_To the Lady Violet Lebas_.
Dear Lady Violet,--I am not sure that I agree with you in your admiration
of Rochefoucauld--of the _Reflexions, ou Sentences et Maximes Morales_, I
mean. At least, I hardly agree when I have read many of them at a
stretch. It is not fair to read them in that way, of course, for there
are more than five hundred _pensees_, and so much _esprit_ becomes
fatiguing. I doubt if people study them much. Five or six of them have
become known even to writers in the newspapers, and we all copy them from
each other.
Rochefoucauld says that a man may be too dull to be duped by a very
clever person. He himself was so clever that he was often duped, first
by the general honest dulness of mankind, and then by his own acuteness.
He thought he saw more than he did see, and he said even more than he
thought he saw. If the true motive of all our actions is self-love, or
vanity, no man is a better proof of the truth than the great maxim-maker.
His self-love took the shape of a brilliancy that is sometimes false. He
is tricked out in paste for diamonds, now and then, like a vain,
provincial beauty at a ball. "A clever man would frequently be much at a
loss," he says, "in stupid company." One has seen this embarrassment of
a wit in a company of dullards. It is Rochefoucauld's own position in
this world of men and women. We are all, in the mass, dullards compared
with his cleverness, and so he fails to understand us, is much at a loss
among us. "People only praise others in hopes of being praised in turn,"
he says. Mankind is not such a company of "log-rollers" as he avers.