
_Richard Feverel_, and the Old Buccaneer in _The Amazing Marriage_. But
usually his maxims want the bitter tang:
"Who rises from Prayer a better man, his Prayer is answered."
"For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained
to Him; that they cling to Him with their weakness, not with
their strength."
"No regrets; they unman the heart we want for to-morrow."
"My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my
temper."
One sees at once that these are not medicinal maxims, but excellent
advice--concentrated sermons, after our English manner. "Friends may
laugh: I am not roused. My enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the
night"--that has a keener flavour. So has "Never forgive an injury
without a return blow for it." Among the living, Mr. Bernard Shaw is
sometimes infected by an English habit of sermonising. "Never resist
temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good," is a
sermon. But he has the inborn love of maxims, all the same, and, though
they are too often as long as a book, or even as a preface, his maxims
sometimes have the genuine medicinal taste. These from _The
Revolutionist's Handbook_, for instance, are true maxims:
"Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation."
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of
temptation with the maximum of opportunity."
"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport;
when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The
distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater."
"Home is the girl's prison, and the woman's workhouse."
"Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence."
But among the masters of the maxim, I suppose no one has come so near as
Chamfort to the Master himself. There is a difference. If Chamfort
brings rather less strength and bitterness to his dose, he presents it
with a certain grace, a sense of mortal things, and a kind of pity
mingled with his contempt that Rochefoucauld would have despised:
"Il est malheureux pour les hommes que les pauvres n'aient
pas l'instinct ou la fierté de l'éléphant, qui ne se reproduit pas
dans la servitude."
"Otez l'amour-propre de l'amour, il en reste très peu de
chose."
"Il n'y a que l'inutilité du premier déluge qui empêche
Dieu d'en envoyer un second."
"L'homme arrive novice à chaque âge de la vie."
"Sans le gouvernement on ne rirait plus en France."
With a difference, these come very near Rochefoucauld's own. "Take
self-love from love, and little remains," might be an extract from that
Doomsday Book of Egoism in which Rochefoucauld was so deeply read.
"Self-love is the Love of a man's own Self, and of everything else, for
his own Sake": so begins his terrible analysis of human motives, and no
man escapes from a perusal of it without recognition of himself, just as
there is no escape from Meredith's Egoist. All of us move darkly in that
awful abyss of Self, and as the fourth Maxim says, "When a Man hath
travelled never so far, and discovered never so much in the world of
Self-love, yet still the Terra Incognita will take up a considerable
part of the Map." On the belief that self-love prompts and pervades all
actions, the greater part of the maxims are founded. The most famous of
them all is the saying that "Hypocrisy is a sort of Homage which Vice
pays to Virtue," but there are others that fly from mouth to mouth, and
treat more definitely of self-love. "The reason why Ladies and their
Lovers are at ease in one another's company, is because they never talk
of anything but themselves"; or "There is something not unpleasing to us
in the misfortunes of our best friends." These are, perhaps, the three
most famous, though we doubt whether the last of them has enough truth
in it for a first-rate maxim. Might one not rather say that the
perpetual misfortunes of our friends are the chief plague of existence?
Goethe came nearer the truth when he wrote: "I am happy enough for
myself. Joy comes streaming in upon me from every side. Only, for
others, I am not happy." But Rochefoucauld had to play the cynic, and a
dash of cynicism adds a fine ingredient to a maxim.
Nevertheless, after reading this book of _Maxims_ through again, all the
seven hundred and more (a hideous task, almost as bad as reading a whole
volume of _Punch_ on end), I incline to think Rochefoucauld's reputation
for cynicism much exaggerated. It may be that the world grows more
cynical with age, unlike a man, whose cynical period ends with youth. At
all events, in the last twenty years we have had half a dozen writers
who, as far as cynicism goes, could give Rochefoucauld fifty maxims in a
hundred. In all artificial and inactive times and places, as in
Rochefoucauld's France, Queen Anne's England, the London of the end of
last century, and our Universities always, epigram and a dandy cynicism
are sure to flourish until they often sicken us with the name of
literature. But in Rochefoucauld we perceive glimpses of something far
deeper than the cynicism that makes his reputation. It is not to a
cynic, or to the middle of the seventeenth century in France, that we
should look for such sayings as these:
"A Man at some times differs as much from himself as he
does from other People."
"Eloquence is as much seen in the Tone and Cadence of
the Eyes, and the Air of the Face, as in the Choice of proper
Expressions."
"When we commend good Actions heartily, we make them
in some measure our own."
Such sayings lie beyond the probe of the cynic, or the wit of the
literary man. They spring from sympathetic observation and a quietly
serious mind. And there is something equally fresh and unexpected in
some of the sayings upon passion:
"The Passions are the only Orators that are always successful
in persuading."
"It is not in the Power of any the most crafty Dissimulation
to conceal Love long where it really is, nor to counterfeit it
long where it is not."
"Love pure and untainted with any other Passions (if such
a Thing there be) lies hidden in the Bottom of our Heart, so
exceedingly close that we scarcely know it ourselves."
"The more passionately a Man loves his Mistress, the readier
he is to hate her." (Compare Catullus's "Odi et amo.")
"The same Resolution which helps to resist Love, helps to
make it more violent and lasting too. People of unsettled
Minds are always driven about with Passions, but never absolutely
filled with any."
No one who knew Rochefoucauld only by reputation would guess such
sentences to be his. They reveal "the man differing from himself"; or,
rather, perhaps, they reveal the true nature, that usually put on a thin
but protective armour of cynicism when it appeared before the world.
Here we see the inward being of the man who, twice in his life, was
overwhelmed by that "violent and lasting passion," and was driven by it
into strange and dangerous courses where self-love was no guide. But to
quote more would induce the peculiar weariness that maxims always
bring--the weariness that comes of scattered, disconnected, and abstract
thought, no matter how wise. "Give us instances," we cry. "Show us the
thing in the warmth of flesh and blood." Nor will we any longer be put
off by pillules from seeking the abundance of life's great feast.