Studies in Life from Jewish Proverbs. W. A. L. Elmslie
certain that words which have not failed through so many centuries to touch the hearts and minds of men deserve from us more than a passing glance of recognition.
Many proverbs speak truth, but a true word can be spoken too often. Every preacher in Christendom knows how little, through much iteration, the words “Hope” and “Love” may convey to his hearers, although most men are conscious that of the realities of Hope and Love they cannot possess too much. So also with the truths expressed in proverbs. For example, many excellent men have lacked only promptitude to win success, and we have need to be warned thereby; but when the fact is put before us in the words “Procrastination is the thief of time,” what copybook boredom rises in our indignant soul! We will not learn the lesson from so stale a teacher. Every effort to indicate the genius of proverbs is attended by this disadvantage of verbal familiarity; and, of course, it is the finest sayings that suffer most. But just here the tragedy of the great European War lends unwelcome aid. The intensity of human experience has been raised to a degree not known for centuries; and, as a recent writer in the Spectator admirably puts it, “In all times of distress dead truisms come to life. They confront the mind at every turn. We are amazed at the vividness of our thoughts, and confounded at the banality of their expression. We imagined that only fools helped themselves out with the musty wisdom of copybooks, but now it seems that even a fool may speak to the purpose. There is nothing so new as trouble, nothing so threadbare as its expression. ‘All is fair in love and war’. … How vividly that falsehood has been impressed upon us by our enemies. Yet how dull and indisputable it seemed such a little while ago. Even those of us who have least personal stake in the war grow terribly impatient at its slow movement. Almost every man who buys an afternoon paper thinks of the ‘watched pot.’ How many people have lately known the heart-sickness of ‘hope deferred’? ‘Dying is as natural as living’: that is a dull enough expression of fact, when death is far off: but, when it is near, it cuts like a two-edged sword.”[1] Life for the present generation has verily been transformed; it is both more terrible and more inspiring, more poignant in its sorrows, more thrilling in its achievements and its joys: all things are become new. Once we could say glibly, “The heart knoweth its own bitterness,” using the phrase to point a trivial trouble, but not now; and perhaps never again in our life-time. Thank God, it is not only the sorrowful sayings which rise in our heart with new meaning, but also those which speak of courage and strength, of loyalty and faith.
There is a third danger against which we require to be on guard. Proverbs cannot be absorbed in quantity. Like pictures in a gallery, they stand on their rights, each demanding a measure of individual attention and a due period for reflection. Many chapters in the Book of Proverbs are unpalatable reading, not because they are prosy, but because they are composed of independent maxims connected by no link of logical sequence or even of kindred meaning. To read consecutively through a series of these self-contained units is to impose an intolerable strain on the mind. The imagination becomes jaded, the memory dazed by the march of too swiftly changing images. The disconnected thoughts efface one another, leaving behind them only a blurred confusion. This will appear the more inevitable the more clearly we realise what a proverb is. For consider: not one nor two but countless observations of men and things have gone to the making of a single proverb; it is the conclusion to which a thousand premisses pointed the way; it is compressed experience. And further, a proverb usually gives not just the bare inference from experience, but the inference made memorable by some touch of fancy in the phrasing. Hence the meaning of a proverb is not always obvious, that it may seem the sharper when perceived. Some curious comparison, some pleasing illustration, is put forward to catch and hold attention until, from the train of thought thus raised, a truth leaps out upon us or a fact of life confronts us, familiar perhaps but now invested with fresh dignity. A proverb is not, as it were, a single sentence out of the book of human life, but is rather the epitome of a page or chapter; or, if you please, call it a summary, now of some drama of life, now of an epic or lyric poem, now again of a moral treatise. From a literary point of view proverbs are rich, over-rich feeding. They cloy. There is in the Book of Proverbs a remark that adroitly puts the point:
Hast thou found honey?
Eat so much as is convenient for thee (Pr. 2516).
It follows that frequent quotation of proverbs will be apt to fatigue the reader, yet the danger is one which cannot wholly be avoided in this volume. Something, however, can be done by setting limitations on the scope of our subject, and in the following pages no attempt will be made to present any systematic survey of the whole immense field of Jewish proverbs, ancient, mediæval, and modern. Attention will be given chiefly to two pre-Christian collections—the Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus—and, even so, many good sayings in those books will be left unnoticed. Moreover, proverbs are not quite chaotic, for all their natural independence. They are like a forest through which many paths conduct; by following now one, now another topic it is possible to penetrate in various directions, as inclination prompts. But, even so, the peril of wearying the reader by over-many proverbs will only be lessened not removed; wherefore again—’tis a word of high wisdom—Hast thou found honey? Eat so much as is convenient for thee.
Enough of difficulties and dangers! Woe to him who goes “supping sorrows with a long spoon”! A happier task, however, does remain, before we set sail upon our quest: we have still to count our blessings. What are the virtues of proverbs? What the interests we may hope to find in our subject?
The proverb does for human life something that science does for the world of Nature: it rouses the unseeing eye and the unheeding ear to the marvel of what seems ordinary. As for Nature, most of us who are not scientists are still deplorably blind to her perfections, but popular text-books have so far succeeded that we confess our ignorance with shame, and some are even penitent enough to desire that they might grow wiser. We are at least aware that there is nothing in the world not wonderful. We used to pass the spider’s web in our gardens with never a thought, but now—is not Le Fabre whispering to us of “rays equidistant and forming a beautifully regular orb,” of “polygonal lines drawn in a curve as geometry understands it.” “Which of us,” says he, pricking our human vanity, “would undertake, off-hand, without much preliminary experiment and without measuring instruments to divide a circle into a given quantity of sectors of equal width. The spider, though weighted with a wallet and tottering on threads shaken by the wind, effects the delicate division without stopping to think.”[2] The astronomer does not guard his secrets like the jealous astrologer of old; so that now-a-days many a man who possesses neither the higher mathematics nor a telescope knows more than his eyes can show him of the marvels of the stars and the mystery of space. Professor J. A. Thompson writes of The Wonder of Life, and behold! even he that hath no skill in biology may learn that the barren seashore is a teeming world, more strange than fairyland. Science does not make Nature marvellous; she lifts the veil of ignorance from our mind. Proverbs perform the same service for the life of man. Taking the common incidents of experience, they point out their meaning. Perceiving the principles in the recurrent facts of life, they discover and declare that the commonplace is more than merely common. That is a task greater and more difficult than at first sight may appear: as has been well said, “There is no literary function higher than that of giving point to what is ordinary and rescuing a truth from the obscurity of obviousness.”[3] Most men are slow, desperately slow, to perceive the significance of the experiences they encounter daily; yet from the iron discipline of these things none of us can escape. They are our life-long schoolmaster, and woe betide the man who from that stern teacher learns nothing or learns amiss. Nor is it sufficient that the facts should be brought before us. As a rule, the truth requires to be pushed home. Ask us not to observe that the reasoning faculties of the human being are seriously and sometimes disastrously perturbed by the impulses of affection; but tell us “Love is blind,” and—perhaps—we shall not forget.
Proverbs are superlatively human. Suffer the point to have a curious introduction. In certain ancient colleges it is the custom on one Sunday in each year to hold in the chapel a service of Commemoration, when the names of all those who were benefactors of the college are read aloud. Few ceremonies can convey more impressively the continuity of the generations, the actual unity between the shadowy past and the vivid present which seems to us the only real world. The roll may begin far back in