the main as the reflex of polished society, | he, and I say all in that," nevertheless, then we may say of the mirror in La when his "Maxims" appeared they exRochefoucauld's hand, it is certainly a cited among many readers a horror of the small one, but it reflects everything. Other consummate artists may have chosen more popular forms of expression Madame de Sévigné in letters, Molière in plays, and La Fontaine in tales of arch wit; but no one got nearer to the heart of French society than La Rochefoucauld, and no one gives more of its life-blood than he does in his book. Nor is it only of French life that he is the exponent; he had a window into the human heart, and his "Maxims " contain the very bones of the first man. In a word, no one, be his manner of art what it may, can be placed above La Rochefoucauld for insight into the intricacies of human motive and for the sharpness with which he reflects the to-and-fro of social life in ex man who could find so much wickedness a quaint amalgam of John Lilly, George quisitely cut sentences. Voltaire gives Herbert, and Jeremy Taylor. His "Inhim the further merit of having been the troduction à la Vie dévote" corresponds first in Europe after the revival of letters to Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying," who taught people to think and to con- but has much more play of fancy, breathvey their thoughts in lively, precise, and ing of the fields and flowers amid which delicate turns; but this is too largely ex-it was composed. Read what the gentle pressed. It may be true of France and all the Continent, but it cannot hold in the country of Francis Bacon. bishop says of himself: "Ce bon père dit que je suis une fleur, un vase de fleurs, et un phénix: je ne suis qu'un puant homme, un corbeau, un fumier." It was the ecclesiastical style of the period. To most people, however, La Rochefoucauld is repulsive, and it is impossible to set on high the man who is hateful, Since then La Rochefoucauld is not to who is supposed to delight in blackening be judged by himself alone, but by the his kind, and who has ever been accused, age in which he moved, let it be noted although most unjustly, of assailing the that, though one can scarcely speak of bulwarks of morality. Spite of the criti-him as a religious man, he was part and cal commonplaces, that art is independent parcel of a great religious movement of ethics, and that it is possible to achieve sweeping on from century to century. greatness with a bad heart, there is something in the soul which rebels and refuses its homage to genius however bright when it is detestable. Therefore, to do justice to the intellectual eminence of La Rochefoucauld, we have to touch on his moral station and show how he came to occupy it; so that being in his day the man of highest breeding and sweetest courtesy, truest of the true, beloved by his friends in the most extraordinary manner, bewept at his death, says Madame de Sévigné, as man never was, and drawing from Mademoiselle d'Aumale the exclamation, "I know nothing better than We have to think of three centuries, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, with a great wave of thought rolling on from one to another. In the first of these the wave was at its lowest: the Church was fallen, and religion had become very cold. In the next the Church made a mighty effort to recover its strength, and France saw the religious wave cresting in two distinct points, Jesuitism and Jansenism. In the eighteenth century the moral wave sloped down again with vast intellectual force and lively spirits to uncleanness of life, to inhuman devilry, to godless liberty, to utter want of faith except in wild men of the woods and the life of na- | wonder that he should give his own exture. And what does all this mean? It perience as a man of the world to the curmeans that in the sixteenth century, when rent religious creed? His "Maxims the Church was fallen, its leading doctrine were an echo from palace walls of the was Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism; it searchings of heart and the murmurs of denied original sin; it believed in human confession heard in dim recesses of the goodness; it put out of sight the over- cloister. It was not he alone who inwhelming need of supernatural grace. dulged in such maxims. There are people Let us leap the next century and glide on who can play at religion and make themto the eighteenth. There we find the selves buxom in a shroud. What the doctrine of human perfectibility, the dis- penitent sighed to his Redeemer the covery of savage virtue, the love of na- courtier twisted into epigrams. The wail ture, and tales of the age of innocence. of the broken-hearted sinner became the But between those two eras there is the wit of the Academy; and the shriek of seventeenth century, in which the billow the lost soul added dimples to the beauty has a different curve. The Church has of the précieuse in the blue-room of the revived; its most pronounced doctrine is 'Hôtel de Rambouillet. the need of a Saviour; and what can be La Rochefoucauld was too sincere a the need of one, if there is nothing to man to indulge in such levities. Any one save? The fall of man therefore, the can see that, be his maxims what they power of sin, the frightful corruption of may, he is serious in them, and even stern. the heart, and the danger of everlasting Their great defect, and that which separpunishment, became the religious watch-ates them from the beliefs of the orthodox, words of the day. In England, at the is not that they are false, but that they same time, we know how the Puritans suggest no remedy. They preach the preached the utter worthlessness of man. depravity of the human race; they say not "The whole head is sick and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment." This piercing religious cry might be heard everywhere throughout France in the seventeenth century, but it was loudest and most thrilling in Port Royal, and in the penitents who flocked to its spiritual guides. La Rochefoucauld, when he planned his book of maxims, lived in the midst of these people, and many of his sentences were composed in the precincts of the convent of Port Royal in Paris, where his fair friend, Madame de Sablé, was leading a half-incarnation of Diabolos. The world might penitential life, one part in the religious house, the other in apartments of her own adjoining. There and elsewhere he had dinned into his ears: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us." "Oh wretched man that I am! who will deliver me from pleasant creed of Pelagius, with a Saviour this body of sin and death?" What | for whom there is no necessity, or La a word of salvation, or at least give no hint of a Saviour. The world on the whole is Pelagian, and believes in the excellence of human nature. So strong is this tendency that one scarcely knows how it fell to the lot of a poor Welshman of the name of Morgan to go to Rome, to have his name translated into Pelagius, and to bestow it henceforth forever on the selfcomplacency of mankind in its own virtues. There must be an amazing fund of self-satisfaction in the Celtic nature which could thus stamp itself permanently in the nomenclature of Christendom. It is because the world is in the main Pelagian that La Rochefoucauld was hard hit as a slanderer of humanity and as almost the denounce him; his reply was always an appeal to the fathers of the Church. The Jansenists were wholly with him; and the Jesuit father Rapin put him in the way of proving his doctrines from writings of the saints. Now, as then, we have still to ask the doctors of the Church and her obedient children which they prefer, the not. 259. The pleasure of love is in loving, and we are happier in the passion which we feel than in that which we inspire. 262. There is no passion in which self-love reigns so powerfully as in love, and one is always more inclined to sacrifice the repose of the person loved than to part with one's own. 525. The power possessed over us by those we love is nearly always greater than that which we possess over ourselves. Rochefoucauld's rough doctrine of a cor- 70. There is no disguise which can long rupt world in which the corruption is ac- conceal love where it is, or feign it where it is knowledged, though not the cure? Not less have we to ask the admiring disciples of that ancient Briton, Morgan or Pelagius, why is La Rochefoucauld to be branded as a misanthrope for doctrines which (details apart and the errors of false editions excepted) were in their gist received as praiseworthy from the lips of Bossuet and Fénelon, and from the pens of Arnauld and Pascal? It may be that we are detracting from his originality when insisting that it is not he who first discovered the corruptions of the heart. Not much originality can be claimed for any one in that respect. His great feat is to have secularized the doctrine, to have attired it in the phrases of the world, and to have applied it with rare fineness of observation, with ingenious disclosures of detail, and with the most incisive wit, to the daily traffic of society. How La Rochefoucauld has been caricatured by being identified personally with a particular selection of his maxims, those that say the worst for human nature, may be shown by the parallel process of selecting another set of maxims and taking them for a sketch of his portrait. In the common idea, he is a monster raised upon the pedestal of Voltaire's utterly false but universally accepted remark that there is scarcely more than one truth in the book of maxims, that self-love is at the root of all. Having looked on that picture, let us try to imagine another from the following confessions and rules of life. 31. Had we no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure to note them in others. 411. We have but few faults which are not more excusable than the means we employ to hide them. 202. Those are mock gentlefolk who mask their faults to others and to themselves: the true know them perfectly and acknowledge them. 206. To be truly a gentleman one should be willing at all times to be exposed to the scrutiny of gentlefolk. 203. The true gentleman is one who vaunts himself upon nothing. 358. Humility is the true badge of the Christian virtues; without it we hug our faults, and they are only overgrown with pride, which conceals them from others and oftentimes from ourselves. 537. Humility is the altar on which God wills that we should offer him sacrifices. 534. Crowds of people would be godly, but no one cares to be humble. 102. The mind is ever the dupe of the heart. 544. A true friend is the greatest of all blessings and that which we least of all dream of securing. 561. A man who loves nobody is more unhappy than one whom nobody loves. 434. When our friends have deceived us we owe nothing save indifference to the marks of their friendship, but we always owe sensibility to their misfortunes. 84. It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be deceived by them. 395. We are sometimes less unhappy in being deceived about one we love than in being undeceived. 