Chapter II: Part 2

And as new proverbs will be born from life and from life’s experience, so too there will be another fruitful source of their further increase, namely, the books which the people have made heartily their own. Portions of these they will continually detach, most often word for word; at other times wrought up into new shapes with that freedom which they claim to exercise in regard of whatever they thus appropriate to their own use. These, having detached, they will give and take as part of their current intellectual money. Thus “_Evil communications corrupt good manners_,”[29] (1 Cor. xv. 33,) is word for word a metrical line from a Greek comedy. It is not probable that St. Paul had ever read this comedy, but the words for their truth’s sake had been taken up into the common speech of men; and not as a citation, but as a proverb, he uses them. And if you will, from this point of view, glance over a few pages of one of Shakespeare’s more popular dramas,—Hamlet, for example,—you will be surprised, in case your attention has never been called to this before, to note how much has in this manner been separated from it, that it might pass into the every day use and service of man; and you will be prepared to estimate higher than ever what he has done for his fellow countrymen, the “possession for ever” which his writings have become for them. And much no doubt is passing even now from favourite authors into the flesh and blood of a nation’s moral and intellectual life; and as “household words,” as parts of its proverbial philosophy, for ever incorporating itself therewith. We have a fair measure of an author’s true popularity, I mean of the real and lasting hold which he has taken on his nation’s heart, in the extent to which it has been thus done with his writings.

* * * * *

There is another way in which additions are from time to time made to the proverbial wealth of a people. Some event has laid strong hold of their imagination, has stirred up the depths of their moral consciousness; and this they have gathered up for themselves, perhaps in some striking phrase which was uttered at the moment, or in some allusive words, understood by everybody, and which at once summon up the whole incident before their eyes.

[Sidenote: Scriptural proverbs.]

Sacred history furnishes us with one example at the least of the generation in this wise of a proverb. That word, “_Is Saul also among the prophets?_” is one of which we know the exact manner in which it grew to be a “proverb in Israel.” When the son of Kish revealed of a sudden that nobler life which had hitherto been slumbering in him, alike undreamt of by himself and by others, took his part and place among the sons of the prophets, and, borne along in their enthusiasm, praised and prophesied as they did, showing that he was indeed turned into another man, then all that knew him beforehand said one to another, some probably in sincere astonishment, some in irony and unbelief, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” And the question they asked found and finds its application so often as any reveals of a sudden, at some crisis of his life, qualities for which those who knew him the longest had hitherto given him no credit, a nobleness which had been latent in him until now, a power of taking his place among the worthiest and the best, which none until now had at all deemed him to possess. It will, of course, find equally its application, when one does not step truly, but only affects suddenly to step, into an higher school, to take his place in a nobler circle of life, than that in which hitherto he has moved.

[Sidenote: The cranes of Ibycus.]

Another proverb, and one well known to the Greek scholar, _The cranes of Ibycus_,[30] had its rise in one of those remarkable incidents, which, witnessing for God’s inscrutable judgments, are eagerly grasped by men. The story of its birth is indeed one to which so deep a moral interest is attached, that I shall not hesitate to repeat it, even at the risk that Schiller’s immortal poem on the subject, or it may be the classical studies of some here present, may have made it already familiar to a portion of my hearers. Ibycus, a famous lyrical poet of Greece, journeying to Corinth, was assailed by robbers: as he fell beneath their murderous strokes he looked round, if any witnesses or avengers were nigh. No living thing was in sight, save only a flight of cranes soaring high over head. He called on them, and to them committed the avenging of his blood. A vain commission, as it might have appeared, and as no doubt it did to the murderers appear. Yet it was not so. For these, sitting a little time after in the open theatre at Corinth, beheld this flight of cranes hovering above them, and one said scoffingly to another, “Lo, there, the avengers of Ibycus!” The words were caught up by some near them; for already the poet’s disappearance had awakened anxiety and alarm. Being questioned, they betrayed themselves, and were led to their doom; and _The cranes of Ibycus_ passed into a proverb, very much as our _Murder will out_, to express the wondrous leadings of God whereby continually the secretest thing of blood is brought to the open light of day.

_Gold of Toulouse_[31] is another of these proverbs in which men’s sense of a God verily ruling and judging the earth has found its embodiment. The Consul Q. S. Cæpio had taken the city of Toulouse by an act of more than common perfidy and treachery; and possessed himself of the immense hoards of wealth stored in the temples of the Gaulish deities. From this day forth he was so hunted by calamity, all extremest evils and disasters, all shame and dishonour, fell so thick on himself and all who were his, and were so traced up by the moral instinct of mankind to this accursed thing which he had made his own, that any wicked gains, fatal to their possessor, acquired this name; and of such a one it would be said “He has gold of Toulouse.”

