Jasper Republican, Volume 2, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 January 1876 — THE MISCHIEF OF PROVERBS. [ARTICLE]

THE MISCHIEF OF PROVERBS.

Pboyerbs at best are seldom more than partial truths, and at worst are often the meanest of falsehoods. They are specious generally, and their speciousness frequently veils their sophistry and their moral deformity. v , ■ - ! “ The'world owes a man a living” Is one of the pleasant fallacies by which both lazy and unprincipled fellows seek to evade duty to themselves and responsibility to others. The world may possibly owe a man a living, when irreparable adversity has overtaken him; when he has failed after repeated trials, or when he cannot get work. But it certainly does ■not if he folds his arms or, through wretched vanity pride, refrains from honest labor which he counts unworthy. He in whose mouth the phrase oftenest is, is very apt to be a professional loafer or sponge, ot, still worse, a genteel swindler—a borrower of money without expectation or thought of its return. He affects to believe that the world is indebted to him, although he has rendered it no service; has given it absolutely nothing to base an obligation on. He is usually a drone in the beehive of life; a claimant of merit he does not possess; a sycophant, a sham and a bully combined. Beware of the man who is voluble about the debt this busy ball has incurred by his birthl He is not to be trusted. His fondness for the proverb indicates his antipathy to work—and the enemy of work is the enemy of society—offers just ground for suspicion; is an argument against his character. The few men who are the world’s creditors will be very sure to keep silent concerning the fact, if they recognize it; though the great probability is that they will be too modest to be conscious of their large deserving. . There is a pride in merit that bridles the tongue as well as humbles the judgment of its own performance. But the, fellow who has the globe on the debit side pf his ledger can rarely balance his account save by a liberal entry of unmitigjble self-conceit. i “ All stratagems are fair in loye and (war” ds one of the most atrocious sentiments ever nttered. An ingenious deviltry lies in its wording; for it couples two things that are entirely opposite. Love is the antipode of war; not its contradiction (done, but its extinction. Assent to the latter part of the proverb might be readily gained; but never to the former from any kind of moral sanity. The cunning of the verbal contrivance is therefore palpable. The enormity of half the phrase is concealed in the plausibility of the other half. .1

Stratagems in love 7 Who can think of them without abhorrence? The connection is unnatural, inhuman. Mephistopheles lurks in the suggestion. Love is the one thing above augftt else that should be dealt within strictest honesty; that should be reverenced, worshiped, glorified. To take any Advantage of love would be—if anything were—an unpardonable sin; for love is the queen of virtues, the angel'part of our common humanity. It is so pure, so sweet, so tender, so generous, so noble, so confiding, so spontaneous, that to wrong it by a thought—much more to deceive it—is wicked ifi the extreme. And then to employ stratagem deliberately, and likewise to justify it, is simply infamous. He would be bold indeed who should have the courage to father so vile a maxim. The bitterest cynic has never said anything to surpass or exceed this which strikes at all faith, and in its spirit aims to strangle what is best in human nature. 1

‘ Not one person in a hundred that quote the words takes in their entire meaning. The attention is directed to stratagem and war—those two terms linger in the mem-ory-rand love and the suggestion of its monstrous treatment are kept in the background until familiarity with the phrase renders the whole acceptable. If the adage should be to curtailed as to include love only, there are not many who would not be startled by its utterance. Then it would stand—it should so stand with its present appendage—as a semi-apology of rouee and profligates to public decency; and the right kind of people would never mention it except in condemnation. ** Charity begins at home” is generally the excuse of selfishness for lack of generosity. Yet many who are not naturally selfish may be made so by taking what they deem a prudential admonition too much to heart. Applied to the overliberal, the proverb may be, and doubtless often is, a corrective. The mischief is that they who need its restraining influence seldom use or heed it In the main, it is the oral property of the morbid and the covetous, and, to strengthen themselves In thefr soididness, they employ the

phrase to the detriment of others whose character is yrt unformed, but whose tendency is in the wrong direction. The charity that begina at home is prone to stay and end there. And he who preaches the doctrine tain constant danger es carrying its practice to a point of positive niggardliness. OTa kindred kind is “ Self-preservation is the first law of nature.” As everybody knows, or ought to know. the meaning of the axiom is literal and absolute. As such it cannot be gainsaid. But it should he, when it is put forward as a warning against benevolence, as a curb to any disposition to help the needy. Self preservation, being an instinct, needs no enforcement from proverbial popularity. They that are perpetually telling us that it is the first %aw are usually the very persons who might make us wish it were the last law; for then they might »o forget themselves for a moment as to drop out of the world to which they add nothing but a bad example. “ What is the good of having friends unless you use them 7” is often jocosely asked i but the friends are oftener obliged to answer sertoßaly. The proverb is in bad taste, to say the least, and its repetition evinces a grievous want of sensibility, if nothing worse. Friendship springs from sympathy, from spiritual affinity, from mutual understanding and appreciation, and ought to be a reciprocal incentive to advancement, improvement, to a larger and better life. To put ft primarily to material use is to degrade and profane It. The nature capable of understanding or feeling friendship will be slow to ask

