ng." 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
l