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Proverbs, Etc.
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (June 29, 1912) : 23
Purdue copy/scan (hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
 

      Our forebears must have possessed a rhyming proclivity of uncontrollable strength, for it led them to the making of proverbs which are highly condensed doses of inaccuracy, stupidity, and irritation. Nothing but the jingle of them could have insured their repetition. see also :
This may be the reason why misery is said to love company. It knows that, being misery, it will be such extremely good company.
“Happiness” (19111202) Misery does not love company, but company frequently loves misery because misery is interesting and very often impressive. Misery may love an audience, which is a very different thing from company. Misery is obliterated in the company of those equally or doubly miserable; its wrongs are flattened to the level of the general woe or drowned completely in the greater depth of another’s misery. Misery hates company, for it must then fight for its very existence.
      “Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone” is absurd — it is more, it is psychologically untrue. It is the unusual person who can laugh and still be liked. Most of us, when we are so at our ease as to laugh, are in a dangerous position. Whatever there may be of buffoonery, jocosity, yokelism, or philistinism in our nature comes out when we are happy. The moment we are so sure of ourselves as to ramp we are on a narrow ledge from which we may tumble to planes far below our usual. When we speak of those things which make us happy we are almost invariably boresome. Happiness is too personal to be communicated with interest. A thing that makes us happy is something we have enhanced, viewed with leniency, learned to love for its lacks, and we can never make any one else understand how we took those leaps over real obstacles and landed at love and laughter.
      When we cry we are in one of two states, both of which are fundamentally attractive. We cry because we have analyzed something and found it bad so that our sensibilities and our brain are aquiver with keenness. We have felt and our feeling has taught us something. We have seen, and the result is a short cut to truth. Mental unhappiness is creative, impersonal, vivid life; and we naturally attract at such moments, for we are brewing and we shall shortly have something to offer.
      If our unhappiness is of a different kind and we are reduced to our bare humanity we take on the dignity of Nature or the grim appeal of a person struck by one of the whirling arms of that crazy windmill, Society. We are hardly ourselves at all; we are comments on civilization and every one gives us serious attention. All our pettiness is wiped away and we are simple and real. Perhaps it is the only time some of us are worthy of love, or at least easy to love. But set us on our feet again and we bristle with objectionableness.
      The Frenchman was a philosopher and a poet and caused a tug of world sorrow at our hearts, until he had been given a cigarette and some dry clothes... In a play by John Galsworthy (1912), perhaps around here.
wikipedia “The Pigeon” the “cabby” was heartrending and justified saving when he said so humbly: “It’s the cold I’m afraid of, sir. I’m too weak to walk, and unless I keep moving I’ll die, and that would be kind of awkward, now wouldn’t it, sir?” But with food and warmth in him he was so bristling with his human traits that one saw no possible reason for his continuing to burden the earth. Just one meal and we are so far from the discipline that reduced us to stark tragedy that we bulge, billow, and spill over with narrow judgments of others, cant, and self-love. The Frenchman was a philosopher and a poet and caused a tug of world sorrow at our hearts, until he had been given a cigarette and some dry clothes, upon which he became a bourgeois with a taste for unspeakable waistcoats. The flower-girl was devastated womanhood until succor turned her into an insinuating chit, made up of wanton negatives and unmoral blanks. We are all so — when we laugh we but spread our paper frills. When we cry we wash them away and there is revealed, not us, but life. We are all so. The paper frills of personality with which we decorate the core of our being are heart-breakingly vulgar. When we laugh we but spread our paper frills. When we cry we wash them away and there is revealed, not us, but life.

      That foolish smile always worn by a man with a watering-can is there because he knows that he looks like a man with a watering-can to the world at large, while to himself and to the flowers he is one of the elements; and he is on pins and needles for fear some one should divine what is in his mind and laugh. It is one of the few moments in existence when he feels omnipotent. Nature has failed her offspring, and the man with the watering-can has stepped in and saved her from the results of her own incompetency. Naturally he feels that he is a person of amazing powers. The flowers do not know that he is not the rain. He fools them completely. The watering-can makes the same delicious patter, and the leaves shine and duck and wave with never a suspicion as to what has really taken place. The man with a watering-can: one of the elements modernized! The man with the watering-can even improves on nature. He uses fine rain for fine flowers and heavy rain for heavy flowers. He does not pelt delicate blooms to the earth. He shows discrimination. No wonder he comes to feel that not only is nature delinquent, but shockingly rudimentary, while he — ah, he is one of the elements modernized!

      Being one’s ordered self or one’s chaotic self is such a matter of continual wearying see-saw that it is small wonder we let the heavy side have its way and rest recklessly at our lowest. It is like walking in snow. After a while one feels that Fate does not want us to go in that direction, and we sit down, unwilling to argue the matter out with her further, angered and tired to the point of preferring to spend the rest of existence at the precise point where we gave up. No one helps us to be decent; every one by being irritating helps us to be precisely the reverse. Very well, then, we will be horrid. Fate intended it. It is nothing we have anything to do with. It is our nature, which we cannot change, and the frenzy of boredom at the continual war between order and chaos makes us indifferent as to which side wins. All we desire is that the tiresome business be settled somehow. Which, of course, it never will. That is enough to make any one lose interest.
 

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