“Sweet love, I see, changing his property,
Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate.”
“Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs.”
“I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius; he reads much;
He is a great observer....”
And so on.
We all know it, and we know it so well and feel so much with Cæsar or with Lear or with Othello or with Macbeth, that we instinctively take it all for true psychology, while it after all covers just the exceptional cases of the dramatic situation.
No! If we are to seek real generalities, we must not consult the playwright. Perhaps we may find the best conditions for general statement where we do not even have to deal with an individual, but can listen to the mind of the race and can absorb its wisdom from its proverbs. Let us take the word proverb in its widest sense, including popular sayings which have not really the stamp of the proverb. There is surely no lack of sharply coined psychology. This is true of all countries. I find the harvest richest in the field of the German proverbs, but almost as many in the field of the English, and a large number of sayings are common to the two countries. Very characteristic psychological remarks can be found among the Russian proverbs, and not a few among those in Yiddish. But this type of psychology is sufficiently characterized, if we confine ourselves here to the English proverbial phrases. Often they need a commentary in order to be understood in their psychological truth. We hear in almost all countries: “Children and fools speak the truth.” As a matter of course we all know that their chance of speaking the objective truth is very small. What is psychologically tenable is only that they are unable to hide the subjective truth. Many such phrases are simply epigrams where the pleasure in the play of words must be a substitute for the psychological truth; for instance: “Long hair and short wit.” Not a few contradict one another, and yet there is not a little wisdom in sayings like these: “Beware of a silent dog and still water”; “Misery loves company”; “Hasty love is soon hot and soon cold”; “Dogs that put up many hares kill none”; “He that will steal an egg will steal an ox”; “Idle folks have the least leisure”; “Maids say no and take”; “A boaster and a liar are cousins german”; “A young twig is easier twisted than an old tree”; “Imitation is the sincerest flattery”; “Pride joined with many virtues chokes them all”; “Offenders never pardon”; “The more wit, the less courage”; “We are more mindful of injuries than of benefits”; “Where there's a will, there's a way”; “An idle brain is the devil's workshop”; “Anger and haste hinder good counsel”; “Wise men change their minds, fools never”; “Sudden joy kills sooner than excessive grief”; “Lazy folks take the most pains”; “Nature passes nurture”; “Necessity is the mother of invention”; “We are apt to believe what we wish for”; “Where your will is ready, your foot is light.”
All these proverbs and the maxims of other nations may be true, but can we deny that they are on the whole so trivial that a psychologist would rather hesitate to proclaim them as parts of his scientific results? As far as they are true they are vague and hardly worth mentioning, and where they are definite and remarkable they are hardly true. We shall after all have to consult the individual authors to gather the subtler observations on man's behaviour, even though they furnish only semi-naïve psychology. But the English contributions are so familiar to every reader that it may be more interesting to listen to the foreigners. Every nation has its thinkers who have the reputation of being especially fine knowers of men. The French turn most readily to La Rochefoucauld, and the Germans to Lichtenberg. Certainly a word of La Rochefoucauld beside the psychologizing proverb looks like the scintillating, well-cut diamond beside a moonstone. “We imitate good actions through emulation, and bad ones through a malignity in our nature which shame concealed and example sets at liberty”; “It is much easier to suppress a first desire than to satisfy those that follow”; “While the heart is still agitated by the remains of a passion, it is more susceptible to a new one than when entirely at rest”; “Women in love more easily forgive great indiscretions than small infidelities”; “The reason we are not often wholly possessed by a single vice is that we are distracted by several.” But is this not ultimately some degrees too witty to be true, and has our system of prescientific psychology the right to open the door to such glittering epigrams which are uttered simply to tickle or to whip the vanity of man? Or what psychologist would believe Lichtenberg when he claims: “All men are equal in their mental aptitudes, and only their surroundings are responsible for their differences”? He observes better when he says: “An insolent man can look modest when he will, but a modest man can never make himself look insolent”; or when he remarks: “Nothing makes a man old more quickly than the thought that he is growing older”; or “Men do not think so differently about life as they talk about it”; or “I have always found that intense ambition and suspicion go together”; or “I am convinced that we not only love ourselves in loving others, but that we also hate ourselves in hating others.” Often his captivating psychological words are spoiled by an ethical trend. For instance, he has hardly the right to say: “In the character of every man is something which cannot be broken; it is the skeleton of his character.” But he balances such psychological rashness by fine observations like these: “The character of a man can be recognized by nothing more surely than by the joke he takes amiss”; and “I believe that we get pale from fright also in darkness, but I do not think that we would turn red from shame in the dark, because we are pale on our own account, but we blush on account of others as well as on account of ourselves.” And we are in the midst of the up-to-date psychology when we read what he said a hundred years ago: “From the dreams of a man, if he report them accurately enough, we might trace much of his character, but one single dream is not sufficient; we must have a large number for that.”