496. Quarrels would be shortlived if the wrong were only on one side. 235. We console ourselves easily for the misfortunes of our friends when they serve to signalize our affection for them. 433. The surest sign of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy. 218. Hypocrisy is a homage which vice pays to virtue. 447. Seemliness is the least of all the laws and the most observed. has permitted him to make a god of his self510. To punish man for his original sin God conceit, and to be tormented by it in every act of his life. 512. We dread all things as mortals and we desire all things as if we were immortal. Add to these maxims the extraordinary circumstance that, with all his insinuating address and courtly bearing, La Rochefoucauld was one of the most bashful of men, and we may construct from them a portrait of him which, although not complete, must be more so than the commonly received one made up of other maxims of the selfish type indicated by Voltaire. It must also be a nearer likeness, for the fact that is he disowned the more odious of those sayings which have gone to form his caricature and to fill the mind with horror at the hardness of his heart. This brings us to the history of his book, which will show that he is best known by maxims which he suppressed a year after they were published. La Rochefoucauld published five editions of his "Maxims," the first in 1665, the others in 1666, 1671, 1675, | author's views, it throws a false glare upon and 1678. The last is the authorita- the maxims which he allowed to remain. tive one, having received his finishing Any one who will carefully read the long touches and his ripest observations; but, maxim on self-love cannot fail to see what as often happens, he is best known by a masterpiece of writing it is, what a prohis first appearance. Now the differ- digious labor of love La Rochefoucald ence between the last edition and the bestowed upon it, and how reluctant he first consists not merely in advancing must have been to suppress it. Only mellowness of thought and fitness of ex- some overpowering reason could have impression, but in two things besides that pelled him to the sacrifice. So much the the author added many new maxims and greater is the wrong which has been done that he struck out old ones. With regard to his memory in the undoing of his deto his additions they have an interest of liberate intention. their own, although in the present con- He died in 1680, and thirteen years nection it is enough to say that, starting in afterwards friends, who must have had his earliest issue with three hundred and access to his papers, published a new edi eighteen maxims, he added in successive tion of his "Maxims. They did their ones until finally he reached the number work badly. In the first place, they preof five hundred and four. But the impor- fixed to the edition fifty maxims, all tant fact to be noticed is that he sup- seemingly new, although upon examinapressed seventy-nine of his maxims, and tion it will be found that only twenty-eight that no less than seventy-five belonged to are new, while the rest are but repetitions his first edition. The grand auto da fé of those in the recognized collection. It took place before publication of his is odd that this misreckoning was not second edition. He then put into the fire detected by any Frenchman for one sixty-four maxims; the remaining eleven hundred and sixty years. From the date being sacrificed from time to time later of their first publication in 1693 until on. The sixty-four maxims thus immo- Duplessis published his charming Elzelated the year after they were published virian edition in 1853, these fifty maxims included some of La Rochefoucauld's best-have been printed by a long succession of known utterances. For example, the very French editors as if they were all postelaborate one on self-love which appeared humous. But there is a worse fault in the at the head of his first edition, and on the edition of 1693. Those friends of La strength of which mainly he is regarded Rochefoucauld who knew so little of his as the champion of the selfish theory of book that they published the fifty maxims morals, was quashed, and never again in as if all were new to the world, took it his lifetime permitted to see the light. It upon themselves to disinter the chief was the same with that other famous maxim, that on self-love, which had been maxim on the misfortunes of our best slain and buried by the author, and to friends. Such facts are of the utmost install it in the foremost place at the head importance to our estimate of La Roche- of the maxims and immediately after the foucauld, who has been seriously misrep-title-page. Probably they were wellresented through editors, after his death, replacing the suppressed maxims in his text, and in prominent positions there, instead of keeping them in a class apart. The consequence has been that our Shaftesburys, our Bishop Butlers, and other philosophers, have attacked for his unsoundness not so much the author of the five hundred and four acknowledged maxims, as the author of the sixty-four disowned ones. It is not to be denied that in the acknowledged maxims traces are to be found of the selfish theory; but they would scarcely have been noticed were it not for the importance they derive from the reflected light of the doctrines which La Rochefoucauld abjured. And the reintroduction therefore of the discarded maxims into the text is not merely in itself a falsification of the meaning, however weak. They saw the perfection of the