One of the most commonly known of all books of maxims, after the Proverbs of Solomon, are the Moral Reflections of La Rochefoucauld.  The author lived at court, himself practised all the virtues which he seemed to disparage, and took so much trouble to make sure of the right expression that many of these short sentences were more than thirty times revised.  They were given to the world in the last half of the seventeenth century in a little volume which Frenchmen used to know by heart, which gave a new turn to the literary taste of the nation, and which has been translated into every civilised tongue.  It paints men as they would be if self-love were the one great mainspring of human action, and it makes magnanimity itself no better than self-interest in disguise.

  “Interest,” he says, “speaks all sorts of tongues and
  plays all sorts of parts, even the part of the disinterested.”

  “Gratitude is with most people only a strong desire
  for greater benefits to come.”

  “Love of justice is with most of us nothing but the
  fear of suffering injustice.”

“Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, a mutual exchange of good offices; it is a species of commerce out of which self-love always intends to make something.”

  “We have all strength enough to endure the troubles
  of other people.”

  “Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we
  have done, as fear of the ill that may come to us in
  consequence.”

And everybody here knows the saying that “In the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not exactly displeasing.”

We cannot wonder that in spite of their piquancy of form, such sentences as these have aroused in many minds an invincible repugnance for what would be so tremendous a calumny on human nature, if the book were meant to be a picture of human nature as a whole.  “I count Rochefoucauld’s Maxims,” says one critic, “a bad book.  As I am reading it, I feel discomfort; I have a sense of suffering which I cannot define.  Such thoughts tarnish the brightness of the soul; they degrade the heart.”  Yet as a faithful presentation of human selfishness, and of you and me in so far as we happen to be mainly selfish, the odious mirror has its uses by showing us what manner of man we are or may become.  Let us not forget either that not quite all is selfishness in La Rochefoucauld.  Everybody knows his saying that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.  There is a subtle truth in this, too,—­that to be in too great a hurry to discharge an obligation is itself a kind of ingratitude.  Nor is there any harm in the reflection that no fool is so troublesome as the clever fool; nor in this, that only great men have any business with great defects; nor, finally, in the consolatory saying, that we are never either so happy or so unhappy as we imagine.