Library Notes

by A. P. Russell

VI.

LIMITS.

Minds, like some seed-plants, delight in sporting; there is great variety in thinking, but the few great ideas remain the same. They are constantly reappearing in all ages and in all literatures, modified by new circumstances and new uses; though in new dresses, they are still the old originals. Like the virtues, they have great and endless services to perform in this world. Now they appear in philosophy, now in fiction; the moralist uses them, and the buffoon; dissociate them, analyze them, strip them of their innumerable dresses, and they are recognized and identified—the same from the foundation and forever. If a discriminating general reader for forty years had noted their continual reappearance in the tons of books he has perused upon all subjects, he would be astonished at their varied and multiplied uses. Thinkers he would perhaps find more numerous than thoughts; yet of the former how few. The original thought of one age diffuses itself through the next, and expires in commonplace—to be born again when occasion necessitates and God wills. At each birth it is a new creation—to the brain it springs from and to the creatures it is to enlighten and serve. If the writer or speaker could know how often it has done even hack-service in the ages before him, he would repentantly blot it out, or choke in its utterance. In the unpleasant discovery, that indispensable and inspiring quality, self-conceit, would suffer a wound beyond healing.

"The number of those writers who can, with any justness of expression," says Melmoth, "be termed thinking authors, would not form a very copious library, though one were to take in all of that kind which both ancient and modern times have produced. Epicurus, we are told, left behind him three hundred volumes of his own works, wherein he had not inserted a single quotation; and we have it upon the authority of Varro's own works, that he himself composed four hundred and ninety books. Seneca assures us that Didymus, the grammarian, wrote no less than four thousand; but Origen, it seems, was yet more prolific, and extended his performances even to six thousand treatises. It is obvious to imagine with what sort of materials the productions of such expeditious workmen were wrought up: sound thought and well-matured reflections could have no share, we may be sure, in these hasty performances. Thus are books multiplied, whilst authors are scarce; and so much easier is it to write than to think." "The same man," said Publius Syrus, "can rarely say a great deal and say it to the purpose."

To ridicule the pervading absence of thought in common conversation, the author of Lothair makes Pinto exclaim, "English is an expressive language, but not difficult to master. Its range is limited. It consists, as far as I observe, of four words: 'nice,' 'jolly,' 'charming,' and 'bore;' and some grammarians add, 'fond.'"

Proverbs, old as they are, seem always new, and are always smartly uttered. Sancho Panza is but one of an immortal type, and the proverbs and maxims he was always using are older than the pyramids—as old as spoken language. "The language of Spain," says Bulwer, in Caxtoniana, "is essentially a language of proverbs. In proverbs, lovers woo; in proverbs, politicians argue; in proverbs, you make your bargain with your landlady or hold a conference with your muleteer. The language of Spain is built upon those diminutive relics of a wisdom that may have existed before the Deluge, as the town of Berlin is built upon strata amassed, in the process of ages, by the animalcules that dwell in their pores." Aristotle was so struck by the condensed wisdom of proverbial sayings, that he supposed them to be the wrecks of an ancient philosophy saved from the ruin in which the rest of the system had been lost by their eloquence and shortness. Pascal conceived that every possible maxim of conduct existed in the world, though no individual can be conversant with the entire series. "There is a certain list of vices committed in all ages, and declaimed against by all authors, which," says Sir Thomas Browne, "will last as long as human nature; which, digested into commonplaces, may serve for any theme, and never be out of date until doomsday." A proverb Lord John Russell has defined to be "the wisdom of the many in the wit of one." "The various humors of mankind," says the elder Disraeli, "in the mutability of human affairs, has given birth to every species; and men were wise, or merry, or satirical, and mourned or rejoiced in proverbs. Nations held an universal intercourse of proverbs, from the eastern to the western world; for we discover among those which appear strictly national many which are common to them all. Of our own familiar ones several may be tracked among the snows of the Latins and the Greeks, and have sometimes been drawn from The Mines of the East; like decayed families which remain in obscurity, they may boast of a high lineal descent whenever they recover their lost title-deeds. The vulgar proverb, 'To carry coals to Newcastle,' local and idiomatic as it appears, however, has been borrowed and applied by ourselves; it may be found among the Persians; in the Bustan of Saadi, we have 'To carry pepper to Hindostan;' among the Hebrews, 'To carry oil to a city of olives;' a similar proverb occurs in Greek; and in Galland's Maxims of the East we may discover how many of the most common proverbs among us, as well as some of Joe Miller's jests, are of Oriental origin. The resemblance of certain proverbs in different nations must, however, be often ascribed to the identity of human nature; similar situations and similar objects have unquestionably made men think and act and express themselves alike. All nations are parallels of each other. Hence all collectors of proverbs complain of the difficulty of separating their own national proverbs from those which had crept into the language from others, particularly when nations have held much intercourse together. We have a copious collection of Scottish proverbs by Kelly; but this learned man was mortified at discovering that many, which he had long believed to have been genuine Scottish, were not only English, but French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek ones; many of his Scottish proverbs are almost literally expressed among the fragments of remote antiquity. It would have surprised him further had he been aware that his Greek originals were themselves but copies, and might have been found in D'Herbelot, Erpenius, and Golius, and in many Asiatic works, which have been more recently introduced to the enlarged knowledge of the European student, who formerly found his most extended researches limited by Hellenistic lore."

