26 MARCH 1983, Page 23

Golden shreds

Arthur Marshall

The Oxford Book of Aphorisms Chosen by John Gross (0.U.P. £9.50)

One does rather wonder to what extent the creators, or composers, or coiners e,r aphorisms ('maxim' is perhaps the

closest and shortest synonym) tried them proudi Y out on listeners in the home, the

°ea, the street, the -coffee house (the 17th century is here well represented), prior to getting out their quills and giving them a hitl°re Permanent life on paper. One would ardlY care to have been on the receiving end of an aphorism fired off vocally by, say, Rabbi Shmelke of Nicolsburg, here slotted into the 'Moralist' section. Most aphorisms take a gloomy view of mankind (Joseph Roux gives us the briefest, and it is `Maxiiniste, pessimiste') and all his wicked ways and the actual uttering of them must impart a smug expression to the utterer's face. I defy anybody to bring 'However we may be reproached for our vanity, we sometimes need to be assured of our merits and to have our most obvious advantages pointed out to us' casually into the lunch- time conversation and one only hopes that Vauvenargues just wrote it down.

In this connection my heart goes sym- pathetically out to the wife of perhaps the most famous and certainly one of the most prolific aphorists of them all. How frightful it must have been to be seated at breakfast with La Rochefoucauld and to have had to listen, as he reached out for the Golden Shred, to 'There are people whose defects become them, and others who are ill served by their good qualities.' Did the Duchess's attempts to stem the flow with 'More toast, Francois?' have any effect? Did she push forward the Stork (`They say, dear, that it tastes like butter') in the hope of distract- ing him? Perhaps the Duke was occasion- ally forgetful and hoisted himself with his own petard, coming out for the umpteenth time, and as though it were a freshly-minted novelty, with `How comes it that our memories are good enough to retain even the minutest details of what has befallen us, but not to recollect how many times we have recounted them to the same person?' One can, across the years, hear the Duchess sighing and muttering the French equiv- alent of 'I'll say!'

in between, is quite another matter, fistful at a time and with pauses for thought

But for the reading of aphorisms, a especially when we have, as here, such a rich and enjoyable feast awaiting us. But not too rich, in the dietary sense, for Mr Gross, knowing well that all good aphorisms must, to make their point, be fairly highly spiced, has thrown in, as valuable roughage and to combat mental diverticulitis, various fragmentary jottings and gentle musings and 'a sprinkling of miscellaneous outbursts and oddities', all of which are welcome.

by-products we One of these pleasing owe to Paul Valery: What grimaces, what capers, leaps and chuckles prime ministers, presidents, and kings must indulge in, in the privacy , so as to avenge their of their bedrooms systems on the daylong strain imposed on them.

How joyous to picture our splendid Mrs Thatcher at No. 10 when the day's last '1 shall expect a more satisfactory answer first thing tomorrow' has been said and the bedroom door firmly closed. Darting to a chest of drawers, she takes out her castanets and Hungarian rig and, while Denis beats out the relentless rhythm, hurls herself into , her hair all over the a wild gypsy csardas shop. Incidentally, apart from that Roux one and a few more, all the foreign quota- tions are translated into admirable English (such a relief not to have to try to puzzle out what old Ovid was getting at).

As to the frequency of the contributions, you'll want to know their authors' batting averages: Dr Johnson 88, Nietzsche 55, Vauvenargues 52, Schopenhauer 48, Hazlitt 47, La Bruyere 45, Goethe (Cap- tain) 43, La Rochefoucauld 41, Chesterton 35, Emerson 32, Bacon 28. Also played: Proust, Lord Chesterfield, Gertrude Stein. And as to the subjects treated, in the end every facet of the human predicament is covered and John Gross's industry and scholarship are to be very warmly com- mended.

Bright and reasonably well-read persons, looking for a new fireside game, could do much worse than pass the book from hand to hand and play Spot The Author. Try this one on for size: 'A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.' Not easy, is it? Obviously a good person, and kind. The total absence of wit and 'bite' rules out Wilde and Shaw and a good many more. The emphasis on wheels seems to place it in the motor-car age, but as it is quite impossible to oil a Daimler's wheels while the vehicle is in motion, we might be tempted to think that the writer is a woman, and an unworldly one at that. Her ghost will haunt the Langham Hotel long after the BBC pull it down, for it was there she always stayed. Yes, it is Ouida, her in- clusion showing the wide sweep of Mr

Gross's net.

Readers currently involved in rickety marriages may get a sort of grim comfort from the many aphorisms dealing with the married state. Disraeli thought that 'it destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.' Then, 'Love is blind but marriage restores its sight' ought to have come from Dorothy Parker, a very experienced connaisseuse of wedded bliss and here a notable absentee, but it is by Lichtenberg. Samuel Butler (the 19th-cen- tury one) weighs in with 'Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering has been undergone in the streets leading from St George's, Hanover Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate,' and one really cannot go further than that.

Or can one? The French can always be relied on to pitch sourly in. Sacha Guitry, who perhaps had good reason to know, said 'When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her,' They sometimes manage marital matters better in France, as Alexandre Dumas fits points out: 'The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to bear them, and sometimes three.' It is surprising to find, in 1805 and in Chamfort's Maximes el Pensees, a very modern attitude to divorce: 'Divorce is so entirely natural that, in many houses, he sleeps each night between the husband and wife.' And nobody must at any point be complacent: 'Never feel remorse for what you have thought about your wife: she has thought much worse

things about you' (French again: Jean Ros- tand).

'The only way to read a book of aphorisms without being bored ...' wrote the Prince de Ligne in 1796, going on to suggest, as we have done, a few at a time. The Prince would have cheered up could he have known the fine post-1796 crop of aphorists and there is no boredom here. Open the book and dig where you may, a nugget of truth gleams up at you. 'My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose' (J. B. S. Haldane). 'Bees are not as busy as we think they are. They just can't buzz any slower' (Kin Hubbard). 'Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun' (Chesterton).

The late Godfrey Winn, in a burst of boyish confidence, once said 'I just don't care what anybody else says about God. He has always been perfectly sweet to me.' But not always to others, apparently, and God comes in, and rightly some will think, for a bit of a pasting. Nearly two millennia ago we find Pliny the Elder hitting the nail on the head: 'It is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things, whatever it may be, pays any regard to human affairs'. Jules Renard is critical: 'Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window.' Alexandre Dumas fils again: 'If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has in-

flicted on men, He would kill himself.'

Each will have his or her favourite. I ant divided between Mark Twain's 'Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it only because it was forbidder). The mistake was in not forbidding the ser: pent; then he would have eaten the serpen1 and Santayana's 'Why shouldn't things he largely absurd, futile and transitory? The?; are so, and we are so, and they go very we together.' I am reminded of the feather' brained Lady Kitty in Maugham's The Cir- cle: 'Life/ is really very quaint. Sad, 0f, course, but oh!, so quaint. Often I lie in bea at night and have a good laugh to myself as I think how quaint life is.'