Proverbs and Their Lessons
By Richard Chenevix Trench
PREFACE
TO
THE FIRST EDITION.
THE
Lectures here published were never
delivered
as a complete course, but only
one
here and two there, as little by little the
materials
grew under my hands; yet so that
very
much the larger part of what is contained
in
this volume has been at one time or another
actually
delivered. I publish them, because no
one
of the works on Proverbs which I know is
exactly
that book for all readers which I could
have
wished to see. Either they include matter
which
cannot be fitly placed before all—or they
address
themselves to the scholar alone, or if
not
so, are at any rate inaccessible to the mere
English
reader—or they contain bare lists of
proverbs,
with no endeavour to compare, illus-
trate,
and explain them—or if they seek to
vi Proverbs and their Lessons.
explain,
yet they do it without attempting to
sound
the depths, or measure the real signifi-
cance,
of that they undertake to unfold. From
these
or other causes it has come to pass, that
with
a multitude of books, many of them admir-
able,
on a subject so popular, there is no single
one
which is frequent in the hands of men. I
will
not deny that, with all the slightness and
shortcomings
of my own, I have still hoped to
supply,
at least for the present, this deficiency.
ITCHENSTOKE: December 13, 1857.
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
PAGE
THE
FORM AND DEFINIITION OF A PROVERB 1
LECTURE
II.
THE
GENERATION OF PROVERBS 24
LECTURE
III.
THE
PROVERBS OF DIFFERENT NATIONS COMPARED 45
LECTURE IV.
THE
POETRY, WIT, AND WISDOM OF PROVERBS 73
LECTURE
V.
THE
MORALITY OF PROVERBS 99
LECTURE
VI.
THE
THEOLOGY OF PROVERBS 126
APPENDIX.
ON
THE METRICAL LATIN PROVERBS OF THE MIDDLE
AGES 153
PROVERBS
AND THEIR LESSONS
LECTURE I.
THE
FORM AND DEFINITION OF A PROVERB.
IT
may very well be that proverbs have never
attracted
from us the notice they deserve; and
thus
it may easily come to pass that, when invited
to
bestow even a brief attention on them, we are in
doubt
whether they will repay our pains. We think
of
them but as sayings on the lips of the multitude;
not
a few of them have been familiar to us as far back
as
we can remember; they have been often employed
by
ourselves, or in our hearing, on slight and trivial
occasions:
and thus, however one or another may
have
taken our fancy, we yet have remained blind in
the
main to the wit, wisdom, and imagination, of
which
they are full ; and very little aware of the
amusement,
instruction, insight into matters the most
important,
which they are capable of yielding. Unless
too
we have devoted a certain attention to the subject,
we
shall be utterly unconscious how little those more
familiar
ones, which are frequent on the lips of ,men,
2
Form and Definition of a
Proverb, LECT.
exhaust
the treasure of our native proverbs; how
many
and what excellent ones remain behind, having
now
for the most part fallen out of use and of sight;
or
what riches in like kind other nations possess, and
are
prepared to contribute to the common stock. We
shall
not so much as suspect the manifold points of
interest
from which our own by themselves, and our
own
brought into comparison with those of other
nations,
may be regarded.
And yet there is much to induce us
to reconsider
our
judgment, should we be, thus tempted to slight
them,
and to count them not merely trite, but trivial
and
unworthy of a serious regard. The fact that they
please
the people, and have pleased them for ages,—
that
they possess so vigorous a principle of life, as to
have
maintained, many of them, their ground, ever-
new
and ever young, through all the centuries of a
nation's
existence,—nay, that proverbs not a few have
pleased
not one nation only, but many, so that they
have
made themselves a home in lands the most
different,—and
further, that they have, not a few of
them,
come down to us from remotest antiquity;
borne
safely upon the waters of that great stream of,
time,
which has swallowed so much beneath its waves,
—all
this, I think, may well make us pause, should
we
be disposed to turn away from them with indif-
ference
or disdain.
And then further, there is this to
be considered,
that
some of the greatest poets, the profoundest
philosophers,
the most learned scholars, the most
genial
writers in every kind, have delighted in them,
have
made large and frequent use of them, have
bestowed
infinite labour on the gathering and eluci-
I. Best Writers delight in Proverbs. 3
dating
of them. In a fastidious age, indeed, and one
of
false refinement, they may go nearly or quite out
of
use among the so-called upper classes. 'No
gentleman,'
says Lord Chesterfield, or 'no man
of
fashion,' as I think is his exact phrase, ‘ever uses
a
proverb.’1 And with, how fine a touch of nature
Shakespeare
makes Coriolanus, the man who, with all
his
greatness, is entirely devoid of all sympathy for
the
people, to utter hiss scorn of them in scorn of
their
proverbs, and their frequent employment of
these:
'Hang
'em!
They said they were an hungry,
sighed forth proverbs;—
That, hunger broke stone walls: that, dogs
must eat;
That, meat was made for mouths; that, the
gods sent not
Corn for the rich men only;--with these shreds
They vented their complainings.' 2
But that they have been always dear
to the true
intellectual
aristocracy of a nation, there is abundant
evidence
to prove. Take but these three lames in
evidence,
which though few, are in themselves a host.
Aristotle
made a collection of proverbs; nor did he
count
that he was herein doing aught unworthy of
his
high reputation, hovcsever some of his adversaries
may
afterwards have made of this fact an imputa-
tion
against him. He is said to have been the first
collector
of them, though many afterwards followed
in
the same path.3 Shakespeare loves them so well,
1 A similar contempt of
them speaks out in the antithesis
of
the French Jesuit, Bouhours: Les proverbes sont les sentences
du
peuple, et les sentences sont les proverbes des honnetes gens.
2 Coriolanus,
3 Nopitsch, in his Literature of Proverbs,
4
Form
and Definition of a Proverb. LECT.
that
besides often citing them, and scattering in-
numerable
covert allusions, rapid side glances at them,
which
we are in much danger of missing unless at
home
in the proverbs of
as
Measure for Measure, All's well that ends
well,
have
popular proverbs for their titles. And Cervantes,
a
name only inferior to Shakespeare, has made very
plain
the affection with which he regarded them.
Every
reader of Don Quixote will remember
his
squire,
who can hardly open his mouth but there
drop
from it almost as many proverbs as phrases. I
might
name others who have held the proverb in
honour—men
who though they may not attain to
these
first three, are yet deservedly accounted great;
as
Plautus, the most genial of Latin poets, Rabelais
and
Montaigne, the two most original of French
authors
while Chaucer literally swarms with allusions,
nearer
or more remote, to the proverbs current in his
day.
How often too Fuller, whom Coleridge has
styled
the wittiest of writers, justifies this praise in his
witty
employment of some old proverb: and no reader
can
thoroughly understand and enjoy Hudibras,
none
but
will miss a multitude of its keenest allusions, who
is
not thoroughly familiar with the proverbial literature
of
Nor is this all; we may with
reverence adduce
quite
another name than any of these, the Lord Him-
self,
as condescending to employ such proverbs as
He
found current among his people. Thus, on the
occasion
of his first open appearance in the syna-
enumerates
nearly two thousand collections, small and great, of
these,
which have been published.
I. Proverbs in
Scripture 5
gogue
of
heal thyself (Luke iv. 23), as one
which his hearers
will
perhaps bring forward against Himself; and
again
presently to another, A prophet is not
without
honour but in his own
country,
as attested in his own
history;
and at the well of Sychar He declares,
‘Herein
is that saying,’ or that proverb, ‘true,
One
soweth and another
reapeth’
(John iv. 37). But he is
much
more than an employer of other men's proverbs;
He
is a maker of his own. As all forms of human
composition
find their archetypes and their highest
realization
in Scripture, as there is no tragedy like
Job,
no pastoral like Ruth, no lyric melodies like the
Psalms,
so we should affirm no proverbs like those of
Solomon,
were it not that ‘a greater than Solomon’
has
drawn out of the rich treasure-house of the
Eternal
Wisdom a series of proverbs more costly still.
For
indeed how much of our Lord's teaching, especi-
ally
as recorded in the three earlier Evangelists, is
thrown
into this form; and how many of his words
have
in this shape passed over as 'faithful sayings' to
live
upon the lips of men; and so doing, have fulfilled
a
necessary condition of the proverb, whereof there
will
be presently occasion to speak. But I urge this
testimony
no further,--a testimony too august to be
lightly
used, or employed merely to swell the testi-
monies
of men; least of all where they are men of such
‘uncircumcised
lips’ as, with all their genius, were
more
than one of those just named. Proofs enough
there
are everywhere that here is a subject, which
men
whose examples should go far, whose judgments
must
weigh much with us, have counted worthy of
their
most serious attention.
6
Form and Definition of a Proverb. LECT.
And we too ourselves, as I doubt
not, after a little
acquaintance
with the literature of proverbs, shall be
ready
to set our own seal to the conclusions of wiser
men
that have preceded us here. For, indeed, what
a
body of popular good sense and good feeling is con-
tained
in the better, which is also the more numerous,
class
of proverbs. What a sense of natural equity,
what
a spirit of kindness breathes out from many of
them;
what prudent rules for the management of life,
what
shrewd wisdom which though not of this world,
is
most truly for it; what frugality, what patience,
what
perseverance, what manly independence, are
continually
inculcated by them. How fine a know-
ledge
of the human heart do many of them display;
what
useful, and not always obvious, hints do they
offer
on many most important points, as on the choice
of
companions, the bringing up of children, the bearing
of
prosperity and adversity, the restraint of immoderate
desires.
And they take a yet higher range than this;
they
have their ethics, their theology; they contem-
plate
man in his highest relations of all, as man with
his
fellow man, and man with his Maker. Let their
utterances
on these points be correct or not, and I am
very
far from affirming that they are always correct,
the
student of humanity, he who being a man, counts
nothing
human to be alien to him, can never, without
wilfully
foregoing an important document, and one
which
would have helped him often in his studies,
altogether
neglect or pass them by.
But what, it may be asked before we
proceed
further,
is a proverb? Few things are harder than
a
definition. While on the one hand there is gene-
I. Constituents of a Proverb. 7
rally
no easier task than to detect a fault or flaw in the
definitions
of those who have gone before us, nothing
on
the other is more difficult than to propose one of
our
own, which shall not also present a vulnerable
side.
Some one has said that these three things go
to
the constituting of a proverb, shortness,
sense, and
salt. In brief pointed
utterances like this which I
have
just cited, the second of the qualities enume-
rated,
namely sense, is sometimes sacrificed
to allitera-
tion.
I would not affirm that it is so here: for the
words
are not ill spoken, though they are very far from
satisfying
the rigorous requirements of a definition, as
will
be seen when we have considered what the writer
intended
by his three esses, which it is not
hard to
understand.
The proverb, he says, must have short-
ness; it must be succinct,
utterable in a breath. It must
have
sense, not being, that is, the mere
small talk of
conversation,
slight and trivial, which deserves to
perish,
and which does perish as soon as born, no one
taking
the trouble to keep it alive. It must have salt,
that
is, besides its good sense, it must have point and
pungency,
and, so to say, a barb which shall not suffer
it
to drop lightly from the memory.1 Yet, regarded
as
a definition, this of the triple s
fails; it errs alike
in
defect and in excess.
1 Compare with this
Martial's happy epigram upon epigrams,
in
which everything runs exactly parallel to that which has been
said
above :
‘Omne epigramma sit instar apis; sit
aculeus illi,
Sint sua mella, sit et corporis exigui;'
which
may be indifferently rendered thus:
'Three things must epigrams, like
bees, have all—
Its sting, its honey, and its body
small.'
8
Form and Definition of a
Proverb. LECT.
Thus, in demanding shortness, it
errs in excess.
It
is indeed quite certain that a good proverb will be
short,
as short, that is, as compatible with the full
and
forcible conveying of that which it intends.
Brevity,
‘the soul of wit,’ will be eminently the
soul
of a proverb's wit; it will contain, according
to
Fuller's definition, ‘much matter decocted into
few
words.’ Oftentimes it will consist of two, three,
or
four, and these sometimes monosyllabic, words.
Thus
Extremes meet;—Right wrongs no man;—
Wrong never comes right;—Old sins breed new sores;
—Forewarned, forearmed;—with a thousand
more.1
But
still shortness is only a relative term, and it would
be
more accurate to say that a proverb must be concise,
cut
down, that is, to the fewest possible words; con-
densed,
quintessential wisdom.2 But that, if only it
fulfil
this condition of being as short as possible, it
need
not be absolutely very short, there are sufficient
examples
to prove. Thus Freytag has admitted the
following,
which indeed hovers on the confines of the
fable,
into his great collection of Arabic proverbs:
They said to the
camel-bird,
[i.e., the ostrich,] ‘Carry;’
it answered, ‘I cannot,
for I am a bird.’
