“The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs,”—this is Lord Bacon’s well-worn remark; although, indeed, only well-worn because of its truth. “In them,” it has been further said, “is to be found an inexhaustible source of precious documents in regard of the interior history, the manners, the opinions, the beliefs, [37] the customs of the people among whom they have had their course.” [38] Let us put these assertions to the proof, and see how far in this people’s or in that people’s proverbs, their innermost Proverbs characteristic. heart speaks out to us; how far the comparison of the proverbs of one nation with those of others may be made instructive to us; what this comparison will tell us severally about each. This only I will ask, ere we enter upon the subject, that if I should fail here in drawing out anything strongly characteristic, if the proverbs regarded from this point of view should not seem to reveal to you any of the true secrets of national life, you will not therefore misdoubt those assertions with which my lecture opened; or assume that these documents would not yield up their secret, if questioned aright; but only believe that the test has been unskilfully applied; or, if you will, that my brief limits have not allowed me to make that clear, which with larger space I might not have wholly failed in doing.
I am very well aware that in following upon this track, one is ever liable to deceive oneself, to impose upon others, picking out and adducing such proverbs as conform to a preconceived theory, passing over those which would militate against it. Quite allowing that there is such a danger which needs to be guarded against, and also that there are a multitude of these sayings which cannot be made to illustrate difference, for they rest on the broad foundation of the universal humanity, underlying and deeper than that which is peculiar and national, I am yet persuaded that enough remain, and such as may with perfect good faith be adduced, to confirm these assertions; I am convinced that we may learn from the proverbs current among a people, what is nearest and dearest to their hearts, the aspects under which they contemplate life, how honour and dishonour are distributed among them, what is of good