'One Should Carry His Stick Also'

“From the first he walked through intrigue, pretention, flunkeyism, and despotic arrogance, and, by blasting these qualities with his tongue, became a personage among their exponents.” 

What a marvelous word, flunkeyism. It’s a quality we all recognize, especially on the job. The OED defines a flunkey as “a person who behaves obsequiously to persons above him or her in rank or position; a ‘lackey’, toady.” First cousin to the ass-kisser and brown-noser, flunkies are the grease that keeps organizations functioning. Where would bosses be without them?

 

The writer above is E.Powys Mathers in the introduction to his translation of Maxims and Considerations of Chamfort (1926), available free of charge thanks to Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books. Nicolas Chamfort (1741-94) is one of the great aphorists, a practitioner of that difficult form favored by realists with a gift for condensing unfortunate truths.

 

It’s probably significant that maxim has so many close synonyms – aphorism, aperçu, adage, epigram, maxim, apophthegm, proverb. People like to hear truth expressed pithily and memorably, often with a twist. For a while, the French specialized in this sort of thing. Think of Pascal, Joubert, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues. I remember several years ago reading an attack by some academic hack on aphorisms and the notion that truth can be expressed in a mere handful of words. Compared to La Rochefoucauld, I find Chamfort a little wordy and vague. He too often fails to attain that dense concision of the first-rank aphorists. Take CCCVII in the Mathers translation:

 

“Evil by nature, mankind has become much more so through Society, whose every member contributes the defects, first of humanity, then of the individual, and lastly of the social order to which he belongs. These shortcomings grow more pronounced with time, so that a man, offended by them in others, as his age advances, and made unhappy by their presence in himself, conceives a contempt for both Mankind & Society, and has to direct it against one or other.”

 

We can’t argue with the truth of Chamfort’s observation but wish it had been formulated more pithily. It reads more like a miniature essay than a pungent moral stab. The same goes for CCLXXXIX:

 

“Nearly all men are slaves, for that reason which the Spartans gave for the slavery of the Persians, because they cannot pronounce the single syllable no. To be able to say this word and to be able to live alone are the two sole means of retaining liberty and character.”

 

Aphorists treat unflattering truths as a given. No need to prevaricate or make excuses. In this, Chamfort is often very good. Here, in CCLXXVII, he might be describing himself:

 

“An intelligent man is lost if he does not add strength of character to his intelligence. When one has the lantern of Diogenes, one should carry his stick also.” 

 

In CCLVIII he is likewise, we suspect, being autobiographical:

 

“To have an accurate idea of things, we must understand words in an opposite sense to that which Society gives them. For example, Misanthropist means Philanthropist; a bad Frenchman means a good citizen who has been drawing attention to monstrous abuses; andm a Philosopher is a simple-minded man who knows that two and two make four.”

 

Such a thinker can’t expect to live a long life. Chamfort was born on this date, April 6, in 1741, and died in 1794 at age fifty-three, yet another victim of the French Revolution.