Perhaps the proverb from the apostolical writings in most frequent circulation, is the one which St. Paul has adopted from Menander, and which, as Dean Alford suggests, may have become, in the days of the apostle, a current commonplace: "Evil communications corrupt good manners."

"What stories are new?" asks Thackeray. "All types of all characters march through all fables." "Will it be believed," says Max Müller, in his essay On the Migration of Fables, "that we, in this Christian country, and in the nineteenth century, teach our children the first, the most important lessons of worldly wisdom, nay, of a more than worldly wisdom, from books borrowed from Buddhists and Brahmans, from heretics and idolaters, and that wise words, spoken a thousand, nay, two thousand years ago, in a lonely village of India, like precious seed scattered broadcast all over the world, still bear fruit a hundred and a thousand fold in that soil which is the most precious before God and man, the soul of a child? No lawgiver, no philosopher has made his influence felt so widely, so deeply, and so permanently as the author of these children's fables. But who was he? We do not know. His name, like the name of many a benefactor of the human race, is forgotten."

"Our obligations to genius are the greater," says a British essayist, "because we are seldom able to trace them. We cannot mount up to the sources from which we derive the ideas that make us what we are. Few of my readers may have ever read Chaucer; fewer still the Principia of Newton. Yet how much poorer the minds of all my readers would be if Chaucer and Newton had never written! All the genius of the past is in the atmosphere we breathe at present."

The author of The Eclipse of Faith, in one of his intellectual visions, saw suddenly expunged—"remorselessly expunged"—from literature "every text, every phrase, which had been quoted from the Bible, not only in the books of devotion and theology, but in those of poetry and fiction." "Never before," he says, "had I any adequate idea of the extent to which the Bible had moulded the intellectual and moral life of the last eighteen centuries, nor how intimately it had interfused itself with the habits of thought and modes of expression; nor how naturally and extensively its comprehensive imagery and language had been introduced into human writings, and most of all where there had been most of genius. A vast portion of literature became instantly worthless, and was transformed into so much waste paper. It was almost impossible to look into any book of merit, and read ten pages together, without coming to some provoking erasures and mutilations, which made whole passages perfectly unintelligible. Many of the sweetest passages of Shakespeare were converted into unmeaning nonsense, from the absence of those words which his own all but divine genius had appropriated from a still diviner source. As to Milton, he was nearly ruined, as might naturally be supposed. Walter Scott's novels were filled with lacunæ. I hoped it might be otherwise with the philosophers, and so it was; but even here it was curious to see what strange ravages the visitation had wrought. Some of the most beautiful and comprehensive of Bacon's Aphorisms were reduced to enigmatical nonsense."