They said,
1 The shortest proverb
which I know in the world is this
German:
Voll, toll; which sets out very well the connexion
between
fulness and folly, pride and abundance of bread. In
that
seeking of extreme brevity noted above, they sometimes
become
exceedingly elliptical (although this is the case more
with
the ancient than with the modern), so much so as to omit
even
the vital element of the sentence, the verb. Thus: Xrh<mat
]
a]nh<r;—Sus Minervam;—Fures clamorem;—Meretrix
pudicam;
—Amantes
amentes.
2 This is what Aristotle
means ascribing suntomi<a—which
in
another place he opposes to the o@gkoj le<cewj—to it.
I. Popularity an essential quality. 9
'Fly;' it answered, 'I
cannot, for I am a camel.' This
could
not be shorter, yet, as compared with the greater
number
of proverbs, is not short.1 Even so the sense and
the
salt, which are ascribed to the proverb as other
necessary
conditions, can hardly be said to be such; see-
ing
that flat, saltless proverbs, though comparatively rare,
there
certainly are in abundance; while yet, be it re-
membered,
we are not considering now what are the or-
naments
of a good proverb, but the essential marks of all.
And then moreover the definition
just given errs
in
defect; for it has plainly omitted one quality of
the
proverb, and that the most essential of all, and
indeed
almost the only essential—I mean popu-
larity, acceptance and adoption
on the part of the
people.
Without this popularity, without these
suffrages
and this consent of the many, no saying,
however
brief, however wise, however seasoned with
salt,
however worthy on all these accounts to have
become
a proverb, however fulfilling, all other its con-
ditions,
can yet be esteemed as such. This popu-
larity,
omitted in that enumeration of the essential
notes
of the proverb, is yet the only note whose pre-
sence
is absolutely necessary, whose absence is fatal
to
the claims of any saying to be regarded as such.
Those, however, who have occupied
themselves
1 Let serve for further
proof this eminently witty old Ger-
man
proverb, which, despite its apparent length, has not for-
feited
its character as such. I shall prefer to leave it in the
original;
Man spricht, an viererlei Leuten ist Mangel auf Erden:
an
Pfaffen, sonst durfte einer nit 6 bis 7 Pfruenden; an
Adelichen,
sonst wollte nit jeder Bauer ein Junker sein; an
Huren,
sonst wurden die Handwerk Eheweiber and Nunnen nit
trieben;
an Juden, sonst wurden Christen nit wuchern.
10 Form and Definition of f a Proverb. LECT.
with
the making of collections of proverbs have some-
times
failed to realize this to themselves with sufficient
clearness,
or at any rate have not kept it always
before
them. It has thus come to pass, that many
collections
include whatever brief sayings their
gatherers
have anywhere met, which to them have
appeared
keenly, or wisely, or wittily spoken;1 while
yet
a multitude of these have never received their
adoption
into the great family of proverbs, or their
rights
of citizenship therein: and inasmuch as they
have
never passed into general recognition and cur-
rency,
have no claim to this title, however just a claim
they
may have on other grounds to our admiration
and
honour. For instance, this word of Goethe's,
‘A
man need not be an architect to live in a house,’
seems
to me to have every essential of a proverb,
saving
only that it has not passed over upon the lips
of
men. It is a saying of manifold application; an
universal
law is knit up in a particular example; I
mean
that gracious law in the distribution of blessing,
which
does not limit our use and enjoyment of things
by
our understanding of them, but continually makes
1 When Erasmus, after
discussing and rejecting the defini-
tions
of those who had gone before him, himself defines the
proverb
thus, Celebre dictum, scita quapiam novitate insigne, it
appears
to me that he has not escaped the fault which he has
blamed
in others—that, namely, of confounding the accidental
adjuncts
of a good proverb with the necessary conditions of every
proverb.
In rigour the whole second clause of the definition
should
be dismissed, and Celebre dictum
alone remain. Better
Eifelein
(Sprichworter des Deutschen Volkes,
Friburg, 1840,
p.
x): Das Sprichwort ist ein mit offentlichem Geprage ausge-
munzter
Saz, der seinen Curs and anerkannten Werth unter dem
Volke
hat.
I. Aphorisms not Proverbs. 11
the
enjoyment much wider than the knowledge; so
that
it is not required that one be a botanist to have
pleasure
in a rose, nor a critic to delight in
Lost, nor a theologian to
taste all the blessings of
Christian
faith, nor, as Goethe here expresses it, an
architect
to live in a house. And here is an inimit-
able
saying of Schiller's: ‘Heaven and earth fight in
vain
against a dunce;’ yet it is not a proverb, because
his
alone; although abundantly worthy to become
such;1
moving as it does in the same line with,
though
far superior to, the Chinese proverb, which
itself
also is good: One never so much needs his
wit, as
when he argues with a
fool.
Or take another example still more
to the point.
James
Howell, a prolific English writer of the earlier
half
of the seventeenth century, and one who merits
something
better than that entire oblivion into which
his
writings have fallen, occupied himself much with
proverbs;
and besides collecting those of others, he
has
himself set down ‘five hundred new sayings, which
in
tract of time may serve for proverbs to posterity.’
So
he hoped, but, as might be expected, they have
not
fulfilled this hope of their author; for it is not
after
this artificial method that such are born. And
yet
many of these proverbs in expectation are ex-
pressed
with sense and felicity; for example: ‘Pride
is
a flower that grows in the devil's garden.’ So too
the
selfishness which characterizes too many proverbs
is
not ill reproduced in the following: ‘Burn not thy
1 It suggests, however,
the admirable Spanish proverb,
spoken
no doubt out of the same conviction: Dios me de con-
tienda
con quien me entienda.
12
Form and Definition of a
Proverb. LECT.
fingers
to snuff another man's candle;’ and there is
at
any rate good theology in the following: ‘Faith is
a
great lady, and good works are her attendants;’
and
in this: ‘The poor are God's receivers,
and the
angels
are his auditors.’ For all this, it
would be in-
accurate
to quote these as proverbs (and their author
himself,
as we have seen, did not do more than set
them
out as proverbs upon trial), inasmuch as they have
remained
the private property of him who first devised
them,
never having passed into general circulation;
which
until men's sayings have done, maxims,
sentences,
apophthegms, aphorisms they may be, and
these
of excellent temper and proof, but proverbs as
yet
they are not.
It is because of this, the
popularity inherent in a
genuine
proverb, that from such in a certain sense
there
is no appeal. You will not suppose me to in-
tend
that there is no appeal from its wisdom, truth, or
justice;
from any word of man's there may be such;
but
no appeal from it, as most truly representing a
popular
conviction. Aristotle, who in his ethical and
political
writings often finds very much more than this
in
a proverb, always finds this. It may not be, it very
often
will not be, an universal conviction which it ex-
presses,
but ever one popular and widespread. So far
indeed
from an universal, very often over against the
one
proverb there will be another, its direct antago-
nist;
and the one shall belong to the kingdom of
light,
the other to the kingdom of darkness. Common
fame is seldom to blame; here is the baser
proverb, for
as
many as drink in with greedy ears all reports to the
injury
of their neighbours; being determined from
the
first that they shall be true. But it
is not left
I. Not all Proverbs true. 13
without
its compensation: ‘They say so,’ is half a liar;
here
is the better word with which they
may arm them-
selves,
who count it a primal duty to close their ears
against
all such unauthenticated rumours to the dis-
credit
of their neighbours. The noblest
vengeance is to
forgive; here is the godlike
proverb on the manner in
which
wrongs should be recompensed: He who
cannot
revenge himself is weak,
he who will not is vile,1 here
is
the devilish. In a sonnet which Howell has pre-
fixed
to his collection of proverbs these lines occur:
‘The people's voice the voice of God
we call;
And what are proverbs but the people's voice?
Coined first, and current made by common choice?
Then sure they must have weight and
truth withal.’
It
will follow from what has just been said, that, how-
ever
true in the main, this statement cannot be taken
without
important qualifications and exceptions.2
Herein the force of a proverb mainly
consists,
namely,
that it has already received the stamp of
popular
allowance. A man might produce (for what
another
has done he might do again) something as
witty,
as forcible, as much to the point, of his own;
which
should the hammered at the instant on his own
anvil.
Yet still it is not ‘the wisdom of many;’ it
has
not stood the test of experience; it wants that
which
the other already has, but which it only after a
1 Chi non pub fare sua
vendetta e debile, chi non vuole a vile.
2 Quintilian's words (Inst. v. i i. 41), which are to the same
effect,
must be taken with the same exception: Neque enim
durassent
haec in aeternum, nisi vera omnibus viderentur; and
also
Don Quixote's: Pareceme me, Sancho, que no ay refran que
no
sea verdadero, porque todas son sentencias sacadas de la
misma
experiencia, madre de las ciencias todas.
14 Form and Definition of a Proverb. LECT.
shorter
or longer period can acquire—the consenting
voice
of many and at different times to its wisdom and
truth.
A man employing a ‘proverb of the ancients’
(I
Sam. xxiv. 13), one of these ‘short sentences drawn
from
long experience,’ as Cervantes calls them, is not
speaking
of his own, but uttering a faith and convic-
tion
very far wider than that of himself or of any
single
man; and it is because he is so doing that they,
in
Lord Bacon's words, ‘serve not only for ornament
and
delight, but also for active and civil use; as being
the
edge tools of speech which cut and penetrate the
knots
of business and affairs.’ The proverb has in
fact
the same advantage over the saying now produced
for
the first time, which for present currency and
value
has the recognized coin of the realm over the
rude
unstamped ore newly washed from the stream,
or
dug up from the mine. This last may
possess an
equal
degree of fineness; but the other has been
stamped
long ago, has already passed often from man
to
man, and found free acceptance with all:1 it in-
spires
therefore a confidence which the metal un-
stamped
and unattested cannot at present challenge.
And
the same satisfaction which the educated man
finds
in referring the particular matter before him to
the
universal law which rules it, a plainer man finds in
the
appeal to a proverb. He is doing the same thing;
taking
refuge, that is, as each man so gladly does,
from
his mere self and single fallible judgment, in a
larger
experience and in a wider conviction.
1 Thus in a proverb about
proverbs, the Italians say, with a
true
insight into this its prerogative: Il proverbio s'invecchia,
e
chi vuol far bene, vi si specchia.
I. Popularity essential. 15
And in all this which has been urged
lies, as it
seems
to me, the explanation of a sentence of an
ancient
grammarian, which at first sight appears to
contain
a bald absurdity, namely, that a proverb is ‘a
saying
without an author.’ For, however without a
known
author it may, and in the majority of cases it
must
be, still, as we no more believe in the spontan-
eous
generation of proverbs than of anything else, an
author
every one of them must have had. It might,
however,
and it often will have been, that in its utter-
ance
the author did but precipitate the floating convic-
tions
of the society round him; he did but clothe in,
happier
form what others had already felt, or even,
already
uttered; for a proverb has oftentimes been in
this
respect, the wit of one, and the wisdom of many.
And
further, its constitutive element, as we must all
now
perceive, is not its utterance on the part of the
one,
but its acceptance on the part of the many. It is
their
sanction which first raises it to the dignity of such;
so
that every one who took or gave it during the period,
when
it was struggling into recognition may claim to
have
had a share in its production; and in this sense
without
any single author it may have been. From
the
very first the people will have vindicated it four
their
own. And thus though they do not always
analyse
the compliment paid to them in the use of
their
proverbs, they always feel it; they feel that
a
writer or speaker using these is putting himself on
their
ground, is entering on their region, and they
welcome
him the more cordially for this.1
1 The name which the
proverb bears in Spanish points to this
fact,
that popularity is a necessary condition of it. This name
16 Form and Definition of a Proverb. LECT.
Let us now consider if some other
have not some-
times
been proposed as essential notes of the proverb,
which
yet are in fact accidents, such as may be present
or
may be absent without affecting it vitally. Into an
error
of this kind they have fallen, who claim for the
proverb,
and make one of its necessary conditions,
that
it should be a figurative expression. But how
many
excellent proverbs, such as Haste makes
waste;
—Honesty is the best
policy,
with ten thousand more,
have
nothing figurative about them: Here again the
error
has arisen from taking that which is the or-
nament
of many, and those oftentimes the best and
choicest,
and transferring it, as a necessary feature, to
all.
This much of truth there is here, namely, that
the
employment of the concrete instead of the abstract
is
one of the most frequent means by which the
proverb
obtains and keeps its popularity; making in
this
way an appeal not to the intellectual faculties
alone,
but to the feelings, to the fancy, or even to the
imagination,
as well, and stirring the whole man to
pleasurable
activity.
By the help of an example or two we
can best
realize
to ourselves how immense an advantage it thus
obtains
for itself. Thus if one contented himself
with
saying, ‘He may wait till he is a beggar, who
waits
to be rich by other men's deaths,’ would this
trite
morality go half so far, or be remembered half
so
long, as the vigorous image of this proverb: He
is
not proverbio, for that in Spanish
signifies an apophthegm, an
aphorism,
a maxim; but refran, which is a referendo, from the
frequency
of its repetition; yet see Diez, Etymol.
Worterbuch,
p.
284. The etymology of the Greek paromi<a is somewhat
doubtful,
but it too means probably a trite,
wayside saying.
I. Proverbs excite the Imagination. 17
who waits for dead men's
shoes may go barefoot?1
Or
again,
what is ‘All men are mortal,’ as compared with
the
proverb: Every door may be shut but
death's
door? or with this: Death always finds some excuse?
Or
let one observe: ‘More perish by
intemperance
than
are drowned in the sea,’ is this anything better
than
a painful, yet at the same time a flat, truism?
But
put it thus: More are drowned in the
beaker
than in the ocean;2 or thus: More are drowned in
wine and in beer than in
water:3
(and these both are
German
proverbs), and it is quite a different matter.
There
is something that lays hold on us now. We
are
struck with the smallness of the beaker as set
against
the vastness of the ocean, while yet so many
more
deaths are ascribed to that than to this; and
further
with the fact that literally none are, and none
could
be, drowned in the former, while multitudes
perish
in the latter. In the justifying of the
paradox,
in
the extricating of the real truth from the apparent
falsehood
of the statement, in the answer to the appeal
and
challenge made here to the imagination—in all
this
there is a process of mental activity, oftentimes
so
rapidly exercised as scarcely to be perceptible, yet
not
therefore the less grateful.4
Let me mention now some other helps
which the
1 The same, under a
different image, in Spanish: Larga soga
tira,
quien por muerte agena suspira.
2 Im Becher ersaufen mehr
als im Meere.
3 In Wein and Bier
ertrinken mehr dens im Wasser,
4 Here is the explanation
of the perplexity of Erasmus. De-
inde
fit, nescio quo pacto, ut sententia
proverbio quasi vibrata
feriat
acrius auditoris animum, et aculeos quosdam cogitationum
elinquat
infixos.
18
Form and Definition of a
Proverb. LECT.
proverb
employs for obtaining free course among
men,
for securing that it shall be listened to with
pleasure
by them, that it shall not slip again from their
memories
who have once heard it;—helps at the
same
time so separable from it, that none can be in
danger
of affirming them essential features or condi-
tions
of it. Of these rhyme is perhaps the most
frequently
recurring. I will enter into no discussion
here
on the causes of the charm which rhyme possesses
for
us all; but that it does possess a wondrous charm,
that
we like what is like, is attested by a thousand
facts,
and not least by the rhyming form into which
a
multitude of proverbs, and those among the most
widely
current, have been thrown. Take a handful
of
these: Good mind, good find;— Wide will
wear,
but tight will
tear;—Truth may be blamed, but cannot
be shamed;—Fury wasteth
as patience lasteth;--Be
still, and have thy
will;—Little strokes fell great
oaks;— Women's jars
breed men's wars ,—A king's
face should give grace;
East, west, home is best,
Store is no sore;—Slow
help is no help;— Who goes
a-borrowing, goes
a-sorrowing;--Measure is treasure.
There
are hundreds of the same character behind,
uniting,
for the most part, this of rhyme with that
which
I spoke of before, namely, extreme brevity and
conciseness.1
1 So, too, in other
languages; Qui prend, se rend;—Qui se
loue,
s'emboue;—Chi va piano, va sano, e va lontano;—Chi
compra
terra, compra guerra;—Quien se muda, Dios le ayuda;
—Ehestand,
wehestand;—Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen; and
the
Latin medieval;—Qualis vita, finis ita;—Vita crucis, via
lucis;—Uniti
muniti. We sometimes regard rhyme as a modern
invention,
and to the modern world no doubt the discovery of
I. Alliteration in Proverbs. 19
Alliteration, which is nearly allied
to rhyme, is
another
help whereof the proverb largely avails itself.
Alliteration
was at one time an important element in
our
English versification; it almost promised to con-
tend
with rhyme itself, which should be the more im-
portant;
and perhaps, if some great master in the art
had
at the critical moment arisen, might have retained
a
far stronger hold on English poetry than it now
possesses.
It might have continued what one declares
it
once to have been, namely, ‘the soul of the earliest
English
Poetry.’ At present it is merely
secondary
and
subsidiary. Yet it cannot be called altogether
unimportant;
no master of melody despises it; on the
contrary,
the mightiest, as in our days Tennyson, make
the
most frequent, though not always the most obvious,
use
of it. In the proverb you will find it of continual
recurrence,
and where it falls, as, to be worth anything,
it
must, on the key-words of the sentence, of very high
value.
Thus: Frost and fraud both end in foul;
all
its capabilities, and the consequent large application of it,
belongs.
But proverbs alone would be sufficient to show that
in
itself it is not modern, however restricted in old times the
employment
may have been. For instance, there is a Greek
proverb
to express that men learn by their sufferings more than
by
any other teaching; Paqh<mata, maqh<mata (Herodotus, i. 207);
one
which in the Latin, Nocumenta, documenta, or, Quae nocent,
docent,
finds both in rhyme and sense its equivalent. Another
rhyming
Greek proverb, Plhsmonh< e]pilhsmonh<, implying that
fulness
of blessings is too often accompanied with forgetfulness
of
their Author (Deut. viii. 11-14), is, I fancy, not ancient—at
least
does not date further back than Greek Christianity. The
sentiment
implies this, and the fact that the word e]pilhsmonh<
does
not occur in classical Greek would seem to be decisive
upon
it.
20 Form and Definition of a Proverb. LECT.
Like lips, like
lettuce;—Meat and matins minish no
way;—Who swims in sin,
shall sink in sorrow;—
No cross, no crown;—Out
of debt, out of danger;—
Do on hill as you would
do in hall;1 that is, Bear your-
self
in solitude as you would in a crowd. Alliterative
proverbs
are almost as common in other languages as
in
our own, but I shall not count it necessary to quote
them;
I will only adduce, in concluding this branch
of
the subject, a single Italian proverb, which in a re-
markable
manner unites all the three distinctive -fea-
tures
of which we have been just treating, brevity,
rhyme,
and alliteration: Traduttori, traditori;
one
which
we might reconstitute in English thus: Trans-
lators, traitors; so untrue very often
are they to the
genius
of their original, to its spirit, if not to its letter,
and
frequently to both; so do they surrender, rather
than
render, its meaning; not turning, but only over-
turning,
it from one language to another.2
A certain pleasant exaggeration, the
use of the
figure
hyperbole, a figure of natural rhetoric which
Scripture
itself does not disdain to employ, is a not
unfrequent
engine with the proverb for the arousing of
attention
and the making of a way for itself into the
minds
of men. Thus the Persians have a proverb:
A needle's eye is wide
enough for two friends; the whole
world is too narrow for
two foes.
Again, of a man
whose
good luck seems never to forsake him, so that
from
the very things which would be another man's
1 So in Latin: Nil sole
et sale utilius; and in Greek: Sw?ma,
sh?ma.
2 This is
Versions
of the Greek Testament current in the Church in his
day
were too many of them not versiones,
but eversiones.
I. Hyperbole in Proverbs. 21
ruin
he extricates himself not merely without harm,
but
with credit and with gain, the Arabs say: Throw
him into the
mouth; while of such a
Fortunatus as this the Germans
have
a proverb: If he flung a groat on the
roof, a
dollar would come back
to him;1 as, again, of the man
in
the opposite extreme of fortune, to whom the most
unlikely
calamities, and such as beforehand might
seem
to exclude one another, befall, they say: He
would fall on his back,
and break his nose.
In all which I have just traced out,
in the fact that
the
proverbs of a language are so frequently its highest
bloom
and flower, while yet so much of their beauty
consists
often in curious felicities of diction pertaining
exclusively
to some single language, either in a rapid
conciseness
to which nothing tantamount exists else-
where,
or in rhymes which it is hard to reproduce, or
in
alliterations which do not easily find their equiva-
lents,
or in other verbal happinesses, lies the difficulty
which
is often felt, which I shall often in these lectures
feel,
of transferring them without serious loss from one
language
to another.2 Oftentimes it will be abso-
1 Wurf er einen Groschen
aufs Dach, fiel ihm Ein Thaler
herunter;—compare
another: Wer Gluck hat, dem kalbet ein
Ochs.
2 Take for example this
German proverb:
Stultus and Stolz
Wachset aus Einem Holz;
its
transfer into any other languages is manifestly impossible.
The
same may be affirmed of another, commending stay-at-home
habits
to the wife: Die Hausfrau soil nit
sein eine Ausfrau;
or
again of this beautiful Spanish one: La verdad
es siempre
verde.
22 Form and Definition of a Proverb. LECT.
lutely
impossible. Oftentimes, to use an image of
Erasmus,1
they are like those wines (I believe the
Spanish
Valdepenas is one), of which the true excel-
lence
can only be known by those who drink them
in
the land which gave them birth. Transport them
under
other skies, or, which is a still more dangerous
undertaking,
empty them from vessel to vessel, and
their
strength and flavour will have well nigh disap-
peared
in the process.
Not indeed that this difficulty is
always felt. We
feel
it most when we seek deliberately, and in a
literary
interest, to transfer some proverb which we
admire
from its native language into our own or
another.
Where, on the contrary, it has transferred
itself,
made for itself a second home, and taken root
a
second time in the hearts and affections of a people,
in
such a case one has often to admire the instinctive
skill
with which it has found compensations for that
which
it has been compelled to let go, replaced one
vigorous
idiom by another, one happy rhyme or play
on
words by its equivalent; and all this while the
extremely
narrow limits in which it moves have left
to
it the very smallest liberty of selection. And thus,
presenting
itself equally finished and complete in two
or
even more Lang stages, the internal evidence will be
quite
insufficient to determine which of these forms is
the
original and which the copy. For example, the
1 Habent enim hoc
peculiare pleraque proverbia, ut in ea
lingua
sonare postulant in qua nata sunt; quod si in alienum
sermonem
demigrarint, multum gratae decedat. Quemadmodum
sunt
et vina quaedam quae recusant exportari, nec germanam
saporis
gratiam obtineant, nisi in his locis in quibus proveniunt.
I.
Proverbs in Different Languages 23
proverb
at once German and French, which I can
present
in no comelier English dress than this,
Mother's truth
Keeps constant youth;
but
which in German runs thus,
Mutter-treu
Wird taglich neu;
and
in French,
Tendresse maternelle
Toujours se renouvelle;
appears
to me as graceful and tender in the one
language
as in the other; while yet so much of its
beauty
depends on the form, that beforehand one could
hardly
have expected that the charm of it would
survive
a transfer to the second language, whichever
that
maybe, wherein it found a home. But of a sub-
ject
thus opened, I must reserve the further develop-
ment
for lectures that will follow.
24 The Generation of Proverbs. LECT.
LECTURE II.
THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS.
My first lecture was occupied with
the form and
necessary
conditions of a proverb; let us
endeavour
in the present to realize to ourselves, so far
as
this lies in our power, the processes by which a
people
gets together the main body of its proverbs,
the
sources from which it most largely derives them,
and
the circumstances under which such as it creates
for
itself of new, had their birth and generation.
And first, I would call your
attention to the fact
that
a vast number of its proverbs a people does not
make
for itself at all, but finds ready made to its hands,
entering
upon them as a part of its intellectual and
moral
inheritance. The world has now endured so
long,
and the successive generations of men have
thought,
felt, enjoyed, suffered, and altogether learned
so
much, that there is an immense stock of wisdom
which
may be said to belong to humanity in common,
being
the accumulated fruits of all this its experience
in
the past. Even Aristotle, more than two thousand
years
ago, could speak of proverbs as ‘the fragments
of
an elder wisdom, which, on account of their brevity
and
aptness, had amid a general wreck and ruin
been
preserved.’ These, the common property of the
II. Antiquity of Proverbs. 25
civilized
world, are the original stock with which each
nation
starts; these, either orally handed down to it,
or
made its own by those of its earlier writers who
brought
it into living communication with the world
beyond
it. Thus, and having reached us through
these
channels, a vast chamber of Greek, Latin, and
medieval
proverbs live on with us, and with all the
modern
nations of the world.