Another proverb, which in English has run into the following posy, _There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip_, descends to us from the Greeks, having a very striking story connected with it: A master treated with extreme cruelty his slaves who were occupied in planting and otherwise laying out a vineyard for him; until at length one of them, the most misused, prophesied that for this his cruelty he should never drink of its wine. When the first vintage was completed, he bade this slave to fill a goblet for him, which taking in his hand he at the same time taunted him with the non-fulfilment of his prophecy. The other replied with words which have since become proverbial: as he spake, tidings were hastily brought of a huge wild boar that was wasting the vineyard. Setting down the untasted cup, the master went out to meet the wild boar, and was slain in the encounter, and thus the proverb, _Many things find place between the cup and lip_, arose.[32]

A Scotch proverb, _He that invented the Maiden, first hanselled it_, is not altogether unworthy to rank with these. It alludes to the well-known historic fact that the Regent Morton, the inventor of a new instrument of death called “The Maiden,” was himself the first upon whom the proof of it was made. Men felt, to use the language of the Latin poet, that “no law was juster than that the artificers of death should perish by their own art,” and embodied their sense of this in the proverb.

[Sidenote: Gnomes become proverbs.]

Memorable words of illustrious men will frequently not die in the utterance, but pass from mouth to mouth, being still repeated with complacency, till at length they have received their adoption into the great family of national proverbs. Such were the gnomes or sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, supposing them to have been indeed theirs, and not ascribed to them only after they had obtained universal currency and acceptance. So too a saying, attributed to Alexander the Great, may very well have arisen on the occasion, and under the circumstances, to which its birth is commonly ascribed. When some of his officers reported to him with something of dismay the innumerable multitudes of the Persian hosts which were advancing to assail him, the youthful Macedonian hero silenced them and their apprehensions with the reply: _One butcher does not fear many sheep_; not in this applying an old proverb, but framing a new, and one admirably expressive of the confidence which he felt in the immeasurable superiority of the Hellenic over the barbarian man;—and this word, having been once set on foot by him, has since lived on, and that, because the occasions were so numerous on which a word like this would find its application.

And taking occasion from this royal proverb, let me just observe by the way, that it would be a great mistake to assume, though the error is by no means an uncommon one, that because proverbs are popular, they have therefore originally sprung from the bosom of the populace. What was urged in my first lecture of their popularity was not at all intended in this sense; and the sound common sense, the wit, the wisdom, the right feeling, which are their _predominant_ characteristics, alike contradict any such supposition. They spring rather from the sound healthy kernel of the nation, whether in high place or in low; and it is surely worthy of note, how large a proportion of those with the generation of which we are acquainted, owe their existence to the foremost men of their time, to its philosophers, its princes, and its kings; as it would not be difficult to show. And indeed the evil in proverbs testifies to this quite as much as the good. Thus the many proverbs in almost all modern tongues expressing scorn of the “villain” are alone sufficient to show that for the most part they are very far from having their birth quite in the lower regions of society, but reflect much oftener the prejudices and passions of those higher in the social scale.

[Sidenote: A Spanish proverb.]

Let me adduce another example of the proverbs which have thus grown out of an incident, which contain an allusion to it, and are only perfectly intelligible when the incident itself is known. It is this Spanish: _Let that which is lost be for God_; one the story of whose birth is thus given by the leading Spanish commentator on the proverbs of his nation:—The father of a family, making his will and disposing of his goods upon his death-bed, ordained concerning a certain cow which had strayed, and had been now for a long time missing, that, if it were found, it should be for his children, if otherwise for God: and hence the proverb, _Let that which is lost be for God_, arose. The saying was not one to let die; it laid bare with too fine a skill some of the subtlest treacheries of the human heart; for, indeed, whenever men would give to God only their lame and their blind, that which costs them nothing, that from which they hope no good, no profit, no pleasure for themselves, what are they saying in their hearts but that which this man said openly, _Let that which is lost be for God_.

This subject of the generation of proverbs, upon which I have thus touched so slightly, is yet one upon which whole volumes have been written. Those who have occupied themselves herein have sought to trace historically the circumstances out of which various proverbs have sprung, and to which they owe their existence; that so by the analogy of these we might realize to ourselves the rise of others whose origins lie out of our vision, obscure and unknown. No one will deny the interest of the subject: it cannot but be most interesting to preside thus at the birth of a saying which has lived on and held its ground in the world, and has not ceased, from the day it was first uttered, to be more or less of a spiritual or intellectual force among men. Still the cases where this is possible are exceedingly rare, as compared with the far greater number where the first birth is veiled, as is almost all birth, in mystery and obscurity. And indeed it could scarcely be otherwise. The great majority of proverbs are foundlings, the happier foundlings of a nation’s wit, which the collective nation has refused to let perish, has taken up and adopted for its own. But still, as must be expected to be the case with foundlings, they can for the most part give no distinct account of themselves. They make their way, relying on their own merits, not on those of their parents and authors; whom they have forgotten; and who seem equally to have forgotten them, or, at any rate, fail to claim them. Not seldom, too, when a story has been given to account for a proverb’s rise, it must remain a question open to much doubt, whether the story has not been subsequently imagined for the proverb, rather than that the proverb has indeed sprung out of history.[33]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Employment of proverbs.]

The proverb having thus had its rise from life, however it may be often impossible to trace that rise, will continually turn back to life again; it will attest its own practical character by the frequency with which it will present itself for use, and will have been actually used upon earnest and important occasions; throwing its weight into one scale or the other at some critical moment, and sometimes with decisive effect. I have little doubt that with knowledge sufficient one might bring together a large collection of instances wherein, at significant moments, the proverb has played its part, and, it may be, very often helped to bring about issues, of which all would acknowledge the importance.

