Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 4

maker of maxims has stamped a deep and permanent impression upon the conscience and the moral habits of the nation. But this has been done by La Rochefoucauld, La Bruy��re, Vauvenargues, whom, did it not sound frivolous, we might style the three great Maximilians.
The three portraits were first exhibited as a course of lectures at the Royal Institution in February of this year. They have been revised and considerably enlarged. For the English of the passages translated or paraphrased I am in every case responsible. The chapter on "The Gallantry of France" appeared in the Edinburgh Review, and I thank the editor and publisher of that periodical for their courteous permission to include it here.
April 1918.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
One of the most gifted of the young officers who gave their lives for France at the beginning of the war, Quartermaster Paul Lintier, in the admirable notes which he wrote on his knee at intervals during the battle of the Meuse in August 1914, said--
"The imperative instinct for making the best you can of life, the sentiment of duty, and anxiety for the good opinion of others, in a word honour--these are the main educators of the soldier under fire. This is not a discovery, it is simply a personal statement."
Taken almost at random from the records of the war, this utterance may serve us as well as any other to distinguish the attitude of the Frenchman in the face of violent and critical action from the equally brave and effective attitude of other races. He has the habit, not common elsewhere, of analyzing conduct and of stripping off from the contemplation of it those voluntary illusions which drop a curtain between it and truth.
The result of this habit of ruthless criticism is to concentrate the Frenchman's attention, even to excess, on the motives of conduct, and to bring him more and more inevitably to regard self-love, self-preservation, personal vanity in its various forms, as the source of all our apparent virtues. Even when we appear to be most disinterested, even when we are most clearly actuated by unselfish devotion, by honour, we are really the prey, as Lintier saw it, of the wish to save our lives and to preserve the good opinion of others. Underneath the transports of patriotism, underneath the sincerity of religious fervour, the Frenchman digs down and finds amour-propre at the root of everything.
This attitude or habit of mind is particularly shocking to all those who live in a state of illusion, and there is probably no aspect of French character which is more difficult for the average Englishman to appreciate than this tendency towards sceptical dissection of the motives of conduct. Yet it is quite certain that it is widely disseminated among those of our neighbours who are most prompt and effective in action, and whose vigour is in no degree paralysed by the clairvoyance with which they seek for exact truth even in the most romantic and illusive spiritual circumstances. To throw light on this aspect of French character, I propose to call attention to a little book, which is probably well-known to my readers already, but which may be regarded from a point of view, as I venture to think, more instructive than that which is usually chosen.
In the year 1665 there appeared anonymously in Paris, in all the circumstances of well-advertised secrecy, a thin volume of "Maximes," which were understood to have exercised for years past the best thoughts of a certain illustrious nobleman. Mme de Sabl��, who was not foreign to the facts, immediately wrote a review, intended for the Journal des Scavants, in the course of which she said that the new book was "a treatise on movements of the human heart which may be said to have remained until now unrecognized." The book, as every one knows, was the work of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, and the subject of it was an unmasking of "the veritable condition of man."
It would be idle not to admit that La Rochefoucauld has been almost exclusively regarded as the chief exponent of egotism among the great writers of Europe. He has become--he became during his own lifetime-- the bye-word for bitterness. He is represented as believing that egotism is the primum mobile of all human action, and that man is wholly the victim of his passions, which lead him whither they will. He denies all spirituality and sees a physical cause for everything we do. His own words are quoted against him. It is true that he says, "All the passions are nothing but divers degrees of heat or cold in the blood." It is true that he says, "All men naturally hate one another," and again, "Our virtues are mostly vices in disguise." Yet again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume