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Paradox in the Aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld and Some Representative English Followers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Harold E. Pagliaro
Harold E. Pagliaro*
Affiliation:
Columbia University New York 27, N.Y.
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Extract

The best remembered aphorists have contrived to state new truths in brief and telling ways. Less fascinated than most authors with leaf, twig, and branch, they strike immediately for the pith. Almost every reader of their work first pays tribute to this concentration of effort with the repeated shock of joy and enlightenment that marks his response. It seems likely that such writers try to achieve a compression of statement that corresponds to the instantaneous character of their insights. Like Dante, they are stirred by the hope of economizing glimpses of eternity into single-worded statements; unlike him, they never quite despair of doing so. Anyone who has responded to the success of their efforts can appreciate the temptation to discover something about the means by which these paradoxical compositions achieve their effects, particularly those that time and again tumble their reader's complacency. It is with the ways in which those effects derive from the structural patterns of the aphorism that this essay is concerned. The method will be first to classify aphorisms according to structure and then to examine the ways in which each class affects the reader.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 42 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964

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Footnotes

Se quanto infino a qui di lei si dice

fosse conchiuso tutto in una loda,

poco sarebbe a fornir questa vice.

Paradiso xxx.16-18

References

1 Generally, English aphorists who wrote after the appearance of La Rochefoucauld's maxims, 1665, produced at least unconscious imitations of his work. See J. E. Tucker, “The Earliest English Translation of La Rochefoucauld's Maximes,” MLN, lxiv (1949), 413–415, for discussion of an anonymous edition of the Maximes published at the Hague in 1664. By 1685 the Maximes were widely known both in the original and in English, owing to translations by John Davies and Aphra Behn. Davies' was the earlier, appearing in 1670; Aphra Behn translated only 395 of the original 504 maximes for her Miscellany, being a collection of Poems by several hands. Together with reflections on morality or Seneca unmasqued (London, 1685). By the time the second edition of Mrs. Behn's translation appeared in 1706, Swift had produced his Various Thoughts, Moral and Diverting, in the style of La Rochefoucauld. See Herbert Davis' introduction to A Tale of a Tub (Oxford, 1957), p. xxxv, for the opinion that “Swift's admiration for the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld began early, and lasted throughout his life, and may well have prompted and shaped these thoughts.” For additional evidence of Swift's interest in La Rochefoucauld see The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. F. Elrington Ball (London, 1911), ii, 44; iii, 297; iv, 277; v, 77; vi, 107–112. Also see “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1958), p. 551. Although George Savile, first Marquis of Halifax, had written his aphorisms before Swift's, it was not until 1750 that the Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections was published. See H. C. Foxcroft, The Life and Letters of George Savile, Bart. (London, New York, and Bombay, 1898), ii, 179, for the view that Halifax was influenced by La Rochefoucauld, “whose example, no doubt, he followed.” Chesterfield, in a letter to his son dated 15 January 1753, included a group of aphorisms “more calculated for the meridian of France or Spain than of England”; see The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London, 1932), v, 2005, n. 1, for this, young Stanhope's opinion of his father's aphoristic effort; also see the letter dated 5 September 1748, in which Chesterfield urges his son to study the Maximes.

2 “William Shenstone,” Essays in Criticism and Research (Cambridge, Eng., 1942), pp. 108–109. See also A. D. McKillop, English Literature from Dryden to Burns (New York and London, 1948), p. 230, who maintains that Shenstone wrote aphorisms “in the manner of La Rochefoucauld.”

3 Representative of lexical imprecision are Johnson's Dictionary and the OED, neither of which distinguishes very-well between the meanings of “aphorism,” “apophthegm,” “maxim,” “sentence,” and “precept.” If it is true that the illustrative passages following the definitions of these terms in the OED suggest that they cannot always be interchanged in context, it is also true that the definition of each employs some or all of the remaining words: “Aphorism” is in part defined as “Any principle or precept expressed in a few words; a short pithy sentence containing a truth of general import”; “Apophthegm,” as “a pithy or sententious maxim.” Johnson is hardly more helpful: “Aphorism” he defines as “A maxim; a precept contracted in a short sentence; an unconnected proposition.” “Apophthegm” he considers to be “A remarkable saying; a valuable maxim uttered on some sudden occasion.”