In this aspect, as having been used at a great critical moment, and as part of the moral influence brought to bear on that occasion for effecting a great result, no proverb of man’s can be compared with that one which the Lord used when He met his future Apostle, but at this time his persecutor, in the way, and warned him, of the fruitlessness and folly of a longer resistance to a might which must overcome him, and with still greater harm to himself, at the last: _It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks_.[34] (Acts xxvi. 14.) It is not always observed, but yet it adds much to the fitness of this proverb’s use on this great occasion, that it was already, even in that heathen world to which originally it belonged, predominantly used to note the madness of a striving on man’s part against the superior power of the gods; for so we find it in the chief passages of heathen antiquity in which it occurs.[35]

I must take the second illustration of my assertion from a very different quarter, passing at a single stride from the kingdom of heaven to the kingdom of hell, and finding my example there. We are told then, that when Catherine de Medicis desired to overcome the hesitation of her son Charles the Ninth, and draw from him his consent to the massacre, afterwards known as that of St. Bartholomew, she urged on him with effect a proverb which she had brought with her from her own land, and assuredly one of the most convenient maxims for tyrants that was ever framed: _Sometimes clemency is cruelty, and cruelty clemency_.

Later French history supplies another and more agreeable illustration. At the siege of Douay, Louis the Fourteenth found himself with his suite unexpectedly under a heavy cannonade from the besieged city. I do not believe that Louis was deficient in personal courage, yet, in compliance with the entreaties of most of those around him, who urged that he should not expose so important a life, he was about, in somewhat unsoldierly and unkingly fashion, immediately to retire; when M. de Charost, drawing close to him, whispered the well-known French proverb in his ear: _The wine is drawn; it must be drunk_.[36] The king remained exposed to the fire of the enemy a suitable period, and it is said ever after held in higher honour than before the counsellor who had with this word saved him from an unseemly retreat. Let this on the generation of proverbs, with the actual employment which has been made of them, for the present suffice.

Footnotes

[22] Thus is it, I believe, with, Bos lassus fortius figit pedem; a proverb with which he warns the younger Augustine not to provoke a contest with him, the weary, but therefore the more formidable, antagonist.

[23] Oblitus _veteris_ proverbii: mendaces memores esse oportere. Let me quote here Fuller’s excellent unfolding of this proverb: “Memory in a liar is no more than needs. For first lies are hard to be remembered, because many, whereas truth is but one: secondly, because a lie cursorily told takes little footing and settled fastness in the teller’s memory, but prints itself deeper in the hearers, who take the greater notice because of the improbability and deformity thereof; and one will remember the sight of a monster longer than the sight of an handsome body. Hence comes it to pass that when the liar hath forgotten himself, his auditors put him in mind of the lie and take him therein.”

[24] Quintilian, _Inst._ l. 4.

[25] Comes facundus in viâ pro vehiculo est.

[26] Kemble, _Salomon and Saturn_, p. 56.

[27] Kelly, in the preface to his very useful collection of Scotch proverbs, describes his own disappointment at making exactly such a discovery as this.

[28] The pages of the excellent _Notes and Queries_ would no doubt be open to receive such, and in them they might be safely garnered up. That there are such proverbs to reward him who should carefully watch for them, is abundantly proved by the immense addition, which, as I shall have occasion hereafter to mention, a Spanish scholar was able to make to the collected proverbs, so numerous before, of Spain. Nor do there want other indications of the like kind. Thus, the editor of very far the best modern collection of German proverbs, records this one, found, as he affirms, in no preceding collection, and by himself never heard but once, and then from the lips of an aged lay servitor of a monastery in the Black Forest: _Offend one monk, and the lappets of all cowls will flutter as far as Rome_; (Beleidigestu einen Münch, so knappen alle Kuttenzipfel bis nach Rom;) and yet who can doubt that we have a genuine proverb here, and one excellently expressive of the common cause which the whole of the monastic orders, despite their inner dissensions, made ever, when assailed from without, with one another? It is very easy to be deceived in such a matter, and one must be content often to be so; but the following, which is current in Ireland, I have never seen in print: “_The man on the dyke always hurls well_;” the looker-on at a game of hurling, seated indolently on the wall, always imagines that he could improve on the strokes of the actual players, and, if you will listen to him, would have played the game much better than they; a proverb of sufficiently wide application.

[29] Φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθ’ ὁμιλίαι κακαί.

[30] Αἱ Ἰβύκου γέρανοι.

[31] Aurum Tolosanum; see C. Merivale, _Fall of the Roman Republic_, p. 63.

[32] Πολλὰ μεταξύ πέλει κύλικος καὶ χείλεος ἄκρου. The Latin form of the proverb, Inter os et offam, will not adapt itself to this story.

[33] Livy’s account of “Cantherium in fossâ,” and of the manner in which it became a rustic proverb in Italy, (23, 47,) is a case in point, where it is very hard to give credit to the parentage which has been assigned to the saying. See Döderlein’s _Lat. Synonyme_, v. 4. p. 289.

[34] Σκληρόν σοι πρὸς κέντρα λακτίζειν.

