Essays in Rebellion

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

XXXII

THE MEDICINE OF THE MIND

There are minds that run to maxims as Messrs. Holloway and Beecham ran to pills. From the fields and mines of experience they cull their secret ingredients, concentrate them in the alembic of wit, mould them into compact and serviceable form, and put them upon the market of publicity for the universal benefit of mankind. Such essence of wisdom will surely cure all ills; such maxims must be worth a guinea a box. When the wise and the worldly have condensed their knowledge and observation into portable shape, why go further and pay more for a medicine of the soul, or, indeed, for the soul's sustenance? Pills, did we say? Are there not tabloids that supply the body with oxygen, hydrogen, calorics, or whatever else is essential to life in the common hundredweights and gallons of bread, meat, and drink? Why not feed our souls on maxims, like those who spread the board for courses of a bovril lozenge apiece, two grains of phosphorus, three of nitrogen, one of saccharine, a dewdrop of alcohol, and half a scruple of caffeine to conclude?

It is a stimulating thought, encouraging to economy of time and space. We read to acquire wisdom, and no one grudges zeal in that pursuit. But still, the time spent upon it, especially in our own country, is what old journalists used to call "positively appalling," and in some books, perhaps, we may draw blank. Read only maxims, and in the twinkling of an eye you catch the thing that you pursue. It is not "Wisdom while you wait"; there is no waiting at all. It is a "lightning lunch," a "kill" without the risk and fatigue of hunting. The find and the death are simultaneous. And as to space, a poacher's pocket will hold your library; where now the sewers of Bloomsbury crack beneath the accumulating masses of superfluous print, one single shelf will contain all that man needs to know; and Mr. Carnegie's occupation will be gone.

For these reasons, one heartily welcomes Messrs. Methuen's re-issue of an old and excellent translation of Rochefoucauld's Maxims, edited by Mr. George Powell. The book is a little large for tabloids. It runs to nearly two hundred pages, and it might have been more conveniently divided by ten or even by a hundred. But still, as Rochefoucauld is the very medicine-man of maxims, we will leave it at that. He united every quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor. He lived in an artificial and highly intellectualised society. He was a contemporary and friend of great wits. He haunted salons, and was graciously received by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue. He mingled in a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion. He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and he used the language that Providence made for maxims. But, above all, he had the acid or tang of poison needed to make the true, the medicinal maxim. His present editor compares him with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Bacon—great names, but gnomic philosophers rather than authors of maxims proper. Nor were the splendid figures of the eighteenth century, who wrote so eloquently about love, virtue, and humanity, real inventors of maxims. Their sugar-coating was spread too thick. Often their teaching was sugar to the core—a sweetmeat, not a pill; or, like the fraudulent patents in the trade, it revealed soft soap within the covering, and nothing more. George Meredith had a natural love of maxims, and an instinct for them. One remembers the "Pilgrim's Scrip" in Richard Feverel, and the Old Buccaneer in The Amazing Marriage. But usually his maxims want the bitter tang:

"Who rises from Prayer a better man, his Prayer is answered."
"For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained
to Him; that they cling to Him with their weakness, not with
their strength."
"No regrets; they unman the heart we want for to-morrow."
"My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my
temper."

One sees at once that these are not medicinal maxims, but excellent advice—concentrated sermons, after our English manner. "Friends may laugh: I am not roused. My enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night"—that has a keener flavour. So has "Never forgive an injury without a return blow for it." Among the living, Mr. Bernard Shaw is sometimes infected by an English habit of sermonising. "Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good," is a sermon. But he has the inborn love of maxims, all the same, and, though they are too often as long as a book, or even as a preface, his maxims sometimes have the genuine medicinal taste. These from The Revolutionist's Handbook, for instance, are true maxims:

"Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation."
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of
temptation with the maximum of opportunity."
"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport;
when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The
distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater."
"Home is the girl's prison, and the woman's workhouse."
"Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence."

But among the masters of the maxim, I suppose no one has come so near as Chamfort to the Master himself. There is a difference. If Chamfort brings rather less strength and bitterness to his dose, he presents it with a certain grace, a sense of mortal things, and a kind of pity mingled with his contempt that Rochefoucauld would have despised: