The German proverb, ‘Speak, that I may see thee,’ may be applied as truly to a whole community as to an individual. For proverbs—or, roughly defining, popular sayings—reflect conspicuously the general character of a nation, constituting its actual code of social, political, and moral philosophy. Besides the beauty and wisdom, from which alone many of them derive an imperishable charm, they serve as a kind of literature in miniature, in which the inner life of a nation is more clearly legible than in its more voluminous writings. And in spite of the general resemblance which seems to pervade the proverbial lore of the world, arising partly from the direct interchange of thought inseparable from international commerce of any kind, partly from a uniformity of experience—such, for example, as has impressed on all people the wisdom of caution and truth—there are yet well-marked differences in the proverbs of nations, which as clearly retain the records of their several histories as do their different laws and customs. Remarkable, therefore, as is the substantial similarity of proverbial codes, of which the general characteristic is a high sense of right coupled with a mournful consciousness of human infirmity, they betray often in the very expression of the same idea the individuality of their national birthplace. It is obvious, for instance, that, largely as all modern nations are indebted to a writer like Æsop for the thoughts they share in common, each nation severally will owe more of its wisdom to writers of its own, who, like Shakespeare or Cervantes, have, from greater familiarity with the manners, been more competent to express the feelings, of their different countries. But the way in which good proverbs, like good gold, find acceptance everywhere, and pass readily into the current coinage of different realms, may be illustrated by the fact of the existence, in countries so widely remote as Spain, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, and India, of a saying, second to none in all the essentials of a good proverb, to the effect that ‘when God wills the destruction of an ant, he supplies it with wings.’[118]

An instructive instance of the light thrown on national character by proverbs may be supplied from a comparison of Italian, German, and Persian teaching on the subject of vindictiveness. In communities destitute of social organisation, the ‘vendetta,’ or duty of blood-revenge, probably preceded and led the way to the practice of legal punishment. Originally it was a kind of lynch-law, supplying the default of any legal protection of life; and all nations bear traces in their history of having passed through a stage of growth in which the sacred duty of vengeance was the germ of any idea of a more judicial retribution. Confucius made it a duty for a son to slay his father’s murderer, just as Moses insisted on a strictly retaliatory penalty for bloodshed. The duty of revenge, which if it is yet extinct in Corsica survives with so much interest in the play of ‘The Corsican Brothers,’ to this day, in places like Fiji, still passes from father to son, and from the son to the nearest relation. The longer survival of such feelings in Italy, consequent on the different circumstances of her history, is clearly impressed on the proverbial philosophy of her people, constituting a remarkable contrast to the sentiments of other countries. For the Italian, extolling the sweetness of revenge, declares it a morsel fit for God; and, expressing pity or contempt for the man who either cannot or will not carry out his revenge, counsels patience and the waiting of time and place for its successful execution. In a proverb so terribly expressive that you seem to hear in it the assassin’s gnashing teeth, he will tell you that ‘revenge, though a hundred years old, still has its milk teeth,’ a maxim which stands on no higher a level than the pagan African saying, ‘Hate hath no medicine,’ or than that of Afghanistan, ‘Speak good words to an enemy very softly, gradually destroy him root and branch;’ and which may be fitly compared with the Fijian expression of malice: ‘Let the shell of the oyster perish by reason of years, and to these add a thousand more, still my hatred shall be hot.’ How much purer than the Italian is the German teaching, which declares revenge to be fresh wrong, the conversion of a little right into a great injustice, and sure in its turn to draw revenge after it; or how far nobler still is the more positive sentiment of Persia, that to take revenge for an injury is the sign of a mean spirit; that it is easy to return evil for evil, but that the manly thing is to return good for it!

The contrast conveyed in these proverbs is the more striking, in that Italy might pre-eminently call herself the Catholic, as against Germany the heretical, or Persia the infidel, land. It has been said that every tenth proverb in an Italian collection contains a selfish or cynical maxim; and though the beauty and purity of many Italian sayings counterbalance the baseness of others—those, for instance, on love being as refined as those on revenge are barbarous—it may not be uninteresting to compare generally the proverbs of Italy with those of a land like Persia where the religious history has been so different.

The noblest Italian proverb is to the effect that a hundred years cannot repair a moment’s loss of honour; the basest, perhaps, that bad as it is to be a knave, it is worse to be known as one. To love a friend with all his faults; to associate with the good in order to be good; to work in order to rest; to do right in spite of consequences, and good irrespectively of persons; to do evil never, whatever the benefit—these are among the highest lessons of Italian proverb-lore. That among men of honour a word is a bond, and that conscience is as good as a thousand witnesses; that the best sermon is a good life, and that the gains of begging are dearly bought, are maxims of the same upright tendency. Yet, over against these, are proverbs pervaded by the saddest spirit of universal mistrust, instilling utter disbelief of any sincerity in friendship, and even counselling to selfish or downright wicked conduct. What more melancholy evidence of this than is afforded by the following common sayings?—

Or, again, what can be thought of such maxims as, that it is expedient to peel a fig for your friend but a peach for your enemy; that the man who esteems none but himself is happy as a king; that public money, like holy water, is the property of all men; or that with art and knavery men may live through half the year, and with knavery and art through the other?

The Persian proverbs seem to breathe a different moral atmosphere from these, being as generous in character as the Italian are cynical, and displaying a free spirit of liberality, trust, independence, above all, of truthfulness, which is unsurpassed in any country of Europe. If in Italy it is common to say that a man who cannot flatter knows not how to talk, in Persia the sentiment prevails that to flatter is worse than to abuse. The Persian, true to the character given of him by Herodotus, holds boldly, that the man who speaks truth is always at ease; that men never suffer from speaking the truth; that it behoves them to speak their minds unreservedly, for that there is no hill in front of the tongue. Add to this the popular sayings, that the accounts of friends are in the heart, and that it is better to be in chains with friends than in the garden with strangers. That it should have become proverbial in Persia, that a man lowers himself by vexing the poor, and loses all claim to greatness by finding fault with his inferiors, proves the purity of a religion which has instilled such thoughts into the ethics of a nation; nor could any language in Europe produce proverbs characterised by a higher spirit of morality than is revealed in the following selection:—

As another illustration of the way in which a few proverbs may condense centuries of history, may be instanced the recorded experiences of mankind touching priests and priestcraft. With no other evidence than that of proverbs before him, a future historian of Europe might easily detect a marked difference of feeling on this matter between Protestant Germany and the Catholic countries of Europe. Not that the latter are wanting in sayings to the prejudice of the priestly class, but they are not so numerous as in Germany. The French have two proverbs, marked with all the wit and boldness of their genius, one charging anyone who values a clean house not to let into it either a priest or a pigeon; the other declaring that it is human ignorance alone which causes the pot to boil for priests. The Spanish experience also is, that it is best neither to have a good friar for a friend nor a bad one for an enemy, and that it is well to keep awake in a land thickly tenanted by monks. But the Germans go much farther than this. In German estimation the priest is a being who, in company with a woman, may be found at the bottom of all the mischief that goes on in the world, and is as little likely as a woman to forgive you an injury. Like the bites of wolves, those of priests are hard to heal, so that it is best, if you fight with them at all, to beat them to death. If they are ever hot, it is from eating, not from work; for they always take care to bless themselves first, nor do they ever pay any tithes to one another.

The above comparisons suffice to show how differences of national character, and even how the operation of different forms of faith, may reveal themselves in proverbs. Yet such estimates must be formed with caution, in consideration of the wide possibilities of error which are inseparable from so inexhaustible a subject. For not only may the proverb-collector easily attribute to one country alone a saying which belongs equally to, or may even have originated in, another, but his canon of selection is somewhat arbitrary and dependent on his preconceptions of what a proverb really is. ‘To take the ball on the hop,’ for instance, is as genuine an English proverb as ‘to make hay whilst the sun shines,’ which contains the same idea; yet whilst the one might be heard every day, the other might not be heard once a year, so that it might easily escape notice altogether, or if found be rejected as obsolete. We can consequently, as in other branches of human study, only make use, on trust, of such data as lie at hand, and, whilst fully acknowledging the imperfection of the evidence, strive after an approximation to truth, without hope for its actual attainment.

If now we extend the limits of our comparison, to take in some proverbs of the lower races as well as of the higher, we shall find therein a strong corroboration of the lesson already learnt in any comparison of the superstitions, myths, and manners of different societies; namely, that differences of race, colour, and even structure, sink into insignificance when compared with the intellectual affinities which unite the families of mankind, and that there is, perhaps, no phase of thought nor shade of feeling belonging to the higher culture of the world to which we may not find an antitype or even an equivalent in the lower. If we take some of the proverbs collected from tribes confessedly low in civilisation—those, for instance, of West Africa—and compare them with proverbs still prevalent in Europe, we cannot fail to be struck with the strong likeness between them, as well as impressed with the idea, that many actually existent common sayings may have had their birth in days of the most remote and savage antiquity. The immense number of modern proverbs, drawn from the observation of the natural, and especially of the animal, world (a number which must be nearly one out of five), coupled with the coincidence that the same fact is perhaps the most striking one in the proverbs collected from West Africa, seems to lend some support to such a theory.

As an introductory instance let us take savage and civilised sentiments about poverty, a belief in the misfortune of which is written clearly in every language of Europe. Italian experience says that poverty has no kin, and that poor men do penance for rich men’s sins; in Germany the poor have to dance as the rich pipe; whilst in Spain and Denmark the evil is expressed more graphically still, it being a matter of observation in the one country that the poor man’s crop is destroyed by hail every year; in the other, that the poor man’s corn always grows thin. And, in the Oji dialect, spoken by about two millions of people, including the Ashantees, Fantees, and others, it is also proverbial that the poor man has no friend, that poverty makes a man a slave, and that hard words are fit for the poor. And as the Dutch have learnt, that ‘poor folks’ wisdom goes for little,’ or the Italians, that ‘the words of the poor go many to the sackful,’ so in Oji exactly the same idea is conveyed in the saying, that ‘when a poor man makes a proverb it does not spread’; in Yoruba, in the saying, that ‘poverty destroys a man’s reputation;’ and in Accra in the still cleverer proverb, that ‘a poor man’s pipe does not sound.’[119]

The proverbs of savages are moral and immoral, elevated and base, precisely as are those of more civilised nations. The proverbs of the Yorubas, justly observes the missionary, Mr. Bowen,[120] ‘are among the most remarkable of the world;’ and indeed the intellectual powers and moral ideas displayed in West African proverbs generally ought largely to modify our conceptions of their originators, and make us sceptical of that extreme dearth of mental wealth which has so frequently been declared to attend a low standard of material advancement. Their wit, terseness, vividness of illustration, and insight into life, are all alike surprising; and acquaintance with them must suggest caution in any estimate of the mental capacities of savages whose languages may have been less investigated and consequently remain less known. ‘It has always been passing travellers who have drawn the most doleful pictures of so-called savages, and especially have asserted the poverty of their language.’[121] It may well prove that better acquaintance with the languages of tribes, classed at present for various reasons almost outside the human family, may show them to combine, as Humboldt found was the case with the once depreciated Carib language, ‘wealth, grace, strength, and gentleness.’ It was said of the Veddahs once that they were utterly destitute of either religion or language; and the Samojeds were reported to shriek and chatter like apes.

The Basutos of South Africa are savages, yet the following proverbs are current among them:—

Compare, for elevation of mind, these Yoruban proverbs with those already noticed as current in Italy:—

On the other hand, ‘If a great man should wrong you, smile on him,’ may be compared with the Arabic advice about dangerous friends, ‘If a serpent love thee, wear him as a necklace;’ or with the Pashto proverb of the same intention, ‘Though your enemy be a rope of reeds, call him a serpent.’

Here are some more proverbs with whose European equivalents everyone will be familiar:—

On Faultfinding.

With which we may compare the Chinese:—

On the Value of Experience.

With which we may compare our own—

Or the German—

To which both Italy and Holland have exactly similar proverbs.

On Perseverance.

Which latter may be compared with the Dutch proverb—

And all of them with the Chinese—

On the Force of Habit.

To which again China supplies a good parallel in

On Causation.

Again, the Turkish proverb, that curses, like chickens, come home to roost, or the Italian one that, like processions, they come back to their starting-point, is well matched by the Yoruba proverb that ‘ashes fly back in the face of their thrower.’ Or the tendency of travellers to exaggerate or tell lies, impressed as it has been on all human experience, is also confirmed by the Oji proverb, that ‘he who travels alone tells lies.’ And the universal belief in the ultimate exposure of falsehood conveyed in such proverbs as the Arabian, ‘The liar is short-lived;’ the Persian, ‘Liars have bad memories;’ or the still more expressive Italian saying, that ‘the liar is sooner caught than a cripple,’ finds itself corroborated by the Wolof proverb, that ‘lies, though many, will be caught by Truth as soon as she rises up.’ Even in Afghanistan, where it is said that no disgrace attaches to lying per se, and where lying is called an honest man’s wings, while truth can only be spoken by a strong man or a fool, there is also a proverb with the moral, that the career of falsehood is short.[124]

That ‘hope is the pillar of the world,’ that ‘it is the heart which carries one to hell or heaven,’ or that ‘preparation is better than after-thought’—all experiences of the Kanuri, a Moslem tribe, who think it a personal adornment to cut each side of their face in twenty places—shows that there is no necessary connection between general savagery and an absence of moral culture. The natives of New Zealand, with all their barbarity, had in common use a saying which were a desirable maxim for European diplomacy: ‘When you are on friendly terms, settle your disputes in a friendly way; when you are at war, redress your injuries by violence.’[125] Even the Fijians would say that an unimproved day was not to be counted, and that no food was ever cooked by gay clothes and frivolity.[126] A good Ashantee proverb warns people not to speak ill of their benefactors, by forbidding them to call a forest a shrubbery that has once given them shelter. The proverbs already quoted from Yoruba teach the same lesson, nor would it be difficult to add many more, all proving the existence among savages of a morality identical in its main features with that of the higher group of nations to which we ourselves belong, interpenetrated as it has been for ages with the philosophies and religions of the civilised East.

A similar testimony to the intellectual powers of savages is afforded by their proverbs, though of course the argument is only a suggestive one from tribes whose language has been well studied to others not so well known. That the Soudan negroes are on a higher level of general culture than many savages of other islands or continents is proved by the fact that all known Africans are acquainted with the art of smelting iron and converting it into weapons and utensils; so that they may be said to be living in the iron age, and thus, materially at least, are more advanced than the Botocudos of Brazil, who are still in the age of polished stone implements. From the fact alone that the Yorubas express their contempt for a stupid man by saying that he cannot count nine times nine, we are enabled at once to place them above tribes whose powers of numeration fall short of such readiness. Hence we should not be justified in expecting to find among Australian or American aborigines proverbs of so high an intellectual order as abound in Africa, of which the following may be selected as samples:—

or—

The Zulus, speaking of the uncertainty of a result, say, ‘It is not known what calf the cow will have;’[127] and when the Fantees tell you to ‘cross the river before you abuse the crocodile,’[128] there is no difficulty in translating their meaning into English. In all these proverbs it is obvious how the facts of every-day life have readily served everywhere as the basis of intellectual advancement, and how similar lessons have everywhere been drawn from the observation of similar occurrences.

Leaving now the analogy between African and European proverb-lore, which the uniformity of moral experiences and the observation of similar laws of nature sufficiently account for, let us endeavour to find among civilised nations any proverbs which, by the figures involved in them or their likeness to savage maxims, seem to bear a distinct impression of a barbaric coinage. One French proverb may almost certainly be so explained. It is, for instance, well known that the lower races very generally account for eclipses of either sun or moon by supposing them to be the victims of the fury or voracity of some ill-disposed animal, whom they try to divert by every horrible noise they can produce, or by any weapon they have learnt to fashion. A typical instance of this was the belief of the Chiquitos of South America that the moon was hunted across the sky by dogs, who tore her in pieces when they caught her, till driven off by the Indian arrows. It has been suggested that the French proverb, ‘Dieu garde la lune des loups,’ said in deprecation of a dread of remote danger, is a survival of a similar rude philosophy of nature which is still prevalent in the capital of Turkey, and in the days of St. Augustine was current over Europe.[129]

Another instructive set of proverbs may be adduced to show how the social philosophy current in the savage state may survive in contemporary expressions of modern Europe. In Africa, where, speaking generally, a man’s wife has no better status in society than that which attaches to his slave or his ox, and a son has been known to wager his own mother against a cow, we cannot be astonished at finding in vogue proverbs strongly depreciatory of the worth of the female sex. Thus a wise Kanuri is cautioned, that if a woman shall speak to him two words, he shall take one and leave the other; nor should he give his heart to a woman, if he would live, for a woman never brings a man into the right way. So, too, Pashto proverbs say contemptuously, that a woman’s wisdom is under her heel, and that she is well only in the house or in the grave. The same feeling is endorsed by the Persians, who declare that both women and dragons are best out of the world, classing the former with horses and swords among their by-words of unfaithfulness.

The literatures of all countries are strongly tinged with sentiments of the same unjust nature. Even the French say that a man of straw is worth a woman of gold, though their proverb, ‘Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,’ is as true as it is a witty variation of the well-known democratic formula. The Italians have made the shrewd observation, that, whilst with men every mortal sin is venial, with women every venial sin is mortal; but no language has anything worse than this, that as both a good horse and a bad horse need the spur, so both a good woman and a bad woman need the stick.

