Chapter 3

"There is something," says La Rochefoucauld, "at once peevish and proud in my appearance. This makes most people think that I am contemptuous, but I am not so at all. So far as my humour goes, I am melancholy, and I am so to such an extent that, in the last three or four years, I have scarcely been seen to laugh three or four times. It seems to me nevertheless that my melancholy would be supportable and mild enough if it depended solely on my temperament, but it comes so much from outside causes, and what so comes fills my imagination to such a degree, and occupies my thoughts so exclusively, that most of the time I move as in a dream, and scarce listen to what I myself am saying."

Here we have the disappointed courtier still brooding over his disgrace, but we pass to an account of the relief which the new-born man of letters find in the cultivation of the intellect alone--

"I am fond of general reading, but that in which I find something to fashion the mind and to fortify the soul is what I like best. Above all it gives me an extreme satisfaction to read in company with an intelligent person, for in this way one is kept constantly reflecting on what one reads, and the reflections thus exchanged form a species of conversation than which no other in the world is so agreeable or so useful. I give a sound opinion about works in verse and prose which are submitted to me, but perhaps I allow myself too much freedom in expressing that opinion. Another fault of mine is that I am sometimes too scrupulously delicate and too severely critical. I do not dislike to listen to argument, and sometimes I am glad to take my share in the discussion, but I usually support my opinion with too much heat, and when any one pleads an unjust cause in my presence, sometimes, in my zeal for logic, I myself become exceedingly illogical. My sentiments are virtuous, my inclinations are honest, and I am so intensely anxious to act in all things as a gentleman should, that my friends cannot do me a greater favour than to warn me sincerely of my faults. Those who know me rather intimately, and who have been so kind as to give me their counsels in this direction, are aware that I have ever received them with all imaginable joy and with all the submission of mind which they could possibly desire."

All this, and what remains, show that in the character of La Rochefoucauld action had abruptly receded in favour of analysis, and the brutality of civil war in the woods had given place to the refinement of endless conversation by the fireside corner. The old swashbuckler turned from the illusions of the camp to the most exquisite of peaceful associations, and he regarded women from a totally new point of view. It was the age of the _salons_, and La Rochefoucauld tells us why it was that he became their sedulous associate. He says, "When women are intelligent, I like their conversation better than that of men. There is a certain suavity in their talk which is lacking in that of our sex, and it seems, in addition, that they explain themselves with more precision, and give a more agreeable turn to what they say." In other words, La Rochefoucauld had, by 1658, become a complete, and indeed the most competent and highly finished example of the new social intelligence which was to be found in France. We must dwell for one rapid moment on what that new spirit was.

The seventeenth century in France, liberated from the weight of internecine wars and political tyrannies, had now thrown itself with ardour into the civilized arts, and had, in particular, developed a love of moral disquisition. All the talk which presently became fashionable about virtue and the higher life was a reaction against the horrors of the Fronde. The advance of social refinement was very rapid, and, especially in Paris, there was a determined and intelligent movement in the direction of the amelioration of manners and a studied elegance of life. M. Rébelliau has pointed out that it was precisely at this moment that a great number of new words, and among them _délicate, distinguer, moraliste, ménagements, finesse_ and many others, were accepted as part of the French language. These served immediately to enrich the vocabulary of the men and women who were anxious to push further and deeper their investigations into psychological analysis. With this social tendency to dissect the human heart and to seize its most secret movements, was combined the religious and, as we may put it, protestant fashion of the hour, in the spirit of Port Royal. To be a moralist was almost in itself to be a Jansenist, and we see the author of the "Maximes" presently claiming to be, after a fashion, evangelical.

There is so little said about theology, in the direct sense, in the writings of La Rochefoucauld, that his various French critics have given perhaps too little thought to his religious tendencies. They have treated him as though he were the enemy of a pious life. But if we examine that contention from the standpoint provided for us by our own Puritan habit of thought, we must recognize that there was something positively pious about the bitter philosopher of the "Maximes." He was trying, let us never forget, to discover a scientific form of morals, and hardly enough attention has been given to the prominence which he gave to a searching analysis of conscience. He found little to help him in the court religion of the age, but he was immensely impressed with the Jansenist conception of the frailty and worthlessness of the natural man. Hence, his persistency in cultivating almost exclusively the society of those men and women of Port Royal with whom we might suppose that he had very little in common. But, quite recently, a discovery has been made, which is not only of special interest to us as Englishmen, but which throws a further light on the evangelical or puritan tendency of the author of the "Maximes."

