"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:
"Il est malheureux pour les hommes que les pauvres n'aient pas l'instinct ou la fierté de l'éléphant, qui ne se reproduit pas dans la servitude."
"Otez l'amour-propre de l'amour, il en reste très peu de chose."
"Il n'y a que l'inutilité du premier déluge qui empêche Dieu d'en envoyer un second."
"L'homme arrive novice à chaque âge de la vie."