I add a few characteristic words of distinctly psychological temper from the great nonpsychological authors of modern times. Lessing says: “The superstition in which we have grown up does not lose its power over us when we see through it; not all who laugh about their chains are free”; or again, “We are soon indifferent to the good and even to the best, when it becomes regular”; “The genius loves simplicity, while the wit prefers complexity”; “The characteristic of a great man is that he treats the small things as small, and the important things as important”; “Whoever loses his mind from love would have lost it sooner or later in any case.” But on the whole, Lessing was too much of a fighter to be truly an objective psychologist. We may put more confidence in Goethe's psychology: “Where the interest fades away, the memory soon fails, too”; “The history of man is his character”; “From nature we have no fault which may not become a virtue, and no virtue which may not become a fault”; “A quiet, serious woman feels uncomfortable with a jolly man, but not a serious man with a jolly woman”; “Whatever we feel too intensely, we cannot feel very long”; “It is easy to be obedient to a master who convinces when he commands”; “Nobody can wander beneath palms without punishment; all the sentiments must change in a land where elephants and tigers are at home”; “A man does not become really happy until his absolute longing has determined its own limits”; “Hate is an active displeasure, envy a passive one, and it is therefore not surprising that envy so easily turns into hate”; “No one can produce anything important unless he isolate himself”; “However we may strive for the general, we always remain individuals whose nature necessarily excludes certain characteristics, while it possesses certain others”; “The only help against the great merits of another is love”; “Man longs for freedom, woman for tradition”; “A talent forms itself in solitude, a character in the stream of the world”; “The miracle is the dearest child of belief”; “It is not difficult to be brilliant if one has no respect for anything.”
Whoever falls into the habit of looking for psychologizing maxims in his daily reading will easily bring home something which he picks up in strolling through the gardens of literature. Only we must always be on our guard lest the beautifully coloured and fragrant flowers which we pluck are poisonous. Is it really good psychology when Vauvenargues writes: “All men are born sincere and die impostors,” or, when Brillat-Savarin insists: “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you who you are”? Or can we really trust Mirabeau: “Kill your conscience, as it is the most savage enemy of every one who wants success”; or Klopstock: “Happiness is only in the mind of one who neither fears nor hopes”; or Gellert: “He who loves one vice, loves all the vices”? Can we believe Chamfort: “Ambition more easily takes hold of small souls than great ones, just as a fire catches the straw roof of the huts more easily than the palaces”; or Pascal: “In a great soul, everything is great”; or the poet Bodenstedt when he sings: “A gray eye is a sly eye, a brown eye is roguish and capricious, but a blue eye shows loyalty”? And too often we must be satisfied with opposites. Lessing tells us: “All great men are modest”; Goethe: “Only rascals are modest.” The psychology of modesty is probably more neatly expressed in the saying of Jean Paul: “Modest is he who remains modest, not when he is praised, but when he is blamed”: and Ebner-Eschenbach adds: “Modesty which comes to consciousness, comes to an end.”
But in our system of naïve psychology, we ought not to omit such distinctly true remarks as Rabelais' much-quoted words: “The appetite comes during the eating”; or Fox's words: “Example will avail ten times more than precept”; or Moltke's: “Uncertainty in commanding produces uncertainty in obedience”; or Luther's: “Nothing is forgotten more slowly than an insult, and nothing more quickly than a benefaction.” It is Fichte who first said: “Education is based on the self-activity of the mind.” Napoleon coins the good metaphor: “A mind without memory is a fortress without garrison.” Buffon said what professional psychologists have repeated after him: “Genius is nothing but an especial talent for patience.” Schumann claims: “The talent works, the genius creates.” We may quote from Jean Paul: “Nobody in the world, not even women and princes, is so easily deceived as our own conscience”; or from Pascal: “Habit is a second nature which destroys the original one.” Nietzsche says: “Many do not find their heart until they have lost their head”; Voltaire: “The secret of ennui is to have said everything”; Jean Paul: “Sorrows are like the clouds in a thunderstorm; they look black in the distance, but over us hardly gray.” Once more I quote Nietzsche: “The same emotions are different in their rhythm for man and woman: therefore men and women never cease to misunderstand each other.”