[35] Æschylus, _Prom. Vinct._ 322; Euripides, _Bacch._ 795; Pindar, _Pyth._ 2. 94-96. The image is of course that of the stubborn ox, which when urged to go forward, recalcitrates against the sharp-pointed iron goad, and, already wounded, thus only wounds itself the more.

[36] Le vin est versé; il faut le boire.

LECTURE III.

THE PROVERBS OF DIFFERENT NATIONS COMPARED.

[Sidenote: Proverbs characteristic.]

“The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs,”—this is Lord Bacon’s well-worn remark; although, indeed, only well-worn because of its truth. “In them,” it has been further said, “is to be found an inexhaustible source of precious documents in regard of the interior history, the manners, the opinions, the beliefs,[37] the customs of the people among whom they have had their course.”[38] Let us put these assertions to the proof, and see how far in this people’s or in that people’s proverbs, their innermost heart speaks out to us; how far the comparison of the proverbs of one nation with those of others may be made instructive to us; what this comparison will tell us severally about each. This only I will ask, ere we enter upon the subject, that if I should fail here in drawing out anything strongly characteristic, if the proverbs regarded from this point of view should not seem to reveal to you any of the true secrets of national life, you will not therefore misdoubt those assertions with which my lecture opened; or assume that these documents would not yield up their secret, if questioned aright; but only believe that the test has been unskilfully applied; or, if you will, that my brief limits have not allowed me to make that clear, which with larger space I might not have wholly failed in doing.

I am very well aware that in following upon this track, one is ever liable to deceive oneself, to impose upon others, picking out and adducing such proverbs as conform to a preconceived theory, passing over those which would militate against it. Quite allowing that there is such a danger which needs to be guarded against, and also that there are a multitude of these sayings which cannot be made to illustrate difference, for they rest on the broad foundation of the universal humanity, underlying and deeper than that which is peculiar and national, I am yet persuaded that enough remain, and such as may with perfect good faith be adduced, to confirm these assertions; I am convinced that we _may_ learn from the proverbs current among a people, what is nearest and dearest to their hearts, the aspects under which they contemplate life, how honour and dishonour are distributed among them, what is of good, what of evil report in their eyes, with very much more which it can never be unprofitable to know.

* * * * *

To begin, then, with the proverbs of Greece. That which strikes one most in the study of these, and which the more they are studied, the more fills the thoughtful student with wonder, is the evidence they yield of a leavening through and through of the entire nation with the most intimate knowledge of its own mythology, history, and poetry. The infinite multitude of slight and fine allusions to the legends of their gods and heroes, to the earlier incidents of their own history, to the Homeric narrative, the delicate side glances at all these which the Greek proverbs constantly embody,[39] assume an acquaintance, indeed a familiarity, with all this on their parts among whom they passed current, which almost exceeds belief. In many and most important respects, the Greek proverbs considered as a whole are inferior to those of many nations of modern Christendom. This is nothing wonderful; Christianity would have done little for the world, would have proved very ineffectual for the elevating, purifying, and deepening of man’s life, if it had been otherwise. But, with all this, as bearing testimony to the high intellectual training of the people who employed them, to a culture not restricted to certain classes, but which must have been diffused through the whole nation, no other collection can bear the remotest comparison with this.

[Sidenote: Roman proverbs.]

It is altogether different with the Roman proverbs. These, the genuine Roman, the growth of their own soil, are very far fewer in number than the Greek, as was indeed to be expected from the far less subtle and less fertile genius of the people. Hardly any of them are legendary or mythological; which again agrees with the fact that the Italian pantheon was very scantily peopled as compared with the Greek. Very few have much poetry about them, or any very rare delicacy or refinement of feeling. In respect of love indeed, not the Roman only, but Greek and Roman alike, are immeasurably inferior to those which many modern nations could supply. Thus a proverb of such religious depth and beauty as our own, _Marriages are made in heaven_, it would have been quite impossible for all heathen antiquity to have produced, or even remotely to have approached.[40] In the setting out not of love, but of friendship, and of the claims which it makes, the blessings which it brings, is exhibited whatever depth and tenderness they may have.[41] This indeed, as has been truly observed,[42] was only to be expected, seeing how much higher an ideal of that existed than of this, the full realization of which was reserved for the modern Christian world. Yet the Roman proverbs are not without other substantial merits of their own. A vigorous moral sense speaks out in many;[43] and even when this is not so prominent, they wear often a thoroughly old Roman aspect; being business-like and practical, frugal and severe, wise saws such as the elder Cato must have loved, such as must have been often upon his lips;[44] while in the number that relate to farming, they bear singular witness to that strong and lively interest in agricultural pursuits, which was so remarkable a feature in the old Italian life.[45]

[Sidenote: Number of Spanish proverbs.]