It is, indeed, oftentimes a
veritable surprise to
discover
the venerable age and, antiquity of a proverb,
which
we have hitherto taken for granted to be quite
a
later birth of modern society. Thus we may per-
haps
suppose that well-known saying which forbids
the
too critical scanning of a present, One
must not
look a gift horse in the
mouth,
to be of English extrac-
tion,
the genuine growth of our own soil. I will not
pretend
to say how old it is; it is certainly older than
when
some found fault with certain writings of his,
replied
with a tartness which he could occasionally
exhibit,
that they were voluntary on his part, free-will
offerings,
and with this quoted the proverb, that
it did not behove to
look a gift horse in the mouth; and
before
it comes to us, we meet it once more in one of
the
rhymed Latin verses, which were such favourites
in
the Middle Ages.
Si quis det mannos, ne quere in
dentibus annos.
Again, Liars should have good memories is a
saying
which probably we assume to be modern; it
is
very far indeed from so being. The same Jerome,
who,
I may observe by the way, is a constant quoter
of
proverbs, and who has preserved some that would
26 The Generation of Proverbs. LECT.
not
otherwise have descended to us,l speaks of one as
‘unmindful
of the old proverb, Liars should have good
memories,’2 and we find it
ourselves in a Latin writer
a
good deal older than he.3 So too I was certainly
surprised
to discover that our own proverb: Good
company on a journey is
worth a coach,
has come down
to
us from the ancient world.4
Having lighted just now on one of
those Latin
rhymed
verses, let me by the way warn against an error
about
them, into which it would be very easy; to fall.
I
have seen it suggested that these, if not the source
from
which, are yet the channels by which,
very many
proverbs
of the old world have reached us. I doubt
it
exceedingly; should indeed have little hesitation in
denying
it wholly. This much we may conclude from
the
existence of proverbs in this shape, namely, that
1 Thus is it, I believe,
with Bos lassus fortius figit pedem;
a
proverb with which he warns his junior Augustine not to
provoke
a contest with him, the weary, but therefore the more
formidable,
antagonist.
2 Oblitus veteris proverbii: mendaces memores esse
oporterel
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 it 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 hearer's, who takes the greater notice because of the im-
probability
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.’
3 Quintilian, Inst. 1. 4.
4 Comes facundus in via
pro vehiculo est.
II. Rhymed Latin Proverbs. 27
since
these rhymed or leonine verses went altogether
out
of fashion at the revival of the classical taste in
the
fifteenth century, such proverbs as exist in this
form
may be confidently affirmed to date at least as
far
back as that period; but not that in all or even in
a
majority of cases this shape was their earliest.
Oftentimes
the proverb in its more popular form is
vastly
superior to the same in this its Latin monkish
dress;
the latter by its tameness and flatness betraying
itself
at once as the inadequate translation, and not
the
genuine proverb. Many are ‘so essentially Teu-
tonic,
that they appear to great disadvantage in the
Latin
garb which has been huddled upon them.’1
Thus,
when we have on one side the English, Hungry
bellies have no ears, and on the other the
Latin,
Jejunus venter non audit verba
libenter,
who
can doubt that the first is the proverb, and the
second
only the versification of the proverb? Or who
would
hesitate to affirm that the old Greek proverb,
A rolling stone gathers
no moss,
may very well have
come
to us without the intervention of the medieval
Latin.
Non fit hirsutus lapis hinc atque
inde volutus?
And
the true, state of the case comes out still more
clearly,
where there are two, or it may be more, of
these
rhymed Latin equivalents for the one popular
proverb,
and these quite independent of each other.
So
it is in respect of our English proverb: A
bird in
the hand is worth two in
the bush;
which appears in
this
form:
Una avis in dextra melior quam
quatuor extra;
1 Kemble, Salomon and Saturn, p. 56.
28 The Genera/ion of Proverbs. LECT.
and
also in this:
Capta avis est pluris quam mille in
gramine ruris:
and
again in this:
Plus valet in manibus passer quam
sub dubio grus.
Who
can fail to see here three independent attempts
to
render the same saying? Or when Chaucer works
up
into his narrative that rule of natural equity, First
come, first serve, in the following
verse:
Whoso first cometh to the mill,
first grint,
can
any doubt that we have here the proverb, and in
the
Latin line,
Ante molam primus qui venit, non
molat imus,
the
mere versification of the proverb? Sometimes
the
Latin line confesses itself to be only the rendering
of
popular saying; thus is it with the following:
Ut dicunt multi, cito transit lancea stulti
in
other words, A fool's bolt is soon shot:
or
again:
Res satis est nota, plus foetent
stercora mota,
which
may be left without its interpretation.
Then, besides this derivation from
elder sources,
from
the literature of nations which as such now exist
no
1onger, besides this process in which a people "are
merely
borrowers and receivers, there is also at some-
what
later periods in its life a mutual interchange
between
it and other nations growing up beside, and
contemporaneously
with it, of their own several in-
ventions
in this kind; a free giving and taking, in
which
it is often hard, and oftener impossible, to say
which
is the lender and which the borrower. Thus
the
quantity of proverbs not drawn from antiquity, but
II. Proverbs claimed by Many. 29
at
the same time common to all, or nearly all of
the
modern European languages, is very considerable.
The
‘solidarity’ (to use a word which it is in vain to
struggle
against), of all the nations of Christendom
comes
out very noticeably here.
There is indeed nothing in the study
of proverbs,
in
the attribution of them to their right owners, in
the
arrangement and citation of them, which creates
more
perplexity than the fact of finding the same
proverb
in so many different quarters, current among
so
many different nations. In quoting it as
of one, it
often
seems as if we were doing wrong to many;
while
yet it is sometimes almost, and oftener altogether,
impossible
to determine to what nation it first be-
longed,
so that others drew it at second hand from
that
one;—even granting that any form in which we
now
possess ie is really the oldest of all. More than
once
this facts has occasioned a serious disappoint-
ment
to the zealous collector of the proverbs of his
native
country. Proud of the rich treasures
which in
this
kind it possessed, he has very reluctantly dis-
covered
on a fuller investigation of the whole subject,
how
many of these which he counted native; the
peculiar
heirloom and glory of his own land, must at
once
and without hesitation be resigned to others,
who
can be shown beyond all doubt to have been in
earlier
possession of them: while in respect of
many
more,
if his own nation can put in a claim to them as
well
as others, he has no choice but to allow that it
can
put in no better than many competitors, and fre-
quently
a claim not as good as theirs.1
1 Kelly, in the preface
to his very useful collection of Scotch
30 The Generation of Proverbs. LECT.
This single and undoubted fact, that
nations are
thus
continually deriving proverbs from one another,
is
sufficient to show that, however the main body of a
nation's
proverbs may be, some almost as old as itself,
and
some far older, it would for all this be a serious
mistake
to regard the sum of them as a closed account,
neither
capable of receiving, nor actually receiving,
addition
nor suffering diminution. The mistake is of
the
same character as that sometimes made about the
words
of a language. So long as a language is living,
it
will be appropriating foreign words, putting forth
new
words of its own; at the same time that it suffers
other,
and not seldom very good ones to retire into
obscurity,
and in the end to disappear and die.
Exactly
in the same way, so long as a people have any
vigorous
energies at work in them, are acquiring any
new
experiences of life, are forming any new moral
convictions,
for these new experiences and col-
victions
new utterances will be found; and some
of
the happiest of these will receive that stamp of
general
allowance which shall constitute them pro-
verbs.
And this fact makes it certain that the col-
lections
which exist in print will he very far from
embracing
the whole body of proverbs in circulation.
They
preserve, indeed, may others; many, as I have
said,
which have now become obsolete, and which
would,
but for them, have been forgotten. I speak
not,
however, of these, but of the many rather which,
living
on the lips of men, have yet never found their
way
into books, however worthy to have done so;
and
this, either because the sphere in which they
proverbs,
describes his own disappointment at making exactly
such
a discovery as this.
II. Unregistered Proverbs. 31
circulate
has continued always a narrow one, or that
the
occasions which call them out are very rare, or
that
they, having only lately risen up, have not hitherto
attracted
the attention of any who cared to record
them.
It would be well, if such as take an interest in
the
subject, and are sufficiently well versed in the
proverbial
literature of their own country to recognize
these
unregistered proverbs when they meet them,
would
secure such from that perishing, which, so long
as
they remain merely oral, might easily overtake
them;
and would make them at the same time, what
all
good proverbs ought certainly to be,
the common
heritage
of all.1
1 The pages of Notes and Queries are always 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
Thus,
the editor of what was till very lately quite the best
modern
collection of German proverbs, records this one, found
in
no preceding collection, and by himself never heard but
once,
and then from the lips of an aged lay servitor of a monas-
tery
in the
cowls will flutter as
far as
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 mo-
nastic
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, but the following, which is current
in
always hurls well;’ the looker-on at a
game of hurling, seated
indolently
on the wall, always imagines that he could improve
32 The Generation of Proverbs. LECT.
But it is not merely proverbs,
which, though
current
on the lips of men, have never yet been regis-
tered,
that are wanting to complete our collections.
There
are besides them, a vast number in every
European
literature, certainly in our own, which are
still
lurking in books, in those mainly of the early and
middle
period of our literature, and which have never
been
gathered out of these. Before we could flatter
ourselves
that a complete collection, or one at all
approaching
to completeness, had been made, it
would
need that the whole of English literature should
have
been carefully and intelligently dragged,
with the
special
object of drawing these from the innumerable
lurking
places in which at present they so effectually
lie
hid, that, although from time to time encountered
by
the rare readers of our older books, they yet form
no
part of any collected body of our proverbs, and
are
taken no account of, when we are estimating our
riches
in this kind. It is little likely that such a task
will
ever be undertaken; yet something in this way
might
be accomplished, if every reader of an Eliza-
bethan
drama, of a volume of Puritan divinity, of
Fuller,
of a hundred more, would make a note of the
proverbs
or proverbial phrases which they severally
offered,
and where these are new, be at pains that by
one
channel or another they should enter into the
common
stock of our collected proverbs.1
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.
1 Several such proverbs,
of my own noting, I have used in
this
little volume, as for instance that very beautiful one which
I
never met but in the writings of Tyndal, Be
still, and have thy
II. Unregistered Proverbs. 33
And as new proverbs will be born
from life and
from
life's experience, so too there will be another
mine
from which they will be largely dug, from the
plays
and poems which a people have made heartily
their
own. Precious fragments of these they will con-
tinually
detach, most often word for word; at other
times
wrought up into new shapes with that freedom
which
men claim to exercise in the modifying or
moulding
of whatever they thus appropriate to their
own
use. These fragments thus detached they wil
give
and take as part of their current intellectual
money.
Thus ‘Evil communications corrupt good
manners’1 (I Cor.
xv. 33) is word for word a metrica
line
from a Greek comedy. It is not very likely that
their
truth's sake had in his time or before it been
taken
up into the common language of Greek-speaking
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,
should
your attention never have been called to this
before,
to note how much has in this manner been
detached
from it, to pass into the every-day use and
will; nor this, which I have
found in the same: Of little med-
dling cometh much rest. Fuller would yield
numbers, as for
instance
these: Fury wasteth as patience lasteth.–I am black,
but I am not the
devil.—It is ill wool that will take no dye. — The
more courtesy, the more
craft.
Wander in his Deutsches Spricka-
worter-Lexicon, pp. xvii–xx, gives a
very interesting account of
what
he is doing in this way to enrich, or rather to learn the
extent
of the riches of, the proverbial literature of
1 Fqei<rousin
h@qh xrh<sq ] o[mili<ai kakai<.
34 The Generation of Proverbs. LECT.
service
of life; and you will be prepared to estimate
higher
than ever what he has done for his fellow-
countrymen,
the ‘possession for ever’ which his writ-
ings
have become for them. And much, no doubt, is
passing
even now from favourite authors into the
tissue,
the flesh and blood of a nation's moral and
intellectual
life; and as ‘household words,’ as a
portion
of its proverbial philosphy, for ever incorpor-
ating
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 and
imagination,
in the extent to which it has thus fared
with
his writings.
In another way additions from time
to time are
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
all which they have then felt they have gathered
up
for themselves, perhaps in some striking phrase
which
was uttered at the moment, or it may be in
some
allusive words, understood by everybody, and
which
at once summon up the whole incident before
their
eyes.
Sacred history furnishes us with one
example at
the
least of this generation of a proverb. Of that say-
ing,
‘Is Saul also among the prophets?’ we
know the
exact
manner in which it grew to be a ‘proverb in
that
nobler life which had hitherto been slumbering in
him,
undreamt of alike by himself and by others, took
his
part and place among the sons of the prophets,
and,
borne along in their enthusiasm, praised and
II. The Cranes of Ibycus. 35
prophesied
as they did, showing that he was indeed
‘turned
into another man,’ then all that had known
him
before exclaimed 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 as often as
any
one reveals suddenly, at some crisis of his life,
qualities
for which those who knew him the best 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
had
at all deemed him to possess. It will, of course,
find
equally its application, when one does not truly
step,
but only affects to step of a sudden, into a higher
school,
to assert his place in a nobler circle of
thought
and action than any in which hitherto he has
moved.
Another proverb, and one well known
to the
classical
scholar, The Cranes of Ibycus,l
had its rise
in
one of those remarkable incidents, which, witnessing
for
God's inscrutable judgments, are eagerly laid
hold
of by men. The story of its birth is indeed one
of
a moral interest so deep, that I shall not hesitate
to
repeat it, even with the risk before me 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
games
at Corinth, was assailed by robbers: as
he fell
beneath
their murderous strokes he looked round, to see
if
any witnesses or avengers were nigh. No living thing
1 Ai[ ]Ibu<kou ge<ranoi.
36 The Generation of Proverbs LECT.
was
in sight, save only a flight of cranes soaring high
over
head. He called on them, and to them com-
mitted
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 did not prove so. For
these,
sitting a little time after in the open theatre at
them,
and one said scoffingly to another, ‘Lo, there,
the
avengers of Ibycus!’ The words were caught up
by
some near then; for already the poet's non-
appearance
at the games had awakened anxiety and
alarm.
Being seized and questioned, they betrayed
their
guilt, 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 most secret things of
blood
are brought to the open light of day.
Gold
of Toulouse1 is another of these proverbs in
which
men's sense of a God verily ruling and judging
the
earth has found its embodiment. A Roman
Consul
had taken the city of
more
than common perfidy and treachery; and
possessed
himself of the immense hoards of wealth
there
stored in the temples of the Gaulish deities.
From
this day forth he was so hunted by calamity, all
worst
evils and disasters, all shame and dishonour,
fell
so thick and fast on himself and on 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 pos-
1 Aurum Tolosanum; see
Merivale, Fall of the Roman
Republic, p. 63.
II. History in Proverbs. 37
sessor,
acquired this name of ‘Tolosan gold;’ while
of
him, at once the sinner and the sufferer, it would
be
said ‘He has gold of
Another proverb, which in English
has run into
the
following posy, There's many a slip
'twixt the cups
and the lip, descends to us from the
Greeks, and
has
a very striking story connected with it. A master
treated
with extreme cruelty his slaves who were
engaged
in planting and otherwise laying out a vine-
yard
for him; until at length one of them, the most
misused
of all, 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, and taking this in his hand he
taunted
him with the failure of his prophecy. The
other
replied in the words which have since become
proverbial.
As he spake, tidings were brought of a
huge
wild boar that was wasting the vineyard. Setting
down
the untasted cup, and snatching hastily a spear,
the
master went out to meet the wild boar, and was
slain
in the encounter; and thus, as we are told, the
proverb,
Many things find place between the cup
and
the lip, arose.1
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,' a sort of anticipation
1 Polla>
metacu> pe<lei ku<likoj kai> xei<leoj a@krou. In Latin,
Inter
calicem et os multa cadunt; in French, Entre la bouche
et
le verre le vin souvent tombe a terre; in Spanish, De la mano
a
in boca se pierde in sopa.
38 The Generation of Proverbs. LECT.
of
the guillotine, 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.
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
these to have been indeed theirs, and not
ascribed
to them only after they had obtained uni-
versal
currency and acceptance. So too a saying, at-
tributed
to Alexander the Great, may very well have
arisen
on the occasion, and under the circumstances,
to
which its birth is commonly referred. 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 apprehen-
sions
with the reply: One butcher does not fear
many
sheep; not in this applying an
old proverb, but, as
the
issue proved, framing a new, and one admirably
embodying
the confidence which he felt in the
immeasurable
superiority of the Hellenic over the
barbarian
man;—and this saying, having been once
launched
upon the world, has since lived on, the
occasions
being so numerous on which it would find
its
fit application.
Taking occasion from this royal
proverb, I observe
by
the way, that it would be a great mistake to assume,
though
the error is not an uncommon one, that
II. Popularity of
Proverbs. 39
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 con-
tradict
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 these 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
no
less than ale good. Thus the many proverbs in
almost
all modern tongues expressing scorn of the
‘villain’
are of themselves sufficient to show that for
the
most part they have their birth not quite in the
lower
regions of society, but reflect much oftener the
convictions,
prejudices, and passions of those higher
in
the social scale.
Let me adduce another example of the
proverbs
which
have 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 com-
mentator
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 was found, it should be for his
children,
if not found, for God: and hence the pro-
40 The Genera/ion of Proverbs. LECT.
verb,
Let that which is lost be for God,
arose. The
saying
was not one to let die; laying bare as so won-
derfully
it does 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 one upon
which
whole volumes have been written.1 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
beyond
our vision, obscure and unknown. No one
1 Erasmus in the Preface to his Adagia has a few excellent
words
on the subject, which are well worth quoting: Quibus
ex
rebus accedat novitas adagiis, mox ostendemus; nunc quot
in
modis celebritas contingit, paucis indicabimus. Veniunt
igitur
in vulgi sermonem, vel ex oraculis numinum; vel a sa-
pientium
dictis, quae quidem antiquitas oraculorum instar cele-
bravit;
vel a poeta quopiam maxime vetusto; vel e stem, hoc
est
tragicorum vel comicorum actis fabulis; praecipue vero co-
mcedia
mutuo quodam commercio et usurpat pleraque jactata
vulgo,
et gignit traditque vulgo jactanda, nonnulla ducuntur
ex
fabularum argumentis; ex historiis aliquot mutuo sumpta
sunt.
Quaedam profecta sunt ex apophthegmatis, hoc est, scite
breviterque
responsis. Sunt quae ex verbo temere dicto sunt
arrepta.
Denique mores, ingenium, seu gentis, sive hominis
alicujus,
sive etiam animantis, postremo rei quoque vis quaepianm
insignis
et vulgo nota locum fecerunt adagio.
II. Obscurity of
Origin. 41
will
deny the interest of the subject, of the being ena-
bled
thus to preside at the birth of a saying that has
lived
on and held its ground in the great struggle for
existence
which is raging everywhere, 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 in which this tracing of the genesis of
proverbs
is possible are rare, as compared with the
far
larger number in which the first birth is veiled, as
is
almost all birth, in mystery and obscurity. And
indeed
it could scarcely be otherwise. The vast
majority
of proverbs are foundlings, the happier found-
lings
of a nation's wit, which the collective nation,
refusing
to let perish, has taken up and adopted for
its
own. But still, as must be expected with found-
lings,
they can for the most part give no distinct
account
of themselves. They make their way, relying
on
their own merits, not on the merits 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 history
has
been offered to account for a proverb's birth, it
must
remain an open question, whether the story has
not
been subsequently imagined for the proverb,
rather
than the proverb grown out of the story.1
The proverb thus springing out of
the actual life
of
men, however it may be often impossible to trace
1 Livy's account of
Cantherium in fossa, and of the manner
in
which it became a rustic proverb in
in
point, where it is very hard to give credit to the parentage
which
has been assigned to the saying (see Doderlein, Lat.
Synonyme, vol. iv. p. 289).
42 The Generation of Proverbs. LECT.
the
circumstances of its rise, will continually find its
way
back to active life again. It will attest its own
practical
character by the frequency with which it will
present
itself for use, and, it may be, will have been
actually
used, upon earnest and notable 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 helped to bring about issues, of which all
would
acknowledge the importance.
In this aspect, as having been used
at some crisis
or
turning-point of things, and as part of the moral
influence
brought to bear on that occasion for effect-
ing
a great result, no proverb of man's can be com-
pared
with that one which the risen Lord used when
He
met his future Apostle, but then his persecutor, on
the
way to
lessness
and folly of further resistance to a might
which
must overcome him, and with a more disastrous
overcoming,
at the last: It is hard for thee to hick
against
the pricks1 (Acts xxvi. 14). It is not always
observed,
but adds much to the fitness of this pro-
verb's
use on this ever-memorable 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 over-
mastering
power of the gods for so we find it em-
ployed
in the chief passages of heathen antiquity in
which
it occurs.2
1 Sklhro<n
soi pro>j ke<ntra lakti<zein.
2 AEschylus, Prom. Vinct. 322; Euripides, Bacch. 795
II. Employment of Proverbs. 43
I must derive the second
illustration of my asser-
tion
from a very different quarter, passing at a single
stride
from the kingdom of light to the kingdom of
darkness,
and finding my example there. We are
told
then, that when Catherine de Medicis desired to
overcome
the hesitation of her son Charles IX., and
to
draw from the wretched king 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 a more
pleasant
illustration. At the siege of
Lewis
XIV. found himself with his suite unexpectedly
under
a heavy cannonade from the besieged city. The
charge
is brought often against Lewis that he was
deficient
in personal courage; I believe unjustly;
while
yet, in compliance with the entreaties of many
round
him, who urged that he should not expose
so
valuable a life, he was about, in somewhat un-
soldierly
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 he
drunk.1 The king remained
exposed
to the fire of the enemy for a suitable period,
Pindar,
Pyth. ii. 94-96. The image is of
course that of the stub-
born
ox, which when urged to go forward, recalcitrates against
the
sharp-pointed iron goad, and, already wounded, thus only
wounds
itself the more.
1 Le vin est verse; it
faut le boire.
44 The Generation of Proverbs. LECT.
and,
it is said, 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 employment which at critical
moments
has been made of them, for the present
suffice.
III. Proverbs of Nations Compared. 45
LECTURE III.
THE PROVERBS OF DIFFERENT NATIONS
COMPARED.
‘THE genius, wit, and spirit of a
nation are dis-
covered
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,1 the customs,
of
the people among whom they have had their
1 The writer might have
added, the superstitions; for pro-
verbs
not a few involve and rest on popular superstitions, and a
collection
of these would be curious and in many ways instruc-
tive.
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 for-
tune
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 observes (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).
46 Proverbs of Nations Compared. LECT.
course.1
Let us put these assertions to the
proof,
and
see how far in this people's or in that people's
proverbs
that which is nearest to their heart reveals
itself
to us; how far the comparison of the proverbs
of
one nation with those of other nations may be
made
instructive to us; how much this comparison
will
tell us severally about each. This only I will ask,
ere
we enter upon the subject, namely, that should
I
fail here in eliciting anything strongly characteristic,
if
the proverbs regarded from this point of view should
fail
to reveal to you any of the true secrets of a people's
life,
you will not therefore misdoubt the assertions with
which
my lecture opened; or assume that these
documents
would not yield up their secret, if ques-
tioned
aright; but only assume that the test has been
unskilfully
applied; or, if you would not willingly find
fault,
that my brief limits have not allowed me to make
that
clear, which with larger space at command I
might
not have wholly fallen short of doing.
I am very well aware that in
pursuing this line of
thought,
we are ever liable to deceive ourselves and to
impose
upon others, picking out and adducing such
proverbs
as conform to a preconceived theory, passing
over
those which will not fit themselves into this.
There
is no doubt such a danger needing to be
guarded
against; nor do there want a multitude of
these
sayings which cannot be made to illustrate dif-
ferences,
for they rest on the broad foundation of the
1 We may adduce further
the words of Salmasius: Argutae
hae
brevesque loquendi formulae suas habent veneres, et genium
cujusque
gentis penes quam celebrantur, atque acumen osten-
dunt.
III. Greek Proverbs. 47
universal
humanity, and not on anything which is
peculiar
and national. But, with all this, enough of
proverbs,
I am persuaded, will remain, and such as
may
with perfect good faith be adduced, to confirm
these
assertions; we may, I am convinced, learn from
the
proverbs current among a people, what is the true
moral
tissue of their lives; the aspects under which
they
contemplate life; in what ways honour and dis-
honour
are distributed among them; what is of good,
what
of evil report in their eyes; with much more which
it
can never be unprofitable to know.
To begin, then, with the proverbs of
What
we are most struck with in these, and what, the
more
they are studied, the more fills the thoughtful
reader
with astonishment, is the evidence they yield of
an
entire people penetrated and leavened through and
through
with the most intimate knowledge of their
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,1 presuppose an acquain-
tance,
indeed a familiarity, with all this on their parts
among
whom these proverbs passed current, which is
perfectly
marvellous. In many and most important
respects,
the Greek proverbs, taken in the aggregate,
are
inferior to those of some nations of modern
Christendom.
This is nothing strange, the Christian
1 Thus ]Ai~doj kunh?—a@plhstoj
pi<qoj-- ]Ilia>j kakw?n—Xarw<nioj
qu<ra—Lh<mnion
kako<n—xou<sea
xalkei<wn.
48 Proverbs of Nations Compared. LECT.
religion
would have done little for the world, would
have
proved 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 of proverbs can bear comparison with
the
Greek.1
It is altogether different with the
Roman. These, the
genuine
Roman, the growth of the Italian 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;
this 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 the matter 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
1 On proverbs in general,
but mainly on Greek proverbs,
there
is a pleasant article in the Quarterly
Review, July, 1868.
I
append a small group of these: Ai[
xa<ritej gumnai<. –a@kairoj
eu@noia ou]de>n e@xqraj diafe<rei.—gluku>j
a]
kakw?j pra<ssontoj e]kpodw>n
fi<loi.—a@rktou
parou<shj i!xnh mh>
zh<tei—a]ei> gewrgo>j ei]j ne<wta plou<sioj.—di>j
pro>j to>n au]to>n
ai]sxro>n proskrou<ein li<qon.—e]xqrw?n
a@dwra dw?ra.—zei?
xu<tra, zei?
fili<a.—Qeo>j
h[ ]Anai<deia.—kakou?
ko<rakoj kako>n w]o<n.—a]nh>r de>
feu<gwn ou] me<nei lu<raj
ktu<pon.—kak&?
su>n a]ndri> mhd ] o!lwj
o[doipo<rou.—dru?oj
pesou<shj pa?j a]nh>r culeu<etai.—h#qoj a]nqrw<pou
dai<mwn.
III. Roman Proverbs. 49
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.1
In the setting out not of love, but of
friendship,
and of the claims which it makes, the
advantages
which it brings, is exhibited whatever
depth
and tenderness of affection they may have.2
This
indeed, as has been truly observed,3 was only to be
expected,
seeing how much higher an ideal of friend-
ship
existed in the old world than of love, the full
realization
of which was reserved for the modern
Christian
world. But all this admitted, the Roman
proverbs
possess substantial merits of their own. A
vigorous
moral sense speaks out in many;4 and even
1 This Greek proverb on
love is the noblest of the kind which
I
remember: Mousikh>n
e@rwj dida<skei, ka@ntij a@mousoj ^# to> pri>n.
2 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
grateful equivalent in the
Italian,
Ama 1' amico tuo con it difetto suo (Love
your friend with
his fault), is worthy of all
admiration.
3 By Zell, in his slight
but graceful treatise, On the Proverbs
of the ancient Romans (Ferienschriften, vol. ii. p. 1-96).
4 Thus, Noxa caput
sequitur;—Conscientia, mille testes. I
subjoin
a few more Latin proverbs; but of these two or three
perhaps
are medieval or modern. Heroum filii noxae.—Lupus
pilum
mutat, non mentem.—Galeatum sero duelli poenitet.—
Gladiator
in arena consilium capit.—Ex scintilla incendium.—
Sui
cuique mores fingunt fortunam.—Piscis primuni a capite
foetet.—Ubi
uber, ibi tuber.—Simul sorbere et flare difficile est.
—Qui
celocem agere nescit, onerariam ne petat [Jer.
xii. 15].—
Nescis
quid serus vesper vehat.—Bona tergo formosissima.—
Virum
improbum vel mus mordet.—Amicus certus in re incerta
cernitur.—Ubi
amici, ibi opes.—Nec nulli sis amicus, nec omni-
bus.
—Nunquam periclum sine periclo vincitur.—Sine pennis
50
Proverbs of Nations
Compared. LECT.
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 will have been
often
upon his lips;1 while in the number that relate
to
farming, they bear singular witness to that strong
and
lively interest in agricultural pursuits, which
formed
so remarkable a feature of the old Italian life.
It will not be possible to pass
under even this
hastiest
review more than a few of the modern families
of
proverbs. Let us turn first to those of Spain.3 I
put
them in the foremost rank, because Spanish
literature,
poor in some provinces wherein many other
literatures
are rich, is eminently rich in this; and
deserves
this praise whether we regard the quantity or
volare
haud facile est.—Dies adimit aegritudinem.—Ars non
habet
osorem, nisi ignorantem. —Aliquis in omnibus est nullus
in
singulis.—Medice vivere est misere vivere.—Liter n: marsu-
pium
non sequuntur.—Beneficium accipere, libertatem est ven-
dere.
— Homini diligenti semper aliquid superest.
1 He has preserved for us
that very sensible and at the same
time
truly characteristic one, Quod non opus est, asse carum est.
2 These are three or four
of the most notable—the first
against
‘high farming,’ to which I have never seen an appeal in
modern
controversies on the subject: Nihil minus expedit quam
agrum
optime colere (Pliny, H. N. vi. 18).
Over against this,
however,
we must set another, warning against the attempt to
farm
with insufficient capital: Oportet agrum imbecilliorem
esse
quam agricolam; and yet another, on the liberal answer
which
the land will make to the pains and cost bestowed on it:
Qui
arat olivetum, rogat fructum; qui stercorat, exorat; qui
caedit,
cogit: and one more, which no doubt is true: Agricolam
vendacem
oportet esse, non emacem.
3 On Spanish proverbs see
Ticknor, History of Spanish Lite-
rature, ch. 39.
III. Number of Spanish
Proverbs. 51
quality
of the proverbs which it owns.1 I should
call
the mere number of Spanish proverbs astonishing,
if
the German, of which presently, did not exhaust any
astonishment
on the score of the mere number of pro-
verbs
which any nation could possess. A Spanish col-
lection
I have used while preparing these lectures,
contains
between seven and eight thousand, but can
make
no pretence to containing all; for I have searched
it
in vain for several with which from other sources I
had
become acquainted. So far from doing this, there
exists
a manuscript collection brought together by a
distinguished
Spanish scholar, which is reported to
contain
from five and twenty to thirty thousand.2
And their quality is on a par with
their quantity.
It
needs only to call to mind some of those, so rich
in
humour, so double-shotted with homely good sense,
wherewith
the Squire in Don Quixote adorns his dis-
course,
until oftentimes they constitute not the fringe
and
border, but the main woof and texture of it: and
then,
if we assume that the remainder are not alto-
1 This was the judgment
of Salmasius, who says: Inter
Europos
Hispani in his excellunt, Itali vix cedunt, Galls
proximo
sequuntur intervallo.
2 What may have become of
this collection I know not; but
it
was formerly in Richard Heber's library (see the Catalogue,
vol.
ix. no. 1697). Juan Yriarte was the collector, and in a note
to
the Catalogue it is stated that he
devoted himself with such
eagerness
to the bringing of it to the highest possible state of
completeness,
that he would give his servants a fee for any new
proverb
they brought him; while to each, as it was inserted in
his
list, he was careful to attach a memorandum of the quarter
from
which it came; and if this was not from books but from
life,
an indication of the name, the rank, and condition in life of
the
person from whom it was obtained.
52
Proverbs of Nations Compared.
LECT.
gether
unlike these, we shall acknowledge that it
would
be difficult to rate them more highly than they
deserve.
And some are in a loftier vein; we might
indeed
expect as much; for taking, as we have a right
to
do, Cervantes himself as the truest exponent of the
Spanish
character, we should be prepared to meet in
the
proverbs of
humour,
to find them breathing the very spirit of
chivalry
and honour, and indeed of freedom too;--
for
in
is
despotism, and not freedom, which is new. The
expectation
is abundantly fulfilled. How eminently
chivalresque,
for instance, the following: White hands
cannot hurt.1 What a grave humour lurks in this:
The ass knows well in
whose face he brays.2
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.3
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;4
what Castilian
pride
in the following: Every layman in
make a king every clerk
a pope.
The Spaniard's con-
tempt
for his peninsular neighbours finds emphatic
1 Las manos blancas no ofenden. Calderon has
taken this
for
the title of one of his plays. Many of his plays, like Shake-
speare's,
have proverbs for their titles: thus, Mariana sera otro
dia—Casa
con dos puertas mala es de guardar—Guardate de la
agua
mansa—Bien vengas, mal, si vienes solo.
2 Bien sabe el asno en
cuya cara rebozna.
3 Quando vieras to casa
quemar, llega te a escalentar.
4 El rey va hasta do
puede, y no hasta do quiere.
III. Spanish Characteristics. 53
utterance
in another: Take from a Spaniard all his
good qualities, and
there remains a Portuguese.
Nations will occasionally in their
proverbs indulge
in
a fine irony upon themselves, and show that they
are
perfectly aware of their own weaknesses, follies,
and
faults. This the Spaniards must be allowed to
do
in their proverb, Succours of
never.1 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 has passed away. Certainly any one who
reads
the despatches of
during
the Peninsular War will find in almost every
page
of them justifications of this proverb, will own
that
those who coined it read themselves aright, and
could
not have designated broken pledges, unfulfilled
promises
of aid, tardy and thus ineffectual assistance,
by
a 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.2
1 Socorros de Espana, o
tarde, o nunca. The Italians have
a
proverb in which they express their sense of the tardiness of
the
despatch of all business in
which
are sure to attend it—May my death come
to me from
or
not at all.
2 Mataras, y matarte han,
y mataran a quien to matara.
These
which follow are all good, and some very good: Quien a
lobo
embia, carne espera.—Quien en la plaza a labrar se mete,
54 Proverbs of Nations Compared. LECT.
The Italians also are eminently rich
in proverbs;
yet
if ever I have been tempted to retract or seriously
to
modify what I shall have occasion by-and-bye to
affirm
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.’1 Certainly many of them are
muchos
adestradores tiene.—Con agua pasada no muele molino.
—A
carros quebrados carriles a fartos.—Buscais cinco pies al
gato,
y el no tiene sino cuatro.—En los nidos de antano no hay
pajaros
hogano.—El mal cobrador hace mal pagador.—La oveja
lozana
dijo a la cabra, Dame lana.—El dia que te casas o te
sanas,
o te matas.—Quando el corsario promete misas y cera, con
mal
anda la galera.—Quando Dios quiere, con todos vientos
llueve.—Quando
te dier-en la vaquilla, acude con la soguilla.—
Quando
to dieren el anillo, pon el dedillo.—Pierde el lobo los
dientes,
rnas no las mientes.—Quando mayor
segura.—No
pidas al olmo Ia pera; pues no la lleva.—Una vez
sali,
y diez me arrepenti.—Uno piensa el bayo, y otro el que to
ensilla.—Nacen
las alas a la hormiga, para que se pierda mas
aina.—No
con cada mal al fisico, ni con cada pleito al letrado),
ni
con cada sed al jarro.—Mas quiero asno que me lleve, que
cavallo
que me derrueque.—Jurado ha el bano de to negro no
hacer
blanco.—Necio es, que piensa que otros no piensan.--Mas
vale
humo de mi casa que fuego de la agena.—Al fin se canta la
gloria.—Aunque
la mona se vesta de seda, mona se queda.--
Quando
pienses meter el diente en seguro, toparas en duro.—
1 Cusriosities of Literature,
III. Machiavellianism in Proverbs. 55
shrewd
enough, and only too shrewd; 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, and altogether seeming dictated as
by
the spirit of Machiavel himself.1
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 com-
mentary
which Italian history supplies, and which
shows
them no empty words, but truest 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.2 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,
liens
s’y montrent ruses, gracieux et moqueurs, is the judgment
of
a French writer, F. Denis, in a slight but clever essay on
what
he calls The Philosophy of Sancho.
1 These may serve as
examples: Chi ha sospetto, di rado e in
difetto.—Fidarsi
e bene, ma non fidarsi e meglio.—Da chi mi
fido,
mi guardi Iddio; di chi non mi fido, mi guardero io.—Con
arte
e con inganno si vive mezzo 1' anno; con inganno e con arte
si
vive 1’ altra parte.—A mal passo 1' onore.
2 Vendetta, boccon di
Dio.
56 Proverbs of Nations Compared LECT.
for it is never well
done in a hurry;1
while another
proclaims
an immortality of hatred, which no spaces
of
intervening time shall have availed to weaken:
Revenge of a hundred
years old hath still its sucking
teeth.2 We may
well be thankful that we have in
parallel
to these, embodied as the permanent convic-
tions
of the national mind.
How curious again is the confession
which speaks
out
in another Italian proverb, that the maintenance
of
the Roman system and the study of Holy Scripture
cannot
go together. It is this: With the Gospel one
becomes a heretic.3 No doubt with the study of the
Word
of God one becomes a 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, as was lately assigned in
as
shall dare to peruse it; yet certainly it is not a little
remarkable
that such a confession should have em-
bodied
itself in the popular utterances of the nation.
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:
1 Aspetta tempo e luogo a
far tua vendetta, che la non si fa
mai
ben in fretta. Compare another: Vuoi far vendetta
tuo
nemico, governati bene, ed e bell' e fatta.
2 Vendetta di cent' anni
ha ancor i lattaiuoli.
3 Con 1' Evangelo si
diventa eretico.
III. National Mind of
Friends tie their purses
with a spider's thread;l and
of
a subtle wisdom which has not degenerated into
cunning
and deceit; others too of a still nobler stamp;
honour
and honesty, plain dealing and uprightness,
have
here their praises, and are not seldom pro-
nounced
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 is too
little for a knave;2
the ways,
that
is, of truth and uprightness are so simple and
plain,
that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those
who
walk in them; the ways of falsehood and fraud
are
so perplexed and crooked, 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 th 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 web3
1 Gli amici legano la
borsa con un filo di ragnatelo.
2 Ad un uomo dabbene
avanza la meta
tristo
non basta ne anche tutto.
3 Jeremy Taylor appears
to have found much delight in the
proverbs
of
Living I counted five and
twenty such, to which he makes more
or
less remote allusion in the text. There is an excellent
article
on ‘Tuscan Proverbs’ in Fraser's
Magazine, Jan. 1857.
I
subjoin a small group. A nave rotta ogni vento e contrario.—
Chi
ha tempo, non aspetti tempo.—Chi ha la sanita e ricco, e
non
lo sa.—Chi non da fine al pensare, non da principio a
fare.
—Fammi indovino, ed io ti faro ricco. —Fra l' incudine e 'l
martello
non metta la mano chi ha cervello.—Chi edifica, sua
borsa
purifica.—La morte sempre trova qualche scusa.—Il
diavolo
e facile da invitare, ma non da scacciare.—E meglio
58 Proverbs of Nations Compared. LECT.
On French proverbs I cannot linger
long. They
have
very much the excellence which we should before-
hand
have expected; being full of grace and finish;
with
a rapier's point and polish; yet at the same time
often
with the rapier's coldness as well.l
And the German proverbs I must
hastily pass
over.
Whatever other merits they possess, and they
possess
many, and of such different kinds that it is
difficult,
if not impossible, to seize their most charac-
teristic
features, they may certainly boast of being the
most
numerous family of proverbs in existence.2 I
shall
often have occasion to recur to them.
cader
della finestra che
suol
temer dei topi in presenza.—Chi troppo abbraccia, nulla
stringe.—Chi
offende, scrive nella rena, chi e offeso nel marmo.
—Ad
un tristo un tristo e mezzo.—I1 diavolo tenta tutti, ma
1'
ozioso tenta it diavolo.—A flume famoso non andar a pesca. --
Chi
vuol it lavoro mal fatto, paghi innanzi tratto. —Chi non vuol
servir
ad un sol signor, a molti ha da servir.—Chi si fa fango,
it
porco lo calpesta.—Corpo satollo non crede all' affamato.--
Dall'
aqua cheta mi guardi Iddio, dalle correnti mi guardero io.
—Chi
ha arte da per tutto ha parte [cf. Phaedrus, Fab. iv. 21].
—Chi
asino e, e cervo esser si crede, al saltar
n'
avvede.—Se il giovine sapesse, ed it vecchio potesse, non v' e
cosa
che non si facesse.
1 Donner est mort, et
preter est bien malade.—Il ne faut pas
faire
d'un diable deux.—D'un sac a charbon ne peut sortir que
la
poussiere noire. —Un sot savant est plus sot qu'un sot ignorant.
—Le
mal est gros du bien.—L'homme est un arbre renverse.--
A
bon demandeur bon refuseur.—Le fol cherche son malheur. --
La
gloire qui dine de 1'orgueil fait son soupe de mepris.—Tous
les
renards se trouvent chez le pelletier.—Qui veut prendre un
oiseau,
qu'il ne 1'effarouche.—On ne trouve jamais meilleur
messager
que soi-meme.
2 I was disposed once to
claim this pre-eminence for the pro-
III. English Proverbs. 59
English proverbs in like manner have
so many
excellences
without having any one excellence which
is
greatly predominant, that in their case also it is
difficult
to seize upon features which more than any
other
are peculiarly their own.1 With Scotch it is
verbs
of
immensely
outnumbered by the contents of Wander's Deutsches
Spichworter-Lexicon, which when completed
will certainly not
contain
less than 100,000; if, indeed, this almost incredible
number
is not exceeded. It may give some notion of the Ger-
man
opulence in this line of things when I mention that under
Haus'
are ranged 686 proverbs, under 'Frau' 770, under ‘Gluck’
1025,
under, ‘Gott’ 2660; that is, there is this number of pro-
verbs
in which these severally constitute the principal word;
while
other words yield proverbs in the same proportion. I
subjoin
a very small handful of these:—Die Augen sind weiter,
als
der Bauch.—Mancher sucht Einen Pfennig, und verbrennt
dabei
drei Lichter.—Dem Esel traumet von Disteln.—Frau und
Mond
leuchten mit fremden Licht.—Es giebt rnehr Diebe als
Galgen.—Dem
Diebe will kein Baum gefallen, daran er hange.
—
Gedanken sind zollfrei, aber nicht hollenfrei. --Besser zweimal
fragen,
denn einmal irre gehn.—Wass man Gott opfern will,
muss
man nicht von Teufel einsegnen lassen.—Vermogen sucht
Vermogen.—Zu
viel Gluck ist Ungluck.—Wenn der Esel auch
eine
Lowenhaut tragt, die Ohren gucken vor.—Wenn der Fuchs
Richter
ist, gewinnt schwerlich eine Gans den Process.—Wenn
der
Fuchs sie todt stellt, so sind die Huhner in Gefahr.
1 I append here a few of
these: Who hath horns in his bosom
need
not put them on his head.—Better a little loss than a long
sorrow.—A
fool always rushes to the fore.—Folks' dogs bark
worse
than themselves.—A bribe enters without knocking.—
Prosperity
makes friends, adversity proves them.—What can
you
expect from a hog but a grunt? —High winds blow on high
hills.—A
man will never change his mind if he has no mind
to
change.—Mettle is dangerous in a blind horse.—What, keep
a
dog and bark myself? It is of no use flogging a dead horse.
--The
hobgoblin reads his own writing,—Losers may have leave
60 Proverbs of Nations Compared. LECT.
easier.
Of course an immense number of Scotch
proverbs
are identical with our own, or it may be, dis-
tinguished
from them only by slight dialectic differences.
But
this is by no means the case with all. Many of
ours,
so far as I can trace them, have at no time had
free
course in
way
possesses many which have never crossed the
border,
and in which we have no share. Other nations
may
own larger collections of proverbs, and may pro-
duce
single proverbs of a grace, tenderness and eleva-
tion,
which none of these can match; but I know of
no
collection so uniformly good, in which so few flat,
pointless,
and merely trivial are to be found. Their
one
serious fault as a whole is that there are so few
among
them which move in, or assume, or at all reach
out
after, an ideal world, higher than that in which we
commonly
move; but as maxims of prudential morality
they
deserve all praise. Thus, what better in this way
could
be found than the following: Raise nae
mair
deils than ye're able to
lay? It
need not be said that
they
are canny; and some over canny and with the
touch
of a too visible contempt for those that are other-
wise;
as, for instance, this one: Fools make
feasts, and
wise men eat them. They are almost always
witty; as
these
are: As
long as ye serve the tod [the fox], ye
maun
carry his tail—A craw is
nae whiter for being washed—
Dinna lift me before I
fall—A blate cat makes a proud
to
speak.—He dances well to whom Fortune pipes.—Where
God
has his Church, the devil has his chapel. If thy name be
up,
thou mayest lie abed till noon.--Drawn wells are seldom
dry.
—He that will eat the kernel must crack the nut.—Treat
thy
horse as a friend, and mount him as an enemy.—It is a sad
house
where the hen crows louder than the cock.
III. Scotch Proverbs. 61
mouse—As good eat the deil,
as the hail he's boiled in;
while
this, if not witty, yet is wise: Better
keep the deil out
than hae to turn him
out.
This that follows is in a higher
strain,
in that strain of which I just now complained that
Scotch
proverbs offer too few examples: A thread
will
tie an honest man better
than a rope will do a rogue,
How
far the Irish may have a stock of home-born pro-
verbs
I cannot undertake to say; but the poet Spenser,
who
long dwelt in
one
as in his time current among the Irish. It is this:
Spend me and defend me; and no doubt exactly
ex-
presses
their idea of what they owed to their native
chiefs,
and what these owed in return to them. There
has
been no time in which their leaders have not taken
them
only too well at their word so far as the first half of
the
proverb reaches, and have not failed prodigally to
spend them; while if they
have ever undertaken to
defend, these undertakings
have issued exactly as must
ever
issue all undertakings to defend men from those
evils
wherefrom none can effectually protect them but
themselves.
Russian proverbs appear to me to be
singularly
good.
I have no choice, however, but to pass, them by
with
this slight notice, and to wander still further afield.
The
proverbs of the Eastern world go far to tell
the
story of the East. Thus, what description of
moral
condition, could make us to understand all
which
long centuries of oppression and misrule have
made
of it and of its people, as compared with the
Arabic
proverbs now current there?1 In
other books
1 These Arabic Proverbs of the Modern Egyptian,
62 Proverbs of Nations Commared LECT.
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, as poor, mean, sordid, and
ignoble,
with only a few faintest glimpses of that
romance
which we usually attach to the East; all this,
as
we study these documents, rises up before us in
clearest,
though in painfullest, outline.
Thus only in a land where rulers,
being evil
themselves,
instinctively feel all goodness to be their
foe,
and themselves therefore entertain a corresponding
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 save
a
land like this could a proverb like the following,
Do no good, and thou
shalt find no evil,
have ever
come
to the birth. How assured a conviction that
wrong,
and not right, is the lord paramount of the
world
must have settled down on men's spirits, before
such
a word as this, (I know of no sadder one), could
have
found utterance from their lips.1
1830,
were collected by the traveller Burckhardt, and after his
death
published with his name.
1 Yet this very mournful
collection of Burckhardt's possesses
at
least one very beautiful proverb on the all-conquering power
of
love: Man is the slave of beneficence.
I will add a few
others,
Persian, Arabic, Turkish. They all seem to me to pos-
sess
more or less merit, and some to be eminently characteristic
of
that East to which they belong. Thus, He who has need of
III. Chinese Proverbs. 63
The author of an article on Chinese
proverbs in
the
China Review expresses himself thus: ‘If it be
asked
what is the distinguishing note of Chinese
proverbs?
I would say, a certain quiet and keen
long-headedness,
a somewhat cynical and worldly
view
of human nature, but a piercing insight into it,
reminding
one most of those incisive Florentine
bywords
recovered for us by the unwearied diligence
of
George Eliot. And thus the proverbs of
are
marked more by wisdom than by sweetness, for
they
have sprung from the heart of a hard-working,
not
too much rejoicing, people. They turn more on
the
foibles of humanity than its excellences.’1
a
dog, calls him Sir Dog.—He is the true sage who learns from all
the
world. —It is ill sport between the cotton and the fire. — Treat
thy
horse as a friend, and mount him as an enemy.—Two water-
melons
are not held in one hand. —Thou wilt catch more flies
with
a spoonful of honey than with a cask of vinegar. —The king
makes
free with an apple; his servants have cut down the tree.
—If
the monkey reigns, dance before him.—Though thy friend
be
honey, do not swallow him up.—Keep the dogs near when
thou
suppest with the wolf.—Who chatters to you, will chatter
of
you. —The dust of the sheepfold is ointment for the sore eyes
of
the wolf.—Cast thy bread upon the waters; God will know
of
it, if the fishes do not.—Stones and sticks are flung only at
fruit-bearing
trees.—When once thy cart is overturned, everyone
will
show thee the way.