A careful scholar, M. Ernest Jouy, was led by a passage in a seventeenth-century MS. to make investigations which seem to have proved that La Rochefoucauld was acquainted with an English book of edification and even that he deigned to make use of it in the fashioning of his famous "Maximes." This was "The Mystery of Self-Deceiving," published in 1615 by a semi-nonconformist Puritan divine, Daniel Dyke, minister of Coggeshall in Essex, and translated obscurely into French by a certain Vernulius. Of the original work Fuller wrote, "It is a book which will be owned for a truth while men have any badness in them, and will be owned as a treasure whilst they have any goodness in them." It is, certainly, an amazing thing to find that this clumsy old treatise of English divinity was apparently possessed as a treasure by the most elegant and the most sceptical of Frenchmen.

La Rochefoucauld may be conceived as saying to the practical divines of Port Royal, "Your work is confused and thwarted by the vast prevalence of rubbish under which morals are concealed. I will help you to force the people who talk so glibly of humanity and pity, of rectitude and amiability, to dissect the real bodies of egotism to which they give those names. I put Man in the pillory of self-judgment; it is for you to deal evangelically with what remains of his temperament when he comes down out of the ordeal."

To do this, La Rochefoucauld prepared, with infinite patience and with the conscientiousness of a great literary artist, his sheaf of Maxim-arrows, ready to shoot them, one by one, into the gross heart of _amour-propre_. What, then, were the reflexions which, now settled in Paris, and secure from the rough world in the recesses of Mme de Sablé's _salon_, the Duke began to fashion and to polish? A maxim is a formula, which comprehends the whole truth on a particular subject. Coleridge says, in his "Table Talk," that a maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact; we may add that it is final, it goes as far as it can possibly go, and contains the maximum of truth in the minimum of verbiage. If we take some of the most cynical and savage maxims of La Rochefoucauld we may see that conciseness could proceed no further: for instance, "Virtue is a rouge that women add to their beauty"; or "Pride knows no law and self-love no debt"; or "The pleasure of love is loving." The ingenuity of man has not devised a mode of saying those particular things as exactly in fewer words. They reach the maximum of conciseness, and are therefore called maxims.

It is very unusual in the history of literature to be able to point to a man of genius as the positive founder of a class of work. When we look closely into the matter, we are sure to find that there was an obscure predecessor, a torch-bearer who lighted up the path. Even Shakespeare has Marlowe in front of him, and in front of Marlowe are Greene and Peele. Several poets were inspired by the story of the fall of the rebel angels before Milton took up "Paradise Lost" and seized that province as his own by conquest. In like manner, La Rochefoucauld seems to us in a general view, and seemed indeed to his own Parisian contemporaries, to have invented a new art in the production of his "Maximes." But, in truth, he was not the pioneer, and he seems to have spent months, and even years, in a sort of apprenticeship to two authors who have not survived in French literature as he has. So far as we can make out, the real creator of the maxim in French was Jacques Esprit (1611-1678), the Abbé Esprit as he was called, although he was never a priest, and had a legitimate wife and family. He was a young man from Béziers in Provence, who came to Paris under the protection of Chancellor Séguier, soon became a member of the French Academy, and enjoyed a steady social and literary success.

There seems little doubt that Esprit was known early to La Rochefoucauld, for he was familiar in the family of the Duke and Duchess of Longueville, and later the governor of their children. He enjoyed the confidence of the _salons_ from an early date. There is some reason to suppose that Esprit had begun to write maxims before La Rochefoucauld's return from exile, and certainly before Mme de Sablé's retreat to Port Royal in 1659. It is very noticeable in La Rochefoucauld's letters to Esprit--most of which belong to the year 1660--that he treats the academician--who was of plebeian birth and not many months older than himself--with extreme deference. The Duke adopts the style of a pupil to a master, and he submits his sketches or experiments in maxim-making to Esprit for a severe criticism, which he accepts, and for advice, which he adopts. The probability seems to be that Esprit introduced the fashion for writing maxims to Mme de Sablé, who was fascinated by it, recommended it to La Rochefoucauld, and then pointed Esprit out as the acknowledged master of the art, who could give invaluable technical advice.

There was a sort of collaboration. We find La Rochefoucauld writing to Esprit, "I shall be much obliged if you will show _our_ last sentences to Mme de Sablé; it may perhaps induce her to write some of her own." And to the lady he writes, "Here are all my maxims which you have not yet seen, but as nothing is done for nothing, I beg you to send me in return the receipt for the carrot soup which we had when Commander de Souvré dined at your house," The three maximists consulted one another, polished up one another's sentences, and suggested subjects which were first discussed round the dinner-table or in the summer parlour and then worked up, sometimes by all three conjointly, to the highest pitch of perfection. It was probably Esprit by whom many of the original suggestions were started, indeed it is he who seems to have first laid down the formula that "the mind is the servant and even the dupe of the instincts," which both Pascal and La Rochefoucauld were presently to expand in such brilliant forms. But it is quite an error to presume, as some writers have done, that there was a kind of factory for maxims, out of which sentences were turned which really belonged to no one in particular. The "Maximes" of Mme de Sablé and those of the Abbé Esprit--the latter contained in a Jansenist volume called "The Falsity of Human Virtues"--were published independently, but in the same year, 1678. Any one who has the patience to refer to these works may satisfy himself that Mme de Sablé, as an artist, is superior to Esprit, but immeasurably inferior to La Rochefoucauld, who is the one unapproachable master of the maxim.[3]

