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Masters of Chiasmus: Benjamin Franklin (Part 1)

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Born in puritanical Boston in 1706, Benjamin Franklin moved to the more tolerant atmosphere of Philadelphia in his early 20s. There he achieved unparalleled popularity as the author and publisher of Poor Richard's Almanack, international fame as a scientist and inventor, and historical immortality as one of America's Founding Fathers.

Nowadays, Franklin is associated in the popular consciousness with Poor Richard's Almanack. Published annually from 1733 to 1758, the Almanack was sold in all thirteen colonies, eventually selling more than 500,000 copies a year, an astonishing figure at that time. Franklin's almanac was similar to many of the then-popular English and American almanacs, mixing an assortment of practical information on weather, health, food, and cooking with numerous aphoristic or epigrammatic sayings. In Franklin's case, the sayings came from a fictional creation by the name of "Poor Richard" Saunders, a hard-working Quaker weatherman with a shrewish wife named Brigitte. Many of Poor Richard's sayings were taken, without attribution, from ancient and contemporary European writers. Nowadays, such blatant pilfering would ruin a writer's reputation, but different rules were in effect back then.

As a result of his publishing activities, Franklin was extremely well-known throughout colonial America, and eventually emerged as the most popular spokesman for independence. His immense popularity was not restricted to this side of the Atlantic. When Franklin was sent to Paris as ambassador to France in 1776, he created quite a stir when he arrived without the fancy silk and velvet attire normally associated with diplomats. Instead, he showed up wearing a beaver-skin cap, which quickly became known in fashion-conscious Paris as "le chapeau à la Franklin." Soon, beaver-skin caps became all the rage in Europe, almost to the point of threatening extinction of the animals in the New World.

In the late 1700s, the English potter Josiah Wedgwood produced a ceramic pin containing Franklin's likeness. It quickly became one of the hottest-selling items in Europe. He was the best-known and most popular American—here and abroad—in the latter part of the 18th century. With good reason, he is sometimes called "The First American." When he died in 1790, 20,000 people passed by his casket, at a time when the population of Philadelphia was only 40,000. Benjamin Franklin was a man of the world. But even more, he was a world of a man.

Franklin's almanac became popular because the sayings struck a familiar chord with so many people. This saying had special relevance for Franklin. The tenth child of a poor Boston candle-maker, he completed only two grades of schooling before being sent to work to help support his family. After moving to Philadelphia and establishing himself as a printer, Franklin's fortunes changed dramatically, and he became a wealthy man. A voracious reader, his personal library grew to over 4,000 books, the largest private collection in the colonies. He was referred to as "Doctor Franklin" because of honorary degrees he received from a number of universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Oxford.

"Where there is a marriage without love, there will be a love without marriage."

This observation comes from a line penned more than a century earlier by the English writer Thomas Fuller in The Holy State and the Profane State (1642): "They that marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry." The line has been plagiarized by many others since then.

Franklin portrayed Poor Richard as a henpecked husband with serious reservations about the institution of marriage. His supposed views on the subject are reflected in this poem, which asserts that it doesn't make much difference if you marry in haste or at leisure, you'll end up repenting either way. The verse was completely stolen from English writer William Congreve (1670-1729), who wrote in his 1693 play, The Old Bachelor:

Even though many sayings in the Almanack poked fun at marriage, Franklin himself believed in the institution. He once wrote: "The married state, after all our jokes, is the happiest. Man and woman have each of them qualities and tempers, in which the other is deficient. Single and separate, they are not a complete human being; they are like odd halves of scissors."

Franklin was fond of pointing out the foibles of mankind. If you conclude from this observation that all people are guilty of the two forms of hypocrisy he describes, you're getting the message he intended.

This is another example of plagiarism on the part of Franklin. The words are virtually identical to a remark attributed to English writer Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). Sheridan, although a well-known writer and one of the wittiest orators in Parliament, was a horrible manager of his financial affairs. Forever in debt, he once had to get the family silver out of hock to hold a formal dinner at his house. Another time he handed over an IOU to a creditor and supposedly said, "Thank God that's settled!" And still another time, Sheridan's tailor, who'd grown tired of asking Sheridan to pay off his bill, pleaded, "At least you could pay me the interest on the principal." Sheridan replied, "It is not my interest to pay the principal; nor is it my principle to pay the interest."

Here, Franklin passes along ancient advice about the role eating should play in peoples' lives. The original chiastic connection between "eating to live" and "living to eat" was made by Socrates, who is quoted by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers as saying, "Other men live to eat, I eat to live." Cicero turned the observation into a piece of advice, suggesting, "One should eat to live, not live to eat."

The theme of money possessing people rather than vice versa is also an ancient one. The first example I've found comes from the 3rd century B. C. Greek writer Bion, who said about a wealthy man who was noted for his miserliness, "He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him." As with the earlier "eat to live" quote, there have been a host of very similar variations on this theme throughout history, including virtually identical observations from St. Cyprian, Thomas Jefferson, and Billy Graham.

While most of Poor Richard's observations came in the form of simple sayings, some came in poetic form, including the chiastic notion contained in this verse. Franklin dabbled in poetry, but didn't consider himself a poet. He once wrote:

 Continue to Part 2

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