The Decadence of Proverbial Philosophy

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

WHETHER the love of virtue and the Practice virtue can be instilled in the young by any system of education is a question which Socrates found it worth his while to ponder, but on which we wiser moderns have had little time to waste. We have perforce assumed that moral excellence can be induced by the proper training, yet we have hardly realized that our ideas of what constitutes the proper training must be radically readjusted.

The rod, it is true, has long had its day. No reputable scientific authority on the moral training of children has longer a good word to say for Solomon’s panacea. The precocity of modern children in developing a sacred and inviolable sense of personal dignity precludes its employment, while their failure to develop pari passu the inhibitive tendencies which make for the comfort of others has thrown a dreadful burden on what is facetiously described as moral suasion.

But whether this residual doctrine is to prove any more tenable han the now defunct birch-and-rod theory remains to be seen. For upon what in the last resort does the exercise of moral suasion rest? Is it not upon certain indisputable axioms of conduct with which we are wont in season and out of season to bestrew the pathway of the young? Ever since the time of Benjamin Franklin, to go no farther back, we have acted as though under the persuasion that the pregnant proverb was the “guide of life.” Each tale in the school reader had its moral; each accident in the household its lesson; every occurrence in the parish its warning; and universal history its terrible examples. Some fairly intelligent observers of their kind have been so imposed upon by this method as to attribute to it the whole difference between masculine and feminine codes of morality. Thus Stevenson tells us that “Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally on catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”

Now it is against this didactic use of a proverbial philosophy that a violent reaction has set in. To the children of this generation “the words of the wise are as goads, ” in a very literal, yet a very unscriptural sense. I suppose no one but a very old-fashioned individual, and one singularly ignorant of this present evil world and its devices, would close an address even to a Sunday-school with the once widely current, “Be good, and you will be happy.” Travesty and parody have blighted that aphorism beyond hope of rehabilitation. It is by no means the only proverb that engenders disdain on the part of youthful auditors. Such aversion to the improving watchword is all but universal.

Nor is this youthful repugnance to edifying generalizations the most disheartening feature of the situation. As usual, infantile depravity is justified by what parades as scientific pedagogy. The pedagogical expert now tells us that the moral maxim or proverb is commonly false, or at least fallacious; and that where reliable as a recipe for individual success, it is commonly though disguisedly selfish or anti-social.

It must, I think, be conceded that the naively pietized imagination of earlier days has been somewhat undiscriminating in its application of these, instructive watchwords. The uniform recommendation of piety as a specific for success both in this life and in that which is to come accounts in some degree perhaps for the unmerited disrepute into which that seemingly excellent saying has fallen. But the rising tide of skepticism has overflowed not merely the proverbial dikes that have protected the frontiers of the moral life, but is sweeping away those time-worn secular adages that for generations have been the supposed breakwaters behind which commercial integrity has been sheltered. I do not find that any very general assent is longer given to the dictum that “honesty is the best policy.” One discriminating observer has informed me that it applies only to retail trade. Even the group of proverbs that focus in prescribing unflagging industry as the road to worldly success is being undermined. It is true that unctuous homage is frequently and publicly paid to some reading of this proverb, but it fails longer to carry conviction. The now common spectacle of some famous millionaire periodically disclosing to gaping auditors the secret of his worldly success has become something to jeer at. The hardly concealed incredulity of the public has put a terrible strain on the rhetoric of these preachers of perseverance. “ England, ” said Nelson, “expects every man to do his duty; ” yet Mr. Schwab, president of the Steel Trust, is very bold and says: “Everybody is expected to do his duty, but the boy who does his duty, and a little more than his duty, is the boy who is going to succeed in this world.” To this one cynic replies that “ this much belauded industry theory of success can be true only so long as most people don’t act on it.” If each does more than his duty, the standard will ere long be so much raised and so exacting that all will be worse off than before. Hence such supererogatory virtue can redound only to the success of the few, and presupposes the failure of the many. And from this point of view there is another argument adduced against the industry theory of commercial success, namely, that the acceptance of this theory screens from scrutiny and attack the many who have amassed wealth by far other and less laudable means. To the same Limbo are consigned such obviously anti-social maxims as “There’s always room at the top.” This might be preached to the basket of vipers each trying to raise his head above his neighbors, — a description of the modern industrial world which we owe to Rusk in and Carlyle. Even the excellent Samuel Smiles’s admonition that in this country any boy may be president is condemned by our new masters on the same grounds.

Now what is to be done in this state of affairs is another question. But we may as well make up our minds to the fact that to the rising generation a pious fraud is not as good as a miracle. Whether our proper course is to sift our remaining stock of moral maxims, and to use in future only those that have not been reversed in the higher court of juvenile criticism, I do not know. I am concerned here merely to point out the indubitable decay into which our timehonored proverbial philosophy has fallen. “If the foundations be destroyed what can the righteous do ? ”