4 See, for example, William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, Contaynyng the Sayinges of the Wyse (London, 1547). Surprisingly enough, Baldwin, although he prints proverbial and aphoristic materials together, without differentiating them by his format, makes an attempt (futile in my opinion) to distinguish between “Precepts, Counsails and Lawes” on the one hand and “Proverbs and Semblables” on the other (i, iv, 3). The means for distinguishing between the two forms were available to Renaissance authors; a sufficiently strong motive was not; that is, as early as 1546 John Heywood accurately limited himself to a selection of purely proverbial materials in his “Dialogue, Wherein are Pleasantlie contrived the Number of All The Effectual Proverbs In Our Old English Tongue,” though most other authors did not. See The Proverbs of John Heywood, ed. Julian Sharman (London, 1874). Even Erasmus, who certainly was aware of the difference between various kinds of sentenliae, as the first edition of his Adagia, 1500, makes clear, added, in later editions, folk sayings (proverbs) to the classical Greek and Roman sentences that make up the original volume. See Theodore Charles Appelt, Studies in the Contents and Sources of Erasmus' “Adagia” (Chicago, 1942), pp. 9–10. The inescapable inference (based on this and much more evidence) seems to be that although the learned authors of the Renaissance were quite aware of the distinctions between sententious forms, they were much more concerned with preserving the wisdom of valuable old sentences than with classifying them.

5 Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), p. 81; Leon Levrault, Maximes et portraits (Paris, 1908); William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York, 1937), p. 132.

6 This was, of course, standard medieval and Renaissance practice. See Crane, pp. 34–35. It is rather surprising to discover the much more recent literary surgery in Logan Pearsall Smith, A Treasury of English Aphorisms (London, 1928).

7 In addition to those already cited, the most useful studies consulted in the preparation of this essay were these: W. Blades, “Introduction,” The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, A Facsimile of the First Book Printed in England by William Caxton, 1477 (London, 1877); R. O. Evans, “Aphorism—An Aspect of Euphuism,” N&Q, cci (1956), 278–279; W. Gemoll, Das Apophthegma (Leipzig, 1924); H. A. Grubbs, “The Originality of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims,” RHL, xxxvi (1929), 18–59; M. Hadas, A History of Greek Literature (New York, 1950); W. C. Hazlitt, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (London, 1907); W. R. Inge, Lay Thoughts of a Dean (London, 1926); J. Morley, Aphorisms (London, 1887); F. Schalk, “Das Wesen des französischen Aphorismus,” Die Neueren Sprachen, xli (1933), 130–140, 421–436; W. W. Skeat, Early English Proverbs (Oxford, 1910); J. A. K. Thomson, Classical Influences on English Prose (London, 1956); M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1950); B. C. Williams, Gnomic Poetry in Anglo Saxon (New York, 1914); Sister Mary Francine Zeller, New Aspects of Style in the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld (Washington, 1954). It was not until I had concluded the present study that I ran across Sister Mary's admirable dissertation on The Maximes, in which she sets out to analyze the characteristics and effects of La Rochefoucauld's constructions, rhythms, and melodies. Though her analysis is valuable, several aspects of her effort give me pause. (1) I believe Sister Mary often implies the view that the systematic description of characteristics of style is equivalent to an elucidation of their effects. (2) Her analysis of structure, which attempts to take into account all La Rochefoucauld's variations, has so large a number of categories that while it may be useful for reference, it does not give the reader a “sense” for the many forms. (3) Her willingness to venture frequent impressionistic responses perhaps mars the objectivity that characterizes her work at its best; for example, she says, “as one turns the pages of La Rochefoucauld's collection of Maxims, the constantly recurring tonic i is noted quite easily. The high, shrill quality of this vowel seems to translate aptly the author's ironical overtones” (p. 77). Again, “The quick staccato quality of the consonants d, p, k, and t is called up to render the anger, disgust, and sarcasm of the author, the rolling r his rage, the whistling recurrrence of the s his irony, disdain, and scorn, the abrasion of the f and v his disgust, while the softer sounds of l, m, r rather translate the sweetness, languor, and evasive fluidity of the topic under consideration” (p. 81). The reader of both her study and the present essay will note that the aphoristic feature which I call “polar” Sister Mary had referred to as “binary,” “bipartite,” or “binomial.” As the reader may gather, my unique aims have been (1) to establish

