Proverbs or Aphorisms?

By Stefan Kanfer

There are two classes of people in the world, observed Robert Benchley, "those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not."

Half of those who divide quote Benchley and his fellow aphorists. The other half prefer proverbs. And why not? The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general. A proverb is anonymous human history compressed to the size of a seed. "Whom the gods love die young" implies a greater tragedy than anything from Euripides: old people weeping at the grave site of their children. "Love is blind" echoes of gossip in the marketplace, giggling students and clucking counselors: an Elizabethan comedy flowering from three words.

"A proverb," said Cervantes, "is a short sentence based on long experience," and to prove it he had Sancho and his paisanos fling those sentences around like pesetas: "There's no sauce in the world like hunger"; "Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last"; "Patience, and shuffle the cards." His English contemporary was of two minds about folklore, as he was about everything. Hamlet disdains it: "The proverb is something musty." Yet the plays overflow with musty somethings: "Men are April when they woo; December when they wed"; "A little pot and soon hot"; "The fashion wears out more apparel than the man"; and, more to the point, "Patch grief with proverbs."

Like Sancho and Shakespeare, those who praise proverbs favor nature over artifice and peasantry over peerage. Benjamin Franklin always preferred "a drop of reason to a flood of words" and filled Poor Richard's Almanac with colonial one-liners: "Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead"; "The used key is always bright." Emerson thought proverbs "the sanctuary of the intuitions." Tolstoy's knowledge of common tradition led him to an encyclopedia of wisdom. Eastern European sayings have always assumed the clarity and force of vodka: "Where the needle goes, the thread follows"; "The devil pours honey into other men's wives"; "The Russian has three strong principles: perhaps, somehow and never mind." In the epoch of the Romanoffs, wisdom was the only thing that was shared equally. Cossacks who conducted pogroms and victims in the shtetls flavored their remarks with the same sour salt. Russian: "The rich would have to eat money, but luckily the poor provide food." Yiddish: "If the rich could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a nice living."

No culture is without proverbs, but many are poor in aphorisms, a fact that leads Critic Hugh Kenner to hail the ancient phrases as something "worth saying again and again, descending father to son, mother to daughter, mouth to mouth." Gazing at The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, he lauds the short and simple annals of the poor. But he holds The Oxford Book of Aphorisms at the proverbial arm's length: "What the aphorisms lack is the proverb's ability to generalize. They have the air of brittle special cases: How special indeed my life is! How exceptional!"

But that very air is the oxygen of the epigram. W.H. Auden, who collected and concocted them, readily admitted that "aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre. Implicit is a conviction that [the writer] is wiser than his readers." Franc,ois de La Rochefoucauld was a duke; elbowed out of prominence in Louis XIV's court, he retreated to an estate to polish his words until nobility could see its face in the surface: "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others"; "In jealousy there is more self-love than love"; "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue"; "Lovers never get tired of each other, because they are always talking about themselves."

George Savile, first Marquis of Halifax, was alternately in and out of favor with the house of Stuart; his observations were worn smooth by disappointment: "Ambition is either on all fours or on tiptoes"; "The enquiry into a dream is another dream"; "Love is presently out of breath when it is to go uphill, from the children to the parents." By the time aphorisms became the property of the people, commoners had learned to speak like counts. The humbly born Sebastian Charnfort decided that "whoever is not a misanthrope at 40 can never have loved mankind." Nietzsche's phrases bore a strychnine smile: "The thought of suicide is a great consolation; with the help of it one has got through many a bad night"; "Wit closes the coffin on an emotion."

By the mid-19th century, the aphorism had become a favorite of the English. Oscar Wilde exposed the flip side of bromides: "Punctuality is the thief of time"; "Old enough to know worse." But he could be as pontifical as the next prince: "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it"; "One's real life is often the life that one does not lead." George Bernard Shaw saw the aphorism as the new home for political slogans: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." His contemporary G.K. Chesterton was the last master of the paradox: "Silence is the unbearable repartee"; "A figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition"; "Tradition is the democracy of the dead."

That democracy remains in office; the custom of the sharpened axiom continues. Elizabeth Bowen's "Memory is the editor of one's sense of life" is a Shakespearean perception; Peter De Vries' "Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign that something is eating us" belongs with the best of the Edwardians. Hannah Arendt's observation compresses the century down to a sentence: "Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent."

Yet the aphorists do not enjoy the last frown. Even now, proverb makers are at work. Traditions have to begin somewhere; today folk sayings arise from economics: "There is no such thing as a free lunch"; from the comics: "Keep on truckin' "; and even from computers: "Garbage in, garbage out."

Which, then, has more application to modern life, the people's phrases or the aristocrats'? Not aphorisms, says the proverb: "Fine words butter no parsnips." Not proverbs, insists Alfred North Whitehead's terse dictum: "Seek simplicity and distrust it." Still, both categories are noted not only for their concision but their consolation. Collectors of aphorisms may yet find support from the biblical proverb "Knowledge increaseth strength." As for the partisans of folk sayings, they can for once side with the fastidious William Wordsworth:

Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop T

han when we soar.

--By Stefan Kanfer

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