It will not be possible to pass under even this hastiest review more than two or three of the modern families of proverbs. Let us turn first to the proverbs of Spain. I put these in the foremost rank, because the Spanish literature, poor in many provinces wherein other literatures are rich, is probably richer in this province than any other in the world, certainly than any other in the western world; and this I should be inclined to believe, both as respects the quantity and the quality.[46] In respect of quantity, the mere number of Spanish proverbs is astonishing. A collection I have been using while preparing these lectures, contains between seven and eight thousand, and yet does not contain all; for I have searched it in vain for several with which from other sources I had become acquainted. Nay, it must be very far indeed from exhausting the entire stock, seeing that there exists a manuscript collection brought together by a distinguished Spanish scholar, in which the proverbs have attained to the almost incredible amount of from five and twenty to thirty thousand.[47]

[Sidenote: Spanish characteristics.]

And in respect of their quality, it needs only to call to mind some of those, so rich in humour, so double-shotted with homely sense, wherewith the Squire in _Don Quixote_ adorns his discourse; being oftentimes indeed not the fringe and border, but the main woof and texture of it: and then, if we assume that the remainder are not altogether unlike these, we shall, I think, feel that it would be difficult to rate them more highly than they deserve. And some are in a loftier vein; for taking, as we have a right to do, Cervantes himself as the truest exponent of the Spanish character, we should be prepared to trace in the proverbs of Spain a grave thoughtfulness, a stately humour, to find them breathing the very spirit of chivalry and honour, and indeed of freedom too;—for in Spain, as throughout so much of Europe, it is despotism, and not freedom, which is new. Nor are we disappointed in these our expectations. How eminently chivalresque, for instance, the following: _White hands cannot hurt_.[48] What a grave humour lurks in this: _The ass knows well in whose face he brays_.[49] What a stately apathy, how proud a looking of calamity in the face, speaks out in the admonition which this one contains: _When thou seest thine house in flames, approach and warm thyself by it_;[50] what a spirit of freedom, which refuses to be encroached on even by the highest, is embodied in another: _The king goes as far as he may, not as far as he would_;[51] what Castilian pride in the following: _Every layman in Castile might make a king, every clerk a pope_. The Spaniard’s contempt for his peninsular neighbours finds its emphatic utterance in another: _Take from a Spaniard all his good qualities, and there remains a Portuguese_.

We may too, I think, remark how a nation will occasionally in its proverbs indulge in a fine irony upon itself, and show that it is perfectly aware of its own weaknesses, follies, and faults. This the Spaniards must be allowed to do in their proverb, _Succours of Spain, either late, or never_.[52] However largely and confidently promised, these _succours of Spain_ either do not arrive at all, or only arrive after the opportunity in which they could have served have passed away. Certainly any one who reads the despatches of England’s Great Captain during the Peninsular War will find in almost every page of them that which abundantly justifies this proverb, will own that those who made it read themselves aright, and could not have designated broken pledges, unfulfilled promises of aid, tardy and thus ineffectual assistance, by an happier title than _Succours of Spain_. And then again what a fearful glimpse of those blood feuds which, having once begun, seem as if they could never end, blood touching blood, and violence evermore provoking its like, have we in the following: _Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills thee_.[53]

The Italians also are eminently rich in proverbs; and yet if ever I have been tempted to retract or seriously to modify what I shall have occasion by-and-bye to affirm in regard of a nobler life and spirit as predominating in proverbs, it has been after the study of some Italian collection. “The Italian proverbs,” it has been said not without too much reason, though perhaps also with overmuch severity, “have taken a tinge from their deep and politic genius, and their wisdom seems wholly concentrated in their personal interests. I think every tenth proverb in an Italian collection is some cynical or some selfish maxim, a book of the world for worldlings.”[54] Certainly many of them are shrewd enough, and only too shrewd; “ungracious,” inculcating an universal suspicion, teaching to look everywhere for a foe, to expect, as the Greeks said, a scorpion under every stone, glorifying artifice and cunning as the true guides and only safe leaders through the perplexed labyrinth of life,[55] and altogether seeming dictated as by the very spirit of Machiavel himself.

[Sidenote: Proverbs on revenge.]

And worse than this is the glorification of revenge which speaks out in too many of them. I know nothing of its kind calculated to give one a more shuddering sense of horror than the series which might be drawn together of Italian proverbs on this matter; especially when we take them with the commentary which Italian history supplies, and which shows them no empty words, but the deepest utterances of the nation’s heart. There is no misgiving in these about the right of entertaining so deadly a guest in the bosom; on the contrary, one of them, exalting the sweetness of revenge, declares, _Revenge is a morsel for God_.[56] There is nothing in them, (it would be far better if there were,) of blind and headlong passion, but rather a spirit of deliberate calculation, which makes the blood run cold. Thus one gives this advice: _Wait time and place to act thy revenge, for it is never well done in a hurry_;[57] while another proclaims an immortality of hatred, which no spaces of intervening time shall have availed to weaken: _Revenge of an hundred years old hath still its sucking teeth_.[58] We may well be thankful that we have in England, at least as far as I am aware, no sentiments parallel to these, embodied as the permanent convictions of the national mind.

How curious again is the confession which speaks out in another Italian proverb, that the maintenance of the Romish system and the study of Holy Scripture cannot go together. It is this: _With the Gospel one becomes an heretic_.[59] No doubt with the study of the Word of God one does become an heretic, in the Italian sense of the word; and therefore it is only prudently done to put all obstacles in the way of that study, to assign three years’ and four years’ imprisonment with hard labour to as many as shall dare to peruse it; yet certainly it is not a little remarkable that such a confession should have embodied itself in the popular utterances of the nation.

