On not seeing the wood for the trees

 

John Heywood, like many a gentleman in Henry VIII’s England, was not pleased by the Henry’s conversion to the weird Protestantism that has stuck around in the United Kingdom ever since. He was a Catholic, and he wrote as a Catholic, and he was imprisoned as a Catholic in 1544. But being burnt as a Catholic was a big ask: so he was granted a pardon and repented before “the citizens of London at Paul’s Cross.” A good thing too, as he delivered, after that date, his chief claim to fame: A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the englishe tongue …

In Anthony a Woods microbiography of Heywood, he is described as a wit, but not a logician. He was a great favorite with Henry, who found his witty sayings funny; and with Thomas More, who sympathized with his faith.

Here is a passage from Heywood’s dialogue that still lives on the English speaking tongue:

An olde saied sawe, itche and ease, can no man please.
Plentie is no deyntie. ye see not your owne ease.
I see, ye can not see the wood for trees.
Your lyps hang in your light. but this poore mā sees
Bothe howe blyndly ye stande in your owne lyght,
And that you rose on your right syde here ryght.
And might haue gon further, and haue faren wurs.

The variation that I have heard all my life is: not seeing the forest for the trees.

Which is a phrase that contains a deep psychological insight, as the Gestalt school in the twentieth century would show.

In the metro Atlanta countryside, one is astonished by the arboreal mass. Fly into L..A. and you see buildings and lights; fly into Atlanta and you see arboreal cover. I was sitting on my brother’s porch the other day, staring out at the pine tree/deciduous mix that came up to the lawn line like nomads come to decline civilization and all its attributes, and I was thinking about politics. Sadly. America is in the grip of Mr. T mania. I’m among the strong antis. But the question on all of our minds is, are we not seeing the forest for the big fuckin’ orange tree?

I imagine John Heywood, in his house in North Mims, Hertfordshire (near More’s dwelling), might have looked out at woods. According to Anne Rowe’s environmental history of Hertfordshire, it was the site of a familiar double whammy: the common land was being privatized, and the woods were being chopped down in the 16^th century: “Divers parcels of wood’ – said to be at least 80 years old – were felled and sold for 160 pounds from the 200 acre common “woodgrounde’ called Mayne Wood in the parishes of Tring and Wigginton in 1584. The aunathorised felling of substantial amounts of timber and underwood from the 300 acre “great wood”, another common wood, was recorded in the court rolls of the manor of Caddington in the 1680s and 1590s…”

Heywood may well have profited from wood sales, but he was a poet who saw the trees in the forest, and his heart went out to them.

In the Low Countries, the great theorist, so to speak, of collecting proverbs was Erasmus, who wrote: “If Hesiod is right a popular saying is never meaningless.”

Recent historians have put their boot into the idea that Heywood or Erasmus were really listening to the milkmaid and the tavern keeper – the proverbs they collected came from text. Perhaps. Or perhaps text confirmed what they heard, gave them the courage to put it down. At the same time Heywood was presenting us with his Western Zen saying, Brueghel was painting his proverb paintings, which were not given any ancient context. As for Heywood, in his preface he understands the great thing about proverbs: that they are found and heard. Perhaps in Hesiod, a text; and perhaps in the converse of ax men and carters and wetnurses and court hangers-on, where what an ancient Sage said three thousand years ago is all unconsciously echoed.

“That almost in all thinges good lessons they teache.
This write I not to teache, but to touche. for why,
Men knowe this as well or better than I.
But this and this rest, I write for this.
Remembryng and consyderyng what the pith is
That by remembrance of these prouerbes may grow
In this tale, erst talked with a frende, I showe
As many of theim as we coulde fytly fynde,
Fallyng to purpose, that might fall in mynde.
To thentent [intent] the reader redyly may
Fynde theim and mynde theim, when he will alway.”

And so we talk the summer evening away, here in Georgia.