The aphorism.

WHAT IS AN APHORISM? What makes it quotable and memorable? Aside from its condensed, witty quality, it must, like a joke, be somehow surprising, either in thought or phrasing. The best aphorisms, like the best witticisms, are repeated with pleasure. Some aphorisms even reach people who do not habitually read. Sometimes, only the aphorisms of a deceased writer are remembered, testimony to the vitality of the form and the power of quotation, which, to rephrase a famous aphorism, can be called the sincerest form of flattery.

Probably the greatest aphorist of all time was Shakespeare. Most likely, a book of quotations, proverbs, sayings, epigrams, and the like, will devote its largest section to him. Such sayings as "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose" or "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds" are quite familiar. His greatest gift was, I believe, his capacity for compressed language coupled with an unlimited suggestiveness. Both precision and poetry, specificity and implication, denotation and connotation, are merged in him. "How far that little candle throws his beams / So shines a good deed in a naughty world" or "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Both statements fuse concreteness with abstractness in a manner that is almost commonplace in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's best known utterances, his most often quoted expressions, go beyond the aphorism, of course. They are indeed moving lines but not exactly epigrams. Such passages as "We are such stuff as dreams are made on / And our little life is rounded by a sleep" or "There's a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will..." virtually defy analysis because of their rich suggestiveness. And perhaps the more important consideration in this regard is that many celebrated passages derive their power from what aphorisms do not rely on, their context. So when Hamlet looks in awe at the emotion displayed by the itinerant actors and worries about his own lack of passion, wondering "What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?", the lines are moving because we know about the turmoil inside of him and the indecision afflicting him, but they are not necessarily able to stand on their own and would only be quoted by someone who knows the play.

It is precisely the dramatic setting that makes even such innocuous utterances as Lear's "Pray you undo this button" memorable and moving. But aphorisms can, should, and do exist on their own. Even when they are not written specifically as aphorisms, when they are not intended as separate texts, they are often finally able to stand on their own. Many who have delivered themselves of fine epigrams have not at all intended them as such. In this connection, there is a real difference in intention between the likes of the great seventeenth century French aphorist La Rochefoucauld and the eighteenth century English man of letters Samuel Johnson, since the former wrote mainly separate epigrams, while the latter's are embedded in longer work. But the difference in effect is small, for the aphorisms that are detached from the text seem as independent as the ones that have no surrounding context to begin with. Both Johnson's and La Rochefoucauld's qualify as aphorisms, while Lear's poignant remark is heart-stirring because of its setting: the king who has lost everything reveals his continuing dependence on small favors from his few remaining subjects.

Classification remains a vexing problem. Is Kipling's "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" an aphorism? It has become so proverbial that it is almost impossible to see it fresh. Nevertheless, some ingredient of wit or surprise seems to be lacking. Is a startling and funny remark like Villiers de l'Isle Adam's "As for living we'll have our servants do that for us" an aphorism? This has surprise and is memorable, but seems memorable only for what it says of a small group, in this case the dandies and aestheticists of the latter half of the continental nineteenth century. In a similar category, though somehow more central, is Nietzsche's "We have Art, so that we do not perish of Truth." Here too we are dealing with an almost polemical view of Art, against the usual idea that it brings us greater truth. In a similar vein, Oscar Wilde says about characters in fiction, "The only real people are the people who never existed." Probably these can all be called aphorisms, but one still wishes aphorisms to have a general application -- or to put it another way, the most satisfying aphorisms are felt to have a universal significance.

Why is Benjamin Franklin's "He that lives upon hope will die fasting" readily admitted as an aphorism, though banal, while William Blake's "One thought fills immensity" or "Eternity is in love with the productions of time" seems more a gnomic utterance, a koan, a pregnant but slightly misty saying, as does William Butler Yeats' "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." Blake's "The busy bee has no time for sorrow" is less aphoristic than Samuel Johnson's "Grief is a species of idleness," though their paraphraseable content is much the same. Possibly a kind of abstractness is built into the form, allowing for the greatest general application, and it is no wonder that classical periods produced the most satisfying examples.

The neo-classical period in England produced Samuel Johnson, probably the best-known literary figure of his time, a poet, a critic, the author of the first great English dictionary. He was, moreover, a fabled conversationalist, and as many aphorisms are scattered throughout his talk (as recorded by Boswell), as in his letters and essays. Johnson's are more magisterial than later aphorists. The Age of Reason believed in the value and enduring possibility of summing things up, of defining, of formulating as cogently and as wittily as possible the strengths and weaknesses of human beings. Nor does reason exclude the personal expression of taste. When Dr. Johnson says, "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures," he shows his own preference for marriage as well as his sense that a full involvement in life is really better for everyone.

In fact, this preference underscores again, against all reputation, that neo-classicism is not a movement which simply undervalues emotion. On the contrary, feeling is important, though reason must discipline it and be in harmony with it. To bear the burdens of an engaged life and share its pleasures is better than to live joylessly in isolation. Severity of any kind is to be avoided: "Scruples make many men miserable, but few men good."

The neo-classicism of men like Dr. Johnson fears emotion only in the untrammeled longings it provokes, "the hunger of imagination." This hunger makes us unhappy, and while reason and civilization may both try to contain our bottomless yearning, Johnson sees very clearly that civilization itself may unleash even more yearnings: "No sooner are we supplied with everything that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites." But whatever dangers feeling may lead to, we are still most genuine when we are in its grip, for "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."

Later in the eighteenth century, with the spread of Rousseauistic thinking, wit and sentiment became detached from each other. Sentiment was now a matter of great seriousness, even solemnity, coming from deep inside us. Rousseau's argument that the heart knows good and that evil results from reflection, while impulse leads inevitably to goodness, made such a separation inevitable. The expression of wit was now, more and more, dismissed as a kind of superficial cleverness. Obviously, there were still many witty people around, saying quotable things, but the activity was clearly devalued.