a classification of aphoristic forms that is at once comprehensive, brief, and clear; (2) to discover the kinds of apprehension engendered by each variety of form.

8 See “Der Aphorismus als literarische Gattung,” Zeitschrijt für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, xxvii (1933), 154, where Professor Mautner observes, “Die zwei Hauptformen aphoristischer Zeugung sind Einfall und Klärung, jener der mögliche Ausgangs-, dieser ein Endpunkt bewußten Denkens.”

9 The Works of Francis Bacon, eds. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1887–1902), iv, 65.

10 La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, ed. F. C. Green (Cambridge, England, 1945), p. 74; hereafter cited as La Rochefoucauld. For the other aphorists these texts were used: Halifax, The Complete Works of George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax, ed. Walter Raleigh (Oxford, 1912); hereafter cited as Halifax. Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue, Polite Conversation, Etc., (Vol. iv, Blackwell ed.), ed. Herbert Davis with Louis Landa (Oxford, 1957); hereafter cited as Swift. Chesterfield, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, 6 vols. (London, 1932), v; hereafter cited as Chesterfield. William Shenstone, The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone, ed. James Dodsley, 3 vols. (London, 1764–69), ii; hereafter cited as Shenstone. The parenthesized numbers, with short citations, used after aphorisms quoted in the body of the present essay refer, of course, to page numbers in the texts named in this note.

11 The following brief outline reveals in simple form the pattern of the classification adduced in the text.

I. Expository aphorisms

II. Paradoxical aphorisms

A. Polar paradoxical aphorisms

1. Polar aphorisms of parallel structure

a. parallelism of antithesis

b. parallelism of analysis

c. parallelism of synthesis

2. Polar aphorisms of equational structure

3. Polar aphorisms of comparative structure

B. Non-Polar paradoxical aphorisms

Paradoxical aphorisms that do not employ grammatically balanced elements to express the paradox (about 25%) cannot be classified under the five headings provided in this study. Although I suspect great similarity between the effects of polar and non-polar compositions (in fact, I have been able to characterize some of the relationships between the two kinds of structures), space will not allow a full discussion of my tentative conclusions. Here is a very brief, and I hope not misleading, summary of my opinions. One might well regard polar aphorisms as making up the main corpus of paradoxical aphorisms and non-polar forms as constituting a slim appendage to the main body: the farther along the appendage the aphorisms occur, the fewer grammatically polar elements would they contain. Close to polar is this aphorism; in fact, if its adjective clause were made independent (an easily accomplished task), it would qualify: “L'intérêt, qui aveugle les uns, fait la lumière des autres” (La Rochefoucauld, p. 62). But at the other extreme are non-polar aphorisms that suggest little or nothing of grammatical polarity. “The vacant skull of a pedant generally furnishes out a throne and a temple for vanity” (Shenstone, p. 268). Whatever degree of polarity a paradoxical aphorism may have, obviously something in it must convey the force of paradox. In La Rochefoucauld (very nearly polar), “qui aveugle les uns” opposes “fait la lumière”; in Shenstone (scarcely polar), “vacant skull” paradoxically “furnishes out.”

12 Swift, for example, writes, “No wise man ever wished to be younger.” Although the aphorism does not contain parallel elements, a paradox may be readily inferred from it: Men prefer youth to old age; men (wise men) do not prefer to youth old age; its purpose, of course, is to modify the meaning of “wise men” through the denial of received opinion that it is better to be young than old.