[Sidenote: Italian proverbs.]

But while it must be freely owned that the charges brought just now against the Italian proverbs are sufficiently borne out by too many, they are not all to be included in the common shame. Very many there are not merely of a delicate refinement of beauty, as this, expressive of the freedom in regard of _thine_ and _mine_ which will exist between true friends: _Friends tie their purses with a spider’s thread_;[60] of a subtle wisdom which has not degenerated into cunning and deceit; but also of a nobler stamp; honour and honesty, plain dealing and uprightness, have here their praises too, and are not seldom pronounced to be in the end more than a match for all cunning and deceit. How excellent in this sense is the following: _For an honest man half his wits is enough, the whole are too little for a knave_;[61] the ways, that is, of truth and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those that walk in them; the ways of falsehood and fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein. How often and how wonderfully has this found its confirmation in the lives of evil men; so true it is, to employ another proverb and a very deep one from the same quarter, that _The devil is subtle, yet weaves a coarse web_.[62]

Again, what description of Egypt as it now is, or indeed generally of the East, could set us at the heart of its moral condition, could make us to understand all which long centuries of oppression and misrule have made of it and of its people, what could do this so effectually as the collection of Arabic proverbs now current in Egypt, which the traveller Burckhardt gathered, and which, after his death, were published with his name?[63] In other books, others describe the modern Egyptians, but here they unconsciously describe themselves. The selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the servility, which no longer as with an inward shame creeps into men’s acts, but utters itself boldly as the avowed law of their lives, the sense of the oppression of the strong, of the insecurity of the weak, and, generally, the whole character of life, alike outward and inward, as poor, mean, sordid, and ignoble, with only a few faintest glimpses of that romance which one usually attaches to the East; all this, as we study these documents, rises up before us in truest, though in painfullest, outline.

Thus only in a land where rulers, being evil themselves, feel all goodness to be their instinctive foe, and themselves therefore entertain an instinctive hostility to it, where they punish but never reward, where not to be noticed by them is the highest ambition of those under their yoke, in no other land could a proverb like the following, _Do no good, and thou shalt find no evil_, have ever come to the birth. How settled a conviction that wrong, and not right, was the lord paramount of the world must have grown up in men’s spirits, before such a word as this, (I know of no sadder one,) could have found utterance from their lips.[64]

[Sidenote: Irish proverb.]

I have taken a wide circuit of nations; with the proverb of a people nearer home I must bring this branch of the subject to an end. It is one, and a very characteristic one, which the poet Spenser, who long dwelt in Ireland, records as current in his time among the Irish; in which were contained their offer of service to their native chiefs, with a statement of what they expected in return: _Spend me, and defend me_. Their leaders in all times have taken them only too well at their word in respect of the first half of the proverb, and have not failed prodigally to _spend_ them; although their undertakings to _defend_ have issued exactly as must ever issue all promises on the part of others to defend men from those evils, from which none can really protect them but themselves.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: German proverbs.]

Other families of proverbs would each of them tell its own tale, give up its own secret; but I must not seek from this point of view to question them further. I would rather bring now to your notice that even where they do not spring, as they cannot all, from the centre of a people’s heart, nor declare to us the secretest things which are there, but dwell more on the surface of things, in this case also they have often local or national features, which to study and trace out may prove both curious and instructive. Of how many, for example, we may note the manner in which they clothe themselves in an outward form and shape, borrowed from, or suggested by, the peculiar scenery or circumstances or history of their own land; so that they could scarcely have come into existence, not certainly in the shape which they now wear, anywhere besides. Thus our own, _Make hay while the sun shines_, is truly English, and could have had its birth only under such variable skies as ours,—not, at any rate, in those southern lands where, during the summer time at least, the sun always shines. In the same way there is a fine Cornish proverb in regard of obstinate wrongheads, who will take no counsel except from calamities, who dash themselves to pieces against obstacles, which with a little prudence and foresight they might easily have avoided. It is this: _He who will not be ruled by the rudder, must be ruled by the rock_. It sets us at once upon some rocky and wreck-strewn coast; we feel that it could never have been the proverb of an inland people. And this, _Do not talk Arabic in the house of a Moor_,[65]—that is, because there thy imperfect knowledge will be detected at once,—this we should confidently affirm to be Spanish, wherever we met it. So also a traveller with any experience in the composition of Spanish sermons and Spanish ollas could make no mistake in respect of the following: _A sermon without Augustine is as a stew without bacon_.[66] Thus _Big and empty, like the Heidelberg tun_,[67] could have its home only in Germany; that enormous vessel, known as the Heidelberg tun, constructed to contain nearly 300,000 flasks, having now stood empty for hundreds of years. As regards, too, the following, _Not every parish-priest can wear Dr. Luther’s shoes_,[68] we could be in no doubt to what people it appertains. And this, _The world is a carcase, and they who gather round it are dogs_, plainly proclaims itself as belonging to those Eastern lands, where the unowned dogs prowling about the streets of a city are the natural scavengers, that would assemble round a carcase thrown in the way. So too the form which our own proverb, _Man’s extremity, God’s opportunity_, or as we sometimes have it, _When need is highest, help is nighest_ assumes among the Jews, namely this, _When the tale of bricks is doubled, Moses comes_,[69] plainly roots itself in the early history of that nation, being an allusion to Exod. v. 9-19, and without a knowledge of that history would be unintelligible altogether. The same may be said of this: _We must creep into Ebal, and leap into Gerizim_; in other words, we must be slow to curse, and swift to bless. (Deut. xxvii. 12, 13.)