the rhetorical question unless playfully or satirically. And such a nature never will and netet can act upon it. There is quite enough in this bustling, necessarily prosaic world to dwarf and destroy our ideals, without our volunteering any cynical and superfluous aid thereto. A true friend is so willing and anxious to assist us in every honorable way possible, that we should be careful not to give him excess of opportunity. Besides, to use a friend, in the general sense of the verbals ignoble, and must soon result in the fracture of friendship; for no friend can long consent to be used without a certain loss of self-respect, without which friendship is impracticable. No doubt there is a constant temptation with many persons to employ their friends to their own advantage without thought of reciprocity; and quoting the proverb strengthens the temptation and justifies the habit. Never let the aphorism pass your lips, however jocularly, lest you be suspected, in the first place, of meaning it, and secondly, lest you prompt others to do what they shall eventually regret. “ Guilt is always timid” is one of the phrases that must have been coined in the mint of ignorance. The student of human nature knows that guilt, and that of tiie deepest order, is very often so superlatively audacious that it cannot be frightened ot abashed. What is termed wickedness is very different actually from the thing it is theoretically. It is sincerely conscious of itself (the popular notion is that it is ever adpalled by its own image), and when it is conscious it sees itself at a remarkably propitious angle. Vice is its own vindicator through the very perversity of judgment that allows it to exist. Its continuance lends it a hardness and firmness which neither disapproval nor denunciation can soften or shake. Guilt can and will look puking innocence steadily in the face, while sensitive and suspected virtue shall be overwhelmed with confusion and mortification.

Belief in the proverb wrofigs innocence incalculably by causing it to be mistaken for guilt and at the same time acquits this of its offense. If we wish to detect guilt, we must discard the maxim or interpret it by contrariety; for, whenever we confront indubitable, clearly-established guilt, we shall be likely to find it gazing as calmly and defiantly at ns as does the Sphinx at the sands of the surrounding desert. “People like to be deceived.” How often we hear this! Perhaps they do; but what kind of people are they! They must be peculiar, since they are never the people we meet. Everybody will bear witness that his or her acquaintance hate to be, and are angry at being, deceived. They that are fond of deception are plainly those unknown, abstract folk who are sure to be punished for the sins we commit and whom we love to regard metaphysically as the victims of vaguely-vio-lated justice. The trite aphorism in its truth or falsehood is of small consequence. Its mis* chief is in its instigation to deceive. Most of us have sufficient tendency in that direction without any verbal stimulant or honeyed sophistry. The phrase is a trick put upon us wherewith to trick our fellows. It is a cunning device to mollify our consciousness of doing wrong. Not merely this, it proclaims as a benevolence what is manifestly a meanness on our part; and we are so willing to appear duped when ire are not —our faults being in question—that we appeal to maxims to prove the improvable. If the conscience smarts, a timely proverb is hunted up to draw out the sting. The sting may stick; but the prescription is paraded, and the cure is inferred. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Thousands echo this without remembering or knowing that it is a line of Pope, probably made with no higher intent than to fit the corresponding rhyme of the couplet. It has become an aphorism, a proverb, because it has a taking air and sounds well—reason enough for the currency of half our popular sayings. A little learning may be dangerous, but it is fiur better than no learning, which is dangerous itself. The corollary is that ignorance is comparatively free from peril,

I Which is ten times as false as the proposition. <• • ” The greatest fallacy of -this and njaay maxims is in the necessary inference that is drawn. Their greatest mischief ifes in their incompleteness, and in the feet that they are generally accepted as complete. Any halftrutiiror partial ? hoed, if felicitously expressed and aptly repeated, has five-fold the weight in controversy ot conversation that a whole truth awkwardly worded has. He who could make the proverbs pf a nation would possess more influence than he who should write its history or frame its laws. They have been defined the wit of one and. ihe wtedpmof many-, They are oftener the fallacy of one and the inability to detect it of the multitude. B • - Proverbs depend not for popularity upon wisdom, but upon the art of putting them. The farther they are removed from obvious truth, if they be adroitly couched, the more likely are to be accepted- 7 <4 spice of ill-nature is prone to preserve them, and render them appetizing to the public palate- We like to repeat what we know is false when the falsehood is glossed by the embalming epigram, the consciousness that the thing has been said before freeing us from accountability for its promulgation. Hardly a maxim or proverb;‘exists in eurownor any other language that may not be taken to pieces before its atom of truth, if any, can be found. The proverbs of the French and Spanish are the wittiest and the falsest; those of the Germans and Scandinavians the dullest and the truest. No current saying but is contradicted by another -as “ Two of a trade never agree;” “Birds of a feather flock together;? “ In a multitude of counselors there is safety“ Too many cooks spoil the broth;” and so on through every variety of affirmation and denial, of 4 inconsistency and contrariety; * All sorts of sustainment for all sorts ot conduct, every kind of encouragement for every virtue and every vice, may be gathered from proverbs. Entirely devoid of argument, they are regarded and quoted as arguments; defiant of logic, they accomplish what logic cannot. Properly considered, they are helps to language, ornaments to conversation, delicate punctures for pretense, of inestimable value to society. But considered, as they usually are, as strengtheners of position, exetis- . era of conduct, palliators of offense, they are inestimably pernicious! Tlley teach the same lesson and the same truth which the declaration does—that a stoutly-main-tained lie is infinitely better than a poor-ly-defended truth.—J uniue Henri Browne,. in Appletons' Journal.