writing in this, the most eloquent, the most polished, and the most vehement of all La Rochefoucauld's maxims; they could not understand why he put his foot upon it; and thinking more of the form than of the substance, they determined to revive it. Here was the entrance of evil and the beginning of confusion. In the next important edition. of the "Maxims," that of Amelot de la Houssaye, published in 1714, we have the whole of the suppressed maxims brought back into the text and intermingled, nobody knows how, with the sentences to which La Rochefoucauld gave his sanction. The process of corruption and misrepresentation went on until, towards the middle of the century, the Abbé de la Roche prepared an edition of the "Maxims" in which they were frankly mously seven essays, which were attribmixed up with the "Christian Maxims "uted to La Rochefoucauld, which have of Madame de la Sablière, and hers were since been proved to have really come confounded with those of La Rochefou- from his pen, and which have embedded cauld's great friend, Madame de Sablé, in them a number of his acknowledged and with those of Abbé d'Ailly, Madame maxims. The accomplished abbé thought de Sable's confessor. Imagine the mas- he could carve these essays into a supculine sense of the great French classic plementary series of maxims, instead of herding with anything so sickly and silly being faithful to his trust in giving the as this, which is contradictory in its very author's text precisely as he left it. terms: "In intercourse the most inno- Whether for this reason or for any other, cent between persons of different sex, such as the recoil of a nation, wild with there is always a kind of spiritual sensu- dreams of a millennium at hand, from any ality which weakens virtue if it does not depressing view of man, glorious, original destroy it altogether." Such nauseous man, the edition of Abbé Brotier does nonsense had before then, it is true, been not seem to have made much way in published in conjunction with La Roche- France; and we have to pass on to the foucauld's maxims, but it had been printed year 1822, when that of Aimé Martin apart in a section by itself. The Abbé came out with a flourish of trumpets. de la Roche now mixed all up and con- The date is supposed to mark an era in fused them in a new arrangement-a sort the history of the "Maxims," as though, of alphabetical one, in which sentences on the same subject were docketed together with the addition of footnotes, part of his own device, part borrowed from Amelot de la Houssaye. This is the worst of all the editions of La Rochefoucauld, because, as we shall presently see, the model upon which (with corrections and retrenchments) was formed the only English edition of the "Maxims" which has still a place in our book-market. then for the first time, they were presented to the public pure of text. It is a mistake. Aimé Martin was a roaring, raving ranter, but he had not a spark of the critic in him. One stares at him with wonder as, with loud professions of religion, he goes bellowing against La Rochefoucauld through hundreds of pages. It seems as if he expected to go down to posterity with the duke-bane and antidote. But what right had he to speak There was no sign of improvement, until he had first proved his mastery of nothing but changes in the mode of adul- the "Maxims "? He is one of those teration, until the eve of the French Rev-editors who did not know that a score of olution, when the Abbé Brotier found La Rochefoucauld's posthumous maxims extreme difficulty in procuring a single were, as we have seen, published in his genuine copy of La Rochefoucald's work. lifetime. Moreover, his terrific bellowing He was so astounded at this discovery is a proof that, though mechanically in and so much interested in the work itself that he made many researches in public and private libraries, the outcome being an edition of the "Maxims" (bearing date 1789) the most perfect that had appeared since the decease of their author. He provided a trustworthy and rightly numbered text of the "Maxims as left with the author's last touches in his last edition; as for the suppressed maxims, he kept them by themselves under the name of "Premières Pensées;" and he added notes, full of curious information, which has never been disputed, although presented on his own sole voucher without reference to authorities. The Abbé Brotier, however, committed mistakes. He reckoned the number of the "First Thoughts" at one hundred and twentyone, which of course included more than were suppressed; and he took no account of the posthumous maxims. Moreover, in 1731 there had been published anony his pages the suppressed maxims were fenced off from the authorized ones, they were in his mind inseparably intermixed. No, indeed; after the conscientious work done by the Abbé Brotier in the most unpretending manner towards the establishment of La Rochefoucauld's text, we are not going to exalt Aimé Martin because he inherited his predecessor's labors and slightly improved upon them. It was not until 1853 that a critical edition of the "Maxims "appeared which was entitled to precedence over that of Brotier. This was the beautiful little Elzevir edition of Duplessis, the same who discovered for the first time in France that the fifty maxims announced as posthumous were not all such. Some strange errors have crept into the volume; but the text fairly represents La Rochefoucauld; the annotations, full of pith and point, are of curious felicity; and the whole work is so fine and so good that it |