But while it is thus with some, which are bound by the very conditions of their existence to a narrow and peculiar sphere, or at all events move more naturally and freely in it than elsewhere, there are others on the contrary which we meet all the world over. True cosmopolites, they seem to have travelled from land to land, and to have made themselves an home equally in all. The Greeks obtained them probably from the older East, and again imparted them to the Romans; and from these they have found their way into all the languages of the western world.

Much, I think, might be learned from knowing what those truths are, which are so felt to be true by all nations, that all have loved to possess them in these compendious forms, wherein they may pass readily from mouth to mouth: which, thus cast into some happy form, have commended themselves to almost all people, and have become a portion of the common stock of the world’s wisdom, in every land making for themselves a recognition and an home. Such a proverb, for instance, is _Man proposes, God disposes_;[70] one which I am inclined to believe that every nation in Europe possesses, so deeply upon all men is impressed the sense of Hamlet’s words, if not the words themselves:

“There’s a divinity that _shapes_ our ends,
_Rough-hew_ them how we will.”

[Sidenote: Proverbs compared.]

Sometimes the proverb does not actually in so many words repeat itself in various tongues. We have indeed exactly the same _thought_; but it takes an outward shape and embodiment, varying according to the various countries and periods in which it has been current: we have proverbs totally diverse from one another in their form and appearance, but which yet, when we look a little deeper into them, prove to be at heart one and the same, all these their differences being thus only, so to speak, variations of the same air. These are almost always an amusing, often an instructive, study; and to trace this likeness in difference has an interest lively enough. Thus the _forms_ of the proverb, which brings out the absurdity of those reproving others for a defect or a sin, to whom the same cleaves in an equal or in a greater degree, have sometimes no visible connexion at all, or the very slightest, with one another; yet for all this the proverb is at heart and essentially but one. We say in English: _The kiln calls the oven, “Burnt house;”_—the Italians: _The pan says to the pot “Keep off, or you’ll smutch me;”_[71]—the Spaniards: _The raven cried to the crow, “Avaunt, blackamoor;”_[72]—the Germans: _One ass nicknames another, Long-ears_;[73]—while it must be owned there is a certain originality in the Catalan version of the proverb: _Death said to the man with his throat cut, “How ugly you look.”_ Under how rich a variety of forms does one and the same thought array itself here.

[Sidenote: Various proverbs.]

Let me quote another illustration of the same fact. We probably take for granted that _Coals to Newcastle_ is a thoroughly English expression of the absurdity of sending to a place that which already abounds there, water to the sea, faggots to the wood:—and English of course it is in the outward garment which it wears; but in its innermost being it belongs to the whole world and to all times. Thus the Greeks said: _Owls to Athens_,[74] Attica abounding with these birds; the Rabbis: _Enchantments to Egypt_, Egypt being of old esteemed the head quarters of all magic; the Orientals: _Pepper to Hindostan_; and in the middle ages they had this proverb: _Indulgences to Rome_, Rome being the centre and source of this spiritual traffic; and these by no means exhaust the list.

Let me adduce some other variations of the same descriptions, though not running through quite so many languages. Thus compare the German, _Who lets one sit on his shoulders, shall have him presently sit on his head_,[75] with the Italian, _If thou suffer a calf to be laid on thee, within a little they’ll clap on the cow_,[76] and, again, with the Spanish, _Give me where I may sit down; I will make where I may lie down_.[77] They all three plainly contain one and the same hint that undue liberties are best resisted at the outset, being otherwise liable to be followed up by other and greater ones; but this under how rich and humorous a variety of forms. Not very different are these that follow. We say: _Daub yourself with honey, and you’ll be covered with flies_; the Danes: _Make yourself an ass, and you’ll have every man’s sack on your shoulders_; while the French: _Who makes himself a sheep, the wolf devours him_;[78] and the Persians: _Be not all sugar, or the world will gulp thee down_;[79] to which they add, however, as its necessary complement, _nor yet all wormwood, or the world will spit thee out_. Or again, we are content to say without a figure: _The receiver’s as bad as the thief_; but the French: _He sins as much who holds the sack, as he who puts into it_;[80] and the Germans: _He who holds the ladder is as guilty as he who mounts the wall_.[81] We say: _A stitch in time saves nine_; the Spaniards: _Who repairs not his gutter, repairs his whole house_.[82] We say: _Misfortunes never come single_; the Italians have no less than three proverbs to express the same popular conviction: _Blessed is that misfortune which comes single_; and again: _One misfortune is the vigil of another_; and again: _A misfortune and a friar are seldom alone_.[83] Or once more, the Russians say: _Call a peasant, “Brother,” he’ll demand to be called, “Father;”_ the Italians: _Reach a peasant your finger, he’ll grasp your fist_.[84] Many languages have this proverb: _God gives the cold according to the cloth_;[85] it is very beautiful, but attains not to the tender beauty of our own: _God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb_.

And, as in that last example, so not seldom will there be an evident superiority of a proverb in one language over one, which however resembles it closely in another. Moving in the same sphere, it will yet be richer, fuller, deeper. Thus our own, _A burnt child fears the fire_, is good; but that of many tongues, _A scalded dog fears cold water_, is better still. Ours does but express that those who have suffered once will henceforward be timid in respect of that same thing from which they have suffered; but that other the tendency to exaggerate such fears, so that now they shall fear even where no fear is. And the fact that so it will be, clothes itself in an almost infinite variety of forms. Thus one Italian proverb says: _A dog which has been beaten with a stick, is afraid of its shadow_; and another, which could only have had its birth in the sunny South, where the glancing but harmless lizard so often darts across your path: _Whom a serpent has bitten a lizard alarms_.[86] With a little variation from this, the Jewish Rabbis had said long before: _One bitten by a serpent, is afraid of a rope’s end_; even that which bears so remote a resemblance to a serpent as this does, shall now inspire him with terror; and the Cingalese, still expressing the same thought, but with imagery borrowed from their own tropic clime: _The man who has received a beating from a firebrand, runs away at sight of a firefly_.

[Sidenote: Rabbinical proverb.]

Some of our Lord’s sayings contain the same lessons which the proverbs of the Jewish Rabbis contained already; for He was willing to bring forth even from his treasury things old as well as new; but it is very instructive to observe how they acquire in his mouth a dignity and decorum which, it may be, they wanted before. We are all familiar with that word in the Sermon on the Mount, “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” The Rabbis had a proverb to match, lively and piquant enough, but certainly lacking the gravity of this, and which never could have fallen from the same lips: _If thy neighbour call thee ass, put a packsaddle on thy back_; do not, that is, withdraw thyself from the wrong, but rather go forward to meet it. But thus, in least as in greatest, it was His to make all things new.

[Sidenote: Progress of ingratitude.]

Sometimes a proverb, without changing its shape altogether, will yet on the lips of different nations be slightly modified; and these modifications, slight as often they are, may not the less be eminently characteristic. Thus in English we say, _The river past, and God forgotten_, to express with how mournful a frequency He whose assistance was invoked, it may have been earnestly, in the moment of peril, is remembered no more, so soon as by his help the danger has been surmounted. The Spaniards have the proverb too; but it is with them: _The river past, the saint forgotten_,[87] the saints being in Spain more prominent objects of invocation than God. And the Italian form of it sounds a still sadder depth of ingratitude: _The peril past, the saint mocked_;[88] the vows made to him in peril remaining unperformed in safety; and he treated something as, in Greek story, Juno was treated by Mandrabulus the Samian; who, having under her auspices and through her direction discovered a gold mine, in his instant gratitude vowed to her a golden ram; which he presently exchanged in intention for a silver one; and again this for a very small brass one; and this for nothing at all; the rapidly descending scale of whose gratitude, with the entire disappearance of his thank-offering, might very profitably live in our memories, as so perhaps it would be less likely to repeat itself in our lives.

Footnotes

[37] The writer might have added, the superstitions; for proverbs not a few involve and rest on popular superstitions, and a collection of these would be curious and in many ways instructive. Such, for instance, is the Latin, (it is, indeed, also Greek): _A serpent, unless it devour a serpent, grows not to a dragon_; (Serpens, nisi serpentem comederit, non fit draco); which Lord Bacon moralizes so shrewdly: “The folly of one man is the fortune of another; for no man prospers so suddenly as by other men’s errors.” Such again is the old German proverb: _The night is no man’s friend_; (Die Nacht ist keines Menschen Freund;) which rests, as Grimm has so truly observed (_Deutsche Mythol._, p. 713) on the wide-spread feeling in the northern mythologies, of the night as an unfriendly and, indeed, hostile power to man. And such, too, the French: _A Sunday’s child dies never of the plague_; (Qui nait le dimanche, jamais ne meurt de peste.)

[38] We may adduce further the words of Salmasius: Argutæ hæ brevesque loquendi formulæ suas habent veneres, et genium cujusque gentis penes quam celebrantur, atque acumen ostendunt.

[39] Thus Ἄϊδoς κυνῆ—Ἄπληστος πίθος.—Ἰλιὰς κακῶν.

[40] This Greek proverb on love is the noblest of the kind which I remember: Μουσικὴν ἔρως διδάσκει, κἄντις ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν.

[41] In this respect the Latin proverb, Mores amici noveris, non oderis, on which Horace has furnished so exquisite a comment (_Sat._ i. 3, 24-93), and which finds its graceful equivalent in the Italian, Ama l’amico tuo con il difetto suo (Love your friend with his fault), is worthy of all admiration.

[42] By Zell, in his slight but graceful treatise, _On the proverbs of the ancient Romans_ (_Ferienschriften_, v. 2, p. 1-96).

[43] Thus, Noxa caput sequitur;—Conscientia, mille testes.

[44] He has preserved for us that very sensible and at the same time truly characteristic one, Quod non opus est, asse carum est.