'Weaknesses as Good as Other People’s Virtues'

“It is not easy to write essays like Montaigne, nor Maxims in the manner of the Duke de la Rochefoucault.” 

Who could think otherwise? The two Frenchmen are masters of diametrically opposed forms. In Montaigne’s hands, an essay can afford to be expansive. In fact, expansiveness – which is not the same as lengthiness -- is a quality shared by many of the best essays, the ones that linger in the reader’s mind and grow more enriching with time. (Consider Guy Davenport’s “Finding” and Michael Oakeshott’s "On Being Conservative.") The next word or thought ought to come as a mild surprise but not a shock. That would be tacky. Good essays are unified only by the writer’s sensibility. No other form is so personal. It is a reflection of the essayist’s consciousness, but never an undammed stream of consciousness or gush. Montaigne often renders the uncanny sense that we are reading our autobiography.

 

A maxime or aphorism is written as tightly as a good poem. It is a nugget of moral good sense and not a syllable is squandered. Often it contains a verbal IED. It goes off unexpectedly and carries a sting. François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80) is the master of the form. His genius was to make the unpleasant truth about human nature, our devotion to self-protection and self-regard at any cost, sound so familiar: “Yes, that’s me,” we say as we read his maxims, even as we congratulate ourselves on our splendid insight. There’s no escaping La Rochefoucauld’s moral x-ray. Here’s one of his best- known maxims, first in French then in the Oxford translation (2008) by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, and Francine Giguère:

 

“Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui.”

 

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

 

Virtue-signaling and self-congratulation unmasked in eleven (or twelve) words. La Rochefoucauld pared the truth to its unflattering essence. Implicit in the best aphorisms is not just the truth but a slap on our face for failing to recognize it. The observation quoted at the top was written by William Hazlitt and included in his Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault’s Maxims (1823). The English essayist says: “I was so struck with the force and beauty of the style and matter, that I felt an earnest ambition to embody some occasional thoughts of my own in the same form.”

 

Hazlitt doesn’t have the focused killer instinct of La Rochefoucauld. Nor does he distill his words the way the Frenchman does. Some of his purported maxims are paragraphs’ long and tend to be expository. A good maxim doesn’t explain. It demonstrates – a quality Hazlitt often fails to deliver. Take this from Characteristics:

 

“A selfish feeling requires less moral capacity than a benevolent one: a selfish expression requires less intellectual capacity to execute it than a benevolent one; for in expression, and all that relates to it, the intellectual is the reflection of the moral. Raphael’s figures are sustained by ideas: Hogarth’s are distorted by mechanical habits and instincts. . . .”

 

And so on, for another 230 words. That’s not an aphorism but an embryonic essay, which suggests the obvious: Hazlitt is an essayist, as surely as Montaigne. He needs several thousand words for his prose to blossom. He is perhaps the Frenchman’s truest, most accomplished descendant.  Here his maxim almost succeeds: “The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savours less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people’s virtues.” Provocatively true but too long, too blunted. One sentence is usually best. Two will work when the spring is wound sufficiently tight. Let’s praise Hazlitt for his virtues, as in "On Reading Old Books," in which he renders a nuanced judgment both literary and moral in vivid prose:

 

“I have more confidence in the dead than the living. Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes – one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think to ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance, writes finely, and like a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage:---another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not quite come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections. If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.”

 

Hazlitt was born on this date, April 10, in 1778, and died in 1830 at age fifty-two.