It is, however, in Germany that the character of women has suffered most from the shafts of that other half of the community, which (it might be complained) has as unfair a monopoly of making proverbs as it has of making laws. The humorous saying, that there are only two good women in the world, one of whom is dead and the other not to be found, contains the key to the common national sentiment. A woman is compared to good fortune in her partiality for fools, and to wine in her power to make them. Like a glass, she is in hourly danger; and, like a priest, she never forgets. Her vengeance is boundless, and her mutability finds its only parallel in nature in the uncertain skies of April. Her affections change every moment, like luck at cards, the favour of princes, or the leaves of a rose; and though you will never find her wanting in words, there is not a needle-point’s difference betwixt her yea and her nay. She only keeps silence where she is ignorant, and it is as fruitless to try to hold a woman at her word as an eel by its tail. Her advice, like corn sown in summer, may perhaps turn out well once in seven years; but wherever there is mischief brewing in the world, rest assured that there is a woman and a priest at the bottom of it. Every daughter of Eve would rather be beautiful than good, and may be caught as surely by gold as a hare by dogs or a gentleman by flattery. Even in the house she should be allowed no power, for where a woman rules the devil is chief servant; whilst two women in the same house will agree together like two cats over a mouse or two dogs over a bone.

Spanish experience on this subject coincides with the Teutonic, but without the expenditure of nearly so much spleen, and with several glimpses of a happier experience. What can be worse than this: ‘Beware of a bad woman, nor put any trust in a good one;’ or sadder than this: ‘What is marriage, mother? Spinning, childbirth, and crying, daughter’? Yet the Spanish woman, as hard to know as a melon, as little to be trusted as a magpie, as fickle as the wind or as fortune, as ready to cry as a dog to limp, in labour as patient as a mule, is not so destitute as the German of any redeeming qualities for her failings. The Spaniard is taught to believe that with a good wife he may bear any adversity, and that he should believe nothing against her unless absolutely proved. It is also in remarkable contrast to the experiences of other countries, that in Spain it should have passed into a proverb, that whilst an unmarried man advocates a daily beating for a wife, as soon as he marries he takes care of his own.

Female talkativeness appears also to be a subject of lament all over the world, from our own island, where a woman’s tongue proverbially wags like a lamb’s tail, to the Celestial Empire, where it is likened to a sword, never suffered by its owner to rust. Regard not a woman’s words, says the Hindoo; and the African also is warned against trusting his secrets even to his wife. The Spaniard believes that he has only to tell a woman what he would wish to have published in the market-place; and all languages have sayings to the same effect. The Scotch divine who, before the Session, defended his heresy that women would find no place in heaven, by the text, ‘There was silence in heaven for about the space of half an hour,’ only expressed a sentiment of universal currency over the world.

The proverbs collected from the lower races are still very few, when compared with the immense mass of those from nations with whose literature we are more familiar. It is in the nature of things that missionaries and travellers should have been first struck by, and first given us information about, matters more directly challenging their notice than phrases in common use, for a real knowledge of which the most favourable conditions of a prolonged intimacy are obviously requisite. The large collection of such proverbs from West Africa alone, revealing as they do an elevation of feeling and a clearness of intelligence which other facts of their social life would never have led us to suspect, point at the possibility of such collections elsewhere largely modifying our present views concerning other savage tribes. They at least should teach us caution against accepting the conclusions which some writers have drawn from their study of savage languages, when, from the absence or loss in a dialect of such words as ‘love’ or ‘gratitude,’ they proceed to explain, on the hypothesis of degradation, that rude state of existence which is denoted by the word ‘savage,’ and which there are abundant reasons for supposing was really the primitive germ, out of which all subsequent civilisation has been unfolded. ‘Were,’ says Archbishop Trench, ‘the savage the primitive man, we should then find savage tribes furnished, scantily enough it might be, with the elements of speech, yet, at the same time, with its fruitful beginnings, its vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage—more fearful, perhaps, even than that which is stamped upon his form.’[130] Yet, whatever may be the case with some tribes, who may be shown historically to have fallen from a higher state (and such are the exceptions), at least the languages spoken in Africa bear no such ‘fearful impress of degradation’ as are declared to be traceable in every case, if we may judge of a language by the thoughts which it expresses rather than by the words which it contains.