[Footnote 3: A good deal of the prejudice which successive critics, and (very mischievously) Brunetière in particular, have shown with regard to the character of La Rochefoucauld, is due, in my opinion, to the influence of Victor Cousin, who published, in 1854, a disjointed and diffuse, but in many ways brilliantly executed volume on Mme de Sablé. Cousin, who examined, for the first time, a vast array of MS. sources, deliberately lowered the value of La Rochefoucauld in order to enhance the merit of the lady, of whom the learned academician wrote like a lover. Even Esprit was thrown into the scale to lighten the weight of the Duke's originality. Cousin was borne gaily on the stream of his heroine-worship, and others less profoundly acquainted with the facts have let themselves be carried with him. But it is time that we should cease to imitate them in this.]

For six or seven years the Duke worked away at the polishing of his incomparable epigrams, and it was not until October 27, 1665, that the little famous book made its anonymous appearance. The importance of the work was perceived immediately in the close circle of the _salons_ which regulated literary opinion in Paris. For half a century past Frenchmen had been regarding with jealous attention the causes and effects of human passion, culminating, for the moment, in the treatise written by Descartes for the daughter of the Queen of Bohemia. The Jansenists and the Jesuits, the playwrights, the novelists, Hobbes and Spinoza, all pursued, along widely different paths, those illusive secrets of the human heart which had escaped the notice of earlier generations. But La Rochefoucauld reduced the desultory psychology of his predecessors to a system, so that for us the moralizing tendencies of the seventeenth century in France seem to have found their final expression less in the sob of Pascal's conscience than in the resigned ironic nonchalance of La Rochefoucauld, who, as Voltaire so admirably says, "dissolves every virtue in the passions which surround it." Perhaps what the "Maximes" most resembled was the then recently-published analysis of egotism in "Leviathan." But the cool and atrocious periods of what Sir Leslie Stephen calls "the unblushing egotism" of Hobbes have really little in common with the sparkling rapier-strokes of La Rochefoucauld, except that both these moralists-- who may conceivably have met and compared impressions in Paris-- combined a resolute pessimism about the corruption of mankind with an epicurean pursuit of happiness.

The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld were atoms of gold sifted through the mesh of discussions at the dinner-table, around the fire in winter, under the hawthorns and lilacs which Mme de Sévigné describes, in endless talk between two or more trained and intelligent persons, along the course of which thought oscillated from extreme to extreme, until at last the company dispersed, leaving La Rochefoucauld to capture and to fix the essential result of all that desultory conversation. It is not impossible for us to conjecture the general character of this brilliant and illusive talk. It had one central aim, more or less clearly perceived, namely the desire to reach a Latin standard of perfection. It sought to exchange for the romantic barbarism which had underlain so much that was picturesque in the sixteenth century--a barbarism which had come down from the late Middle Ages, and which was really a dissolution of strong things outworn--to exchange for this a preciousness of quality as against mere rude bulk. It desired to introduce depth of purpose in the place of chaotic moral disorder, originality in place of a frenzied and incoherent eccentricity, and to found a solid structure upon a basis of intellectual discipline.

But in order to carry out this fine scheme, and especially in order successfully to check that decadence which had alarmed the best minds in France, there was a pioneer work to be done. It was necessary to intensify and purify the light of criticism. For this purpose the conversations of the _salons_ culminated in the lapidary art of La Rochefoucauld, who was not a creator like Racine and Molière, like Bossuet and Fenelon, but who prepared the way for these slightly later builders of French literature by clearing the ground of shams. Segrais, whose recollections of him are among the most precious which have come down to us, says that La Rochefoucauld never argued. He had the Socratic manner, and led others on to expose and expound their views. His custom was, in the course of the endless talks about morals and the soul, "to conceal half of his own opinion, and to show tact with an obstinate opponent, so as to spare him the annoyance of having to yield." There is something very like this in the "Pensées" of Pascal. La Rochefoucauld blames himself, in his self-portrait, for arguing too fiercely, and for being testy with an opponent, but these faults were not perceived by other people. Doubtless he was aware of an inward impatience, and succeeded in concealing it by means of that extreme politeness on which he prided himself.

