Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France | Page 5

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 in terms which seem to exclude all bountiful
theories concerning the disinterested instincts of the human soul, for he
says "Amour-propre is the love of one's self and of all things for one's
self; it turns men into their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the
opportunity, makes them the tyrants of others.... It exists in all states of
life and in all conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything;
it lives on nothing." He does not admit that Christianity itself is
immune from the ravages of this essential cankerworm, which adopts
all disguises and slips from one Protean shape into another. "The

refinements of self-love surpass those of chemistry," and the purpose of
La Rochefoucauld is to resolve all our virtues in a crucible and to show
that nothing remains but a poisonous deposit of egotism.
No wonder that La Rochefoucauld has been generally regarded as a
scourge of the human race, a sterile critic of mankind without sympathy
or pity. It is true that his obstinate insistence on the universality of
egotism produces a depressing and sometimes a fatiguing impression
on the reader, who is apt to think of him as Shakespeare's Apemantus,
"that few things loves better than to abhor himself." But when the First
Lord goes on to add "He's opposite to humanity," we feel that no phrase
could less apply to La Rochefoucauld. We have, therefore, immediately
to revise our opinion of this severe dissector of the human heart, and to
endeavour to find out what lay underneath the bitterness of his
"Maximes." It is a complete mistake to look upon La Rochefoucauld as
a monster, or even as a Timon. Without insisting, at all events for the
moment, on the plain effect of his career on his intellect, but yet
accepting the evidence that much of his bitterness was the result of bad
health, sense of failure, shyness, foiled ambition, we have to ask
ourselves what he gave to French thought in exchange for the illusions
which he so rudely tore away. In dealing with any savage moralist, we
are obliged to turn from the abstract question: Why did he say these
things? to the realistic one. What did he hope to effect by what he said?
Perhaps we can start no better on this inquiry than to quote the Duchess
of Schomberg's exclamation when she turned over the pages of the first
edition--namely that "this book contains a vast number of truths which
I should have remained ignorant of all my life if it had not taught me to
perceive them." This may be applied to French energy, and we may
begin to see what has been the active value of La Rochefoucauld's
apparently negative and repugnant aphorisms.
The La Rochefoucauld whom we know belongs to a polite and modern
age. He is instinct with the spirit of society, "la bonne compagnie," as it
was called in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a crowd of
refined and well-trained pens competed to make of the delicate
language of France a vehicle which could transfer from brain to brain
the subtlest ingenuities of psychology. He is a typical specimen of the

Frenchman of letters at the moment when literature had become the ally
of political power and the instrument of social influence. Into this new
world, before it had completely developed, the future author of the
"Maximes" was introduced at a very early age. He was presented to the
wits and précieuses of the Hôtel Rambouillet at the age of eighteen. It
is amusing to think that he may have seen Voiture, in the Blue Room,
seize his lute and sing a Spanish song, or have volunteered as a paladin
in the train of Hector, King of Georgia. But the pedantries and
affectations of this wonderful society seem to have made no immediate
impression upon La Rochefoucauld, whose early years were those of
the young nobleman devoid of all apparent intellectual curiosity. It is
true that he says of himself that directly he came back from Italy (this
was in 1629, when he was only sixteen), "I began to notice with some
attention whatever I saw," but this was, no doubt, external; he does not
exhibit in his writings, and in all probability did not feel, the slightest
interest in the pedantic literature of the end of Louis XIII.'s reign. He
represented, through his youth, the purely military and aristocratic
element in the society of that age. If he had died when he was thirty, or
at