The Decay of Popular Wisdom

REVIEWS 205 in many respects a small-scale reproduction or anticipation of Vietor's neo-classic statue) can yet be instrumental in strengthening us for a life of arduous humanitarian activities. But this is, of course, no valid excuse for perpetuating an obsolete tradition of literary portrait painting. A more up-to-date apprehension of Goethe will do much more for us. THE DECAY OF POPULAR WISDOM" H. S. WILSON The increasing disuse of proverbial wisdom is dismaying. Nowadays , if one says to one's children, "The burnt child dreads the fire," they either look blank or suspect a joke. The Victorians still had a proverb for every occasion, and those of us who had Victorian parents can still hear them: "Pride goeth before a fall"; "Willul waste brings woeful want"; "Let patience have her perfect work"; "If you have a reputation for early rising, you may lie abed till noon." As present-day equivalents or substitutes we have practically nothing. A few, not many, of our advertising slogans are clever and pleasant to turn over the tongue; but we know that they are meant to beguile us, and even if they were worth repeating, they would be of no use in our daily lives. Our slang is too depressing even to think of-such banal figures as "on the spot," "behind the eight ball," or the laconic (and usually nasal) "And how!" "So what?" Our popular idiom is supplied from the comics and the movies, the radio and television, and has reached what must surely be the lowest common multiple of human intelligence --flat, dull, and inarticulate. The reasons for this state of affairs are complex and doubtless significant of many different tendencies and influences that operate in very intricate patterns. It is not that our generation is stupider than its forebears or less anxious to do right. The causes are more indirect and less easily perceived. Some of them, however, are fairly obvious and may be listed: (1) the decreasing use of the Bible, and the corresponding neglect of religious and ethical instruction; (2) the increasing faith in the expert and the progressive, as opposed to the traditional, and the consequent preference for the specialist's jargon (or the colloquial smartness which apes it) at the expense of the pithy aphorism refined and polished by the use of generations; (3) the distrust of the old-fashioned, especially old-fashioned sententiousness (the perception that much of it was not simply prudential but also cynical, if not hypo- *A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By MORRIS PALMER TILLEY. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press [Toronto: Burns & MacEachern). 1950, Pp. xiv, 854. $19.50. 206 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY critical as well) ; the dislike of the pompous attitudinizing that it implied ; our generation, the more perspicacious part of it, at least, suffers from a real dread of the overtly didactic; (4) the increasing disuse of books, on anything above the picture-book level- it used to be said that Pope was the English author most quoted next to Shake- 'peare, and it may still be so; we so seldom quote poetry, or indeed anything literary, that there is no ready way of knowing. The age that regarded Erasmus's Adagio and countless lesser collections as indispensable storehouses of wisdom is now antiquity. No one today would think of collecting loci communes with the purpose of thus enriching his table talk or his writing. The age of Elegant Extracts is just as archaic, and perhaps we may bc thankful that it is no longer the fashion to publish the "Beauties" of Ernest Hemingway or "Select Thoughts" from George Bernard Shaw. But it is a pity that the tried and simple "sentences" of our ancestors should be fading from us with the changing times-"A close mouth catches no flies"; "The shortest answer is doing"; "The pitcher that goes too often to the well, at length comes broken home"; "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings." Without growing sentimental about the good old days--we are at least cleaner than our ancestors, and, despite our wars and other...