The "Maximes" are shocking to persons who live in a state of illusion about themselves, and they were so from the hour of their publication. They roll up a bitter pill for human vanity. When Mme de La Fayette, destined to look deeper than any other mortal into the soul of La Rochefoucauld, read them first in 1663, in company with Mme du Plessis at the Château de Fresnes, she was terrified and shocked at what she called the "corruption" which they revealed. She wrote to Mme de Sablé, who had lent her the manuscript--

"Ah, Madame, how corrupt he must be in mind and heart to be capable of imagining such things! I am so frightened by it that I should say, if this were not a matter too serious for jest, that such maxims are likely to do more to upset him than all the plates of soup he swallowed at your house the other day."

As the "Maximes" pass from hand to hand, we see the spiritual Mænads of Port Royal clustering "with a lovely frightened mien" about the sinister author, while he turns "his beauteous face haughtily another way," like young Apollo in the Phrygian highlands. The word "pessimism" was, I believe, unknown until the year 1835, but this is what Mme de La Fayette and the rest of the Jansenist ladies meant by "corruption." Perhaps the most celebrated of all the sayings of her terrible friend is that which declares that "In the misfortunes of our friends there is always something which gives us no displeasure." She was about to learn that no one had a nobler practice in friendship than the cynic who wrote this: "There are good marriages, but no delicious ones"; Mme de La Fayette's own marriage had been not at all delicious and not even good. "Gratitude in the majority of men is simply a strong and secret wish to receive still greater benefits." Terrifying this must have been to a sentimental and exalted bosom, and exclusive of all hope until the little word "majority" was observed, a loophole offered for scared humanity to creep out at.

The design of La Rochefoucauld was to make people ashamed of their egotism, and so to help them to modify it. He saw France deadened by a universal sycophancy, and tyrannized over by a court life which made a lie of everything. He insisted upon the value of individual sincerity, but in a voice so harsh and bitter, and in such sardonic phrases--as when he says: "Sincerity is met with in very few people, and is usually nothing but a delicate dissimulation to attract the confidence of others"--that the more timid of his auditors shrank from him, as if he had been Hamlet or Lear. When he dared to suggest that none of these maxims were intended to refer to the reader himself, but only to all other persons, he invited the reaction which led Huet, Bishop of Avranches, to appeal against the morality of the "Maximes," as suited only to the vices of wicked persons, "improborum hominum vitiis," and to issue a warning against the too-sweeping cynicism of Roccapucaldius, as he called the Duke. This was, perhaps, the beginning of the dead-set against La Rochefoucauld. It encouraged Rousseau, a century later, to talk of "ce triste livre," and to declare, in the true romantic spirit, that "Bad maxims are worse than bad acts." There have always been, and always will be, people who experience a sort of _malaise_, an ill-defined discomfort, as though they sat in an east wind, while they read La Rochefoucauld. This is particularly true of Englishmen, who resent being told that "Our virtues are often only our vices in disguise," and who also, by the way, are constitutionally impatient of the French genius for making what is ugly, and even what is detestable, pleasing by the surface of style.

There is an element of unmercifulness in the candour of La Rochefoucauld which is distressing to sentimentalists. But this was characteristic of the age, which looked upon compassion as a frailty, as a break-down of noble personal reserve. He shall speak on this matter for himself--

"I am little sensible of pity, and if I had my way, I would avoid it altogether. At the same time, there is nothing I would not do to relieve an afflicted person: and I believe as a matter of fact that one ought to go so far as to express compassion for the misfortunes of such a man, since the unhappy are so stupid that compassion does them more good than anything else in the world. But I also hold that one should confine one's self to professions of pity and be very careful not to feel any. Pity is a passion which is wholly useless to a well-constituted mind; it can but weaken the heart, and it ought to be left to people who, carrying nothing out in a logical manner, require passion to constrain them to do things."

He seems to paint himself in tones of Prussian blue, but we must really think of him as of a man timid, and at the same time preternaturally wide-awake, who was determined at all risks not to be taken at a disadvantage. When he was an old man, when much communing with Mme de La Fayette had allayed his suspicion of mankind, La Rochefoucauld said to Mlle de Scudery, "I hope that clemency will come into fashion, and that we shall see no more men unhappy." [4] He professed to found politeness on extreme _amour-propre_, but perhaps in a still closer analysis he would have discovered its basis in kindness of heart. He resists the temptation to weaken his own pessimism, just as in his biting sarcasms about love we may trace a tender soul still bleeding from the wounds which Mme de Longueville's levity had inflicted on it.[5]

[Footnote 4: Mme de Sévigné told her daughter that she was sure that if one could peep at the Duke and Mme de La Fayette "when they were alone with the cat," one would find all the restraints of society flung aside, and see them without the mask, their cynicism forgotten, mingling cries and tears over the sorrows of the world. But neither she nor any third person would ever see their social discretion thus betrayed, and she concludes, in her droll way, "C'est une vision!" In another letter to Mme de Grignan (June 6, 1672) she says of the Duke, "Il connaît quasi aussi bien que moi la tendresse maternelle."]