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!”