Among the great aphorists of the nineteenth century was Byron. Though unquestionably of his own time and justly categorized as a Romantic poet, he had many Johnsonian, rationalist traits and tastes. He disliked most of his fellow-Romantics and favored the poets of the eighteenth century. More important, in temperament he was often a neo-classicist. "The word sensibility...it seems, is to be an excuse for all kinds of discontent." Dr. Johnson would have ap-proved of this dismissiveness towards the great Romantic wave of sensitivity and feeling. And many of his observations on human eccentricities and vanities have an undeniably rationalistic ring: "You may tell a man that he is thought libertine, profligate, a villain, but not that his nose wants blowing or that his neckcloth is ill-tied."

Yet Byron's aphorisms differ from those of the eighteenth century. They are quirky, they are personal. They are the words of an outsider. Though a Peer of the Realm and a great celebrity in much of Europe, Byron was an outlaw of sorts, his scandalous personal life virtually forcing him into exile: "My great comfort is, that the temporary celebrity I have wrung from the world has been in the very teeth of all opinions and prejudices."

Unlike any neo-classicist, Byron played the enfant terrible, the naughty nay-sayer, the artist as comedian. Despite his cool skepticism, he could not help but turn things upside down: "In my esteem age is not estimable" or "The only pleasure of fame is that it paves the way to pleasure." Macaulay once said -- aphoristically -- that Byron divided his time "evenly between poetry, adultery and insurrection." Not surprisingly for a poet who in his Byronic hero created an early version of the poete maudit, Byron occasionally anticipates Baudclaire, as when he remarks in a letter to Lady Hardy that "I rather look upon love altogether as a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to make or break matches, and keep the world going, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned."

There is no question that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued to produce many fine aphorisms. But something of their centrality seems gone. The epigrams of Hazlitt or the witticisms of Oscar Wilde can be stunning, but they are frequently even more personal, i.e., more dependent on personality, than Byron's. Wilde is a particular case in point. He derives most of his effects from surprising his reader by turning things around, all the way from "I must decline your invitation, due to a subsequent engagement" to "Virtue is its own punishment."

Probably few people were as famous for their aphorisms as George Bernard Shaw, though one now has more of a feeling of their scattershot quality. It's as if he peppered his plays with them. Some, like "All professions are conspiracies against the laity," have become justly famous, but most of them now appear to be obvious things said memorably: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Shaw too achieves his effects mainly by violating common expectation: "A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it..." Somehow Shaw is not surprising enough: the really fine aphorists must have something anarchistic in their explosions of received truth, which is why aphorisms usually lose their sting when they become proverbs.

Any upsetting of the conventional wisdom is a performance and highly dependent on the person performing -- really the comedian's art. In America, the "one-liner" has flourished and is endlessly requoted. Many political candidates' fortunes sank when late-night TV comedians turned their one-liners against them. One-liners have reached the level of folk-art, passed on by the media as much as by word of mouth. And of course they gain from who says them, from the personality expressed: some figures become known for their wit, and people's expectation of that wit sharpens its bite. Woody Allen's famous "The one regret I have in life is that I'm not someone else" violates the conventional piety that it is always best to "be yourself" but also expresses the neurotic comedic persona Allen has created.

The quotable quote is more a feature of our time than any other. The media society has encouraged it in a way undreamt of in other ages. One effect has been that ordinary people strive to be quotable, thinking that it is the only way to be noticed. Speaking for effect has become common, with self-expression replacing expression, and self-projection more important than communication. If your aim in conversation is to come across a certain way, then the quotable quote is meant to do some of the work. But even where it genuinely expresses personality, the aphorism will still be less memorable than when that personality attempts to say something of general import. The talking for effect that the media society has spawned delivers indexes to personality and not those moving, generally applicable comments that we value most in aphorisms. In a sense, this is the ultimate extreme of Byron's quirkiness.

Literary aphorisms have not always flourished in our century, though it is surprising how many are still known. During times of crisis, educated people, or for that matter, middlebrow magazines like Newsweek, are likely to quote William Butler Yeats' "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Some writers, like W. H. Auden, have attempted the form, though his best are embedded in his poetry and not happily detached, with some noteworthy exceptions:

Time that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives.

There are many other fine aphorisms in our century, of course, for instance, Orwell's "At fifty, we all have the face we deserve," but perhaps more than ever we see the weakness in the genre: such a saying is both devastatingly true and rather untrue. We know very well that our facial features are cast and set by our attitudes, but we also know that the unconscious drives that propel us are not of our conscious choosing. Perhaps the truth-value of aphorisms has become more problematic because we no longer believe in anyone's ability to sum us up fully. The difficulty remains that the best aphorisms are those which attempt to say something memorable about human nature or the human experience, and we find it difficult to believe that this can still be done; even some belief in its desirability may have left us. It was already fading in Byron's time, and it makes his sayings, however sparkling, finally less satisfactory than Johnson's.

But even Johnson cannot quite match the mordant cynicism of La Rochefoucauld, as in his famous "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue," or the range of Oscar Wilde at his very best, in such moving epigrams as "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young" or the translucent beauty of Yeats' "One never fires of life and at the last must die of thirst with the cup at one's lip." Yet, for all its easy accessibility to the reader, the genre remains a difficult one to practice for the writer, and a nearly impossible one in which to achieve greatness.

Manfred Wolf teaches English at San Francisco State University. Articles by Manfred Wolf have appeared in Comparative Literature, World Literature Today, and American Scholar.