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It has justly been objected to proverbs, maxims, and aphorisms, that they are seldom exactly true. Bat this is, as Stuart Mill observes is, unfortunately "an objection to all human knowledge." An aphorism should not be taken as an axiom. Time does not permit of setting down every possible qualification of any statement, and the good writer is he who gets nearest to the mark, not with a hundred little taps, but at one single blow.
Thomas Paine had all the leading qualities of a great style. His thought was clear and simple, his expression direct..forcible, and illuminated by those strokes of invention which show the master.
Paine's incisive turn of mind led him to lay down some pregnant saying, or telling truth as the keynote, which was at once the starting-point and summary of his theme. The laconic compactness of many of his sentences warrant their being classed as aphorisms, for aphorisms should be, as Sancho Panza says of his proverbs, "short sentences drawn from a long experience," or, as some others have said, "the wisdom of many concentrated in the wit of one." Paine's aphorisms, however, are not like so many proverbs and sayings, mere trite truisms, which serve as substitutes for thought—they are rather thought-provokers.
"These are the times that try men's souls," he wrote at the head of No. 1 of his Crisis, published during the American War of Independence, and the saying became the war-cry of the colonists. Little enough in itself, the phrase was just the spark to fire enthusiasm and make his readers feel their times were equal to all that had gone before, and contained as great opportunities for heroism.
Another phrase, "He pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird," exposes the sentimentalism of Burke with his fond regard for dead chivalry and his callousness to the sufferings of the "swinish multitude." Shelley was so struck with Paine's phrase that he made it the title of one of his pamphlets. On Burke, too, Paine use the telling simile, in his Letter to the Addressers, "He rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick."
"A man may write himself out of reputation, when nobody else can do it," says Paine, and the caution is one that should be kept before the minds of prolific authors. "The press is a tongue to the eye," is another of his suggestive similes.
"From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step" is a saying ascribed to Napoleon. It was, however, taken from Paine, for whose works Napoleon, in early life, expressed great admiration, saying the Rights of Man should be printed in letters of gold. What Paine says in the Age of Reason (pt. ii., ad fin, note) is, " One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublirao again."
"The pen is mightier than the sword" is another saying found in Lord Lytton's play of Richelieu, yet, if my memory does not deceive me, I have come across the same sentiment in Paine. "A man never turns a rogue, but he turns a fool" is another of those sayings of Paine which have been attributed to various authors, and which is vastly more suggestive in its inexactness than any careful disquisition.
How much geology is anticipated and called up by his saying "The caverns of the earth are museums of antiquity." How true is Paine's saying that "the learning any person gains from school education serves only, like a small capital, to put him in the way of learning for himself afterwards."
"It is error only, and not truth that shrinks from inquiry," is a saying which occurs in one of his political pamphlets, but is especially applicable to religion. "If I do not believe as you believe, it proves that you do not believe as I believe, and this is all it proves." Of mystery, he says, "Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion." How forcible, too, is the observation that "any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system."
What can be better than this, on citing the Bible against the Bible: "False testimony is always good against itself;" this on the story of the Crucifixion: "They make the transgressor triumph and the almighty fall"; or this, on the Incarnation: "The belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God, begotten by the Holy Ghost, a being never heard of before, stands on the authority of an old man's dream."
Many of our best writers, from Bacon downwards, have dealt with death, but few have excelled this from the Crisis: "Death is not the monarch of the dead, but of the dying. The moment he obtains a conquest he loses a subject."
"The world is my country and to do good my religion" is a splendid saying, dividing at once the cosmopolitan humanity of the Age of Reason from the exclusive intolerance of the past.* "Where there is no liberty there is my country" is an equally splendid phrase which Paine used on coming to Europe just before the French Revolution.
I have only culled a few of the sayings of Paine almost haphazard. It would be easy to gather a textbook of political wisdom from his writings, but such passages I have avoided. Pope, who perhaps herein magnified his own office, declared that "Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well," and Dr. Johnson said that anyone who wished to attain this art must give his days and nights to the study of Addison. I venture the suggestion he will also do well to devote an odd hour or so to the study of the much-abused "rebellious needleman," Thomas Paine.
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