1 The proverbs which
follow will, I think, bear this judg-
ment
out: It is easier to visit friends than to live with them.
—Master
easy, servant slack.—A coach and four cannot bring
back
a word once uttered.—Better go home and make a net
than
jump into a pool after fish.—Great folks may set the town
in
a blaze, common people must not even light a lantern.—All
ten
fingers cannot be of the same length. —Leave to the tiger the
care
of attacking the wolf.—The tiles which defend thee in the
64 Proverbs of Nations Compared. LECT.
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
central
heart of a people, nor declare to us the se-
cretest
things which are there, but dwell more on the
surface,
they have still oftentimes local or national
features,
which it is worth our while to remark. Thus,
how
many 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
at
all, not certainly in the shape that 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 a fine Cornish proverb tells the story of
obstinate
wrongheads, who will take no warning
except
from calamities, dashing themselves to pieces
against
obstacles, which with a little prudence and
foresight
they might easily have avoided: 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
wet
weather were fashioned in the dry.—The ripest fruit does
not
drop into the mouth. —Who borrows to build, builds to sell.
—In
accounts finish all, or you have finished nothing. —You may
be
arrested by mistake, but not released.
III. Localised Proverbs 65
Arabic in the house of a
Moor,1—that
is, because there
thy
imperfect knowledge of the language will be
detected
at once,—this, wherever we met it, we should
confidently
affirm to be the Spanish version of a
proverb
not strange to ourselves: It is hard to halt
before a cripple. In like manner a
traveller with any
experience
in the composition of Spanish sermons and
Spanish
dishes could make no mistake about the
following:
A sermon without Augustine is as a stew
without bacon.2
Big and empty, like the
tun,3 could have its home
only in Germany; that
enormous
vessel, known as the
structed
to contain nearly 300,000 flasks, having now
stood
empty for hundreds of years. As little does
the
following, It's not every village parson
whom Dr.
Luther's shoes will fit,4 leave us in any doubt
to what
people
it appertains. And this, The world is a
carcase,
and they who gather
pound 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 assemble round a car-
case
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,5 plainly roots
1 En casa del Moro no
hables algarabia.
2 Sermon sin Agostino,
olla sin tocino.
3 Gross and leer, wie das
Heidelberger Fass.
4 Doctor Luther's Schuhe
sind nicht alien Dorfpriestern
gerecht.
5 Cum duplicantur
lateres, Moses venit. This proverb was
a
favourite one with the German Protestants during the worst
66
Proverbs of Nations Compared. LECT.
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 wholly unintelligible. 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 natu-
rally
and freely in it than elsewhere, there are others
which
we meet all the world over. True cosmopolites,
they
seem to have travelled from land to land, and to
have
made themselves a 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 modern world.
Much, I think, may 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
shape, have become a portion of the common
stock
of the world's wisdom, in every land making for
themselves
a recognition and a home. Such a pro-
verb,
for instance, is Man proposes, God
disposes;1
one
I believe that every nation in
so
deeply upon all men is impressed the sense of
Hamlet's
words, if not the very words themselves:
times
of the Thirty Years War. Gustavus Adolphus was the
Moses
who should come in the hour of uttermost need.
1 La gente pone, y Dios
dispone.—Der Mensch denkt's;
Gott
lenkt's.
III. Metamorphosis of Proverbs. 67
‘There's a divinity that
shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.’
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 various periods in which it
has
been current and thus we have proverbs totally
diverse
from one another in form and appearance, but
which
yet, when looked at a little deeper, prove to
be
at heart one and the same, all these their diffe-
rences
being only, so to speak, variations of the same
air.
These furnish almost always an amusing, often an
instructive,
study; and to trace this likeness in diffe-
rence
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, which
cleaves
in an equal or in a greater degree to themselves,
have
for the most 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
for
you'll smutch me;’1—the
Spaniards: The raven cried
to the crow, ‘Avaunt,
blackamoor;’2—the
Germans:
One ass nicknames
another, Longears;3—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
1 La padella dice al
pajuolo, Fatti in la, the to mi tigni.
2 Dijo la corneja al
cuervo, Quitate alla, negro.
3 Ein Esel schimpft den
andern, Langohr.
68 Proverbs of Nations Compare LECT.
a
variety of forms does one and the same thought
array
itself here.
Take another illustration of the
same fact. Coals
to
pressing
well the absurdity of sending to a place that
which
already abounds there, as water to the sea, or
fagots
to the wood: but it is only English in the out-
ward
garment which it wears in its innermost being
it
belongs to the whole world and to all times. Thus
the
Greeks said: Owls to
with
these birds; the Rabbis: Enchantments to
of
all magic; the Orientals: Pepper to Hindostan;
the
Germans: Deals to
Ages
they had this proverb: Indulgences to Rome,
traffic;
nor do these by any means exhaust the
list.
I adduce some other variations of
the same kind,
though
not running through quite so many languages.
Thus
compare the German, Who lets one sit on
his
shoulders, shall have
himpresently sit on his head,2 with the
Italian,
If thou suffer a calf to be laid on thee,
within a
little they'll clap on
the cow,3
and, again, with the Spanish,
Give me where I may sit
down; I will make where I
may lie down.4 All three
alike remind us that undue
liberties
are best resisted at the outset, being otherwise
1 Glau?kaj
ei]j ]Aqh<naj.
2 Wer sich auf der Achsel
sitzen lasst, dem sitzt man nachher
auf
dem Kopfe.
3 Se ti lasci metter in
spalla it vitello, quindi a poco ti met-
teran
la vacca.
4 Dame donde me asiente,
que yo hare donde me acueste.
III. Various Proverbs. 69
sure
to be followed up by other and greater ones; but
this
under how rich and humorous a variety of forms.
Not
very different is the lesson of 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;
the
French: Who makes himself 'a sheep, the wolf
devours him;1 and the Persians: Be not
all sugar, or
the world will gulp thee
down;2
to which they add,
however,
as its necessary complement, nor yet all
wormwood, or the world
will spit thee out.
Take
another
group. 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:3 and the
Germans: He who holds
the ladder is as guilty
as he who mounts the wall.4 Or
again,
we say: A stitch in time saves nine; the
Spaniards:
Who
repairs not his gutter, repairs his
whole house.5 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 mis-
fortune is the vigil of
another,
and again: A misfor-
tune and a friar are
seldom alone.6
The Germans
1 Qui se fait brebis, le
loup le mange.
2
There is a Catalan proverb to the same effect: Qui de tot
es
moll, de tot es foll.
3 Autant peche celui qui
tient le sac, que celui qui met
dedans.
4 Wer die Leiter halt,
ist so schuldig wie der Dieb.
5 Quien no adoba gotera,
adoba casa entera.
6 Benedetto e quel male,
the viensolo.--Unmal e la vigili,
dell
altro.—Un male e un frate di rado soli.
70
Proverbs of Nations Compared LECT.
say:
Many
go out for wool, and come bath shorn; but
the
Romans long ago: The camel that desired horny
lost even its ears.1 Many languages have this proverb
God gives the cold
according to the cloth;2 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, will
there be not
seldom
an evident superiority of a proverb in one
language
over one, which 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 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;3
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 ser-
pent has bitten, a
lizard alarms.4
With a little varia-
1 Camelus cornea
desiderans etiam aures perdidit. The
camel
in AEsop's fable asks horns of Jove. Indignant: at the
foolish
request, he deprives it of its ears.
2 Dieu donne le froid
selon le drap.—Cada cual siente el frio
3 In Spanish: Quien
espanta.
4 Cui serpe mozzica,
lucerta teme.
III. New Testament Proverbs. 71
tion
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
tropical
clime: The man who has received a beating
from a firebrand, runs
away at sight of a firefly.
Some of our Lord's sayings contain
lessons which
the
proverbs of the Jewish Rabbis contained already;
for
He did not refuse to bring forth from his treasury
things
old as well as new; but it is instructive to
observe
how they acquire in his mouth a decorum and
dignity
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 have a
proverb to
match,
lively and piquant enough, but certainly lack-
ing
the gravity of this: If thy neighbour call thee ass,
put a pack-saddle on thy
back;
do not, that is, with-
draw
thyself from the wrong, but rather go forward to
meet
and to welcome it.
Sometimes a proverb, without an
entire transfor-
mation,
will yet on the lips of different nations be
slightly
modified; and these modifications, slight as
they
are, may 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, and perhaps earnestly invoked,
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
72 Proverbs of Nations Compared LECT.
them:
The
river past, the saint forgotten.1 In its
Italian
form it sounds a still sadder depth of ingrati-
tude:
The
peril past, the saint mocked;2 the vows
made
to him in peril remaining unperformed in safety;
and
he treated somewhat as, in Greek story, Juno was
treated
by Mandrabulus the Samian. Of him we are
told
that having under the auspices of the goddess and
through
her direction discovered a gold mine, in his
instant
gratitude he vowed to her a golden ram; this
he
presently exchanged in intention for a silver one;
and
again this for a very small brass one; and this
for
nothing at all. Certainly the rapidly descending
scale
of the gratitude of this gold-finder, with little
by
little the entire disappearance of his thank-
offering,
might very profitably live in our memories, as
so
perhaps it would be less likely that the same should
repeat
itself in our lives.
1 El rio pasado, el santo
olvidado.
2 Passato il punto,
gabbato il santo.
IV. Analysis of Proverbs. 73
LECTURE IV.
THE POETRY, WIT, AND WISDOM OF
PROVERBS.
I PROPOSE in my three remaining
lectures to
justify
the attention which I have claimed for
proverbs,
not merely by appealing to the authority of
others
who in divers lands and in divers ages have
prized
and made much of them, but by bringing out
and
setting before you, so far as my skill reaches,
some
of the excellences by which they are mainly dis-
tinguished.
Their wit, their wisdom, their poetry, the
delicacy,
the fairness, the manliness which characterize
so
many of them, their morality, their theology, will
all
by turns come under our consideration. At the
same
time I shall beware of presenting them to you
as
though they embodied these nobler qualities only.
I
shall not keep out of sight that there are proverbs,
coarse,
selfish, unjust, cowardly, profane; ‘maxims’
wholly
undeserving of the honour implied by that
name.l
Still as my pleasure, and I doubt not yours,
is
rather in the wheat than in the tares, I shall, while
I
make no attempt to keep such out of sight, prefer to
dwell
in the main on proverbs which present nobler
features
to us.
1 Propositiones quae
inter maximas numerari merentur.
74 Poetry, etc. of Proverbs. LECT.
And first, of the poetry of
proverbs. Whatever is
from the people, or truly for the people, whatever
either
springs from their bosom, or has been cordially
accepted
by them, still more whatever unites both
these
conditions, will have more or less of poetry, or
imagination,
in it. For little as the people's craving
after
wholesome nutriment of the imaginative faculty,
and
after an entrance into a fairer and more harmonious
world
than that sordid and confused one with which
often
they are surrounded, is duly met and satisfied,
still
they yearn after all this with an honest hearty
yearning,
such as may well put to shame the palled in-
difference,
the only affected enthusiasm of too many,
whose
opportunities of cultivating this glorious faculty
have
been so immeasurably greater than theirs. This
being
so, and proverbs being, as we have seen, the
sayings
that have found favour with the people, such
as
they have made peculiarly their own, we may confi-
dently
anticipate that there will be poetry, imagination,
passion,
in them. A closer examination will not put
our
confidence to shame.
Bold imagery, lively comparisons we
have a right
to
expect to find in them. Nor do we look for it in
vain.
As a proof, let serve our own: Gray hairs are
death's blossoms;1 or the
Italian: Time is an inaudible
file;2 or the
Greek: Man a bubble;3 which last
Jeremy
Taylor has expanded into such glorious poe-
1 In German: Grau' Haare
sind Kirchhofsblumen; but older
than
either German or English ; for we may compare Erinna:
paurolo<goi poliai<, tai>
gh<raoj a@nqea qnatoi?j.
2 Il tempo e una
3 Pomfo<luc
o[ a@nqrwpoj.
IV. Poetic Imagery. 75
try
in the opening of the Holy Dying; or the Turkish:
Death is a black camel
which kneels at every man's
gate; to take up, that is,
the burden of a coffin there;
or
this Arabic, on the never satisfied eye of desire:
Nothing but a handful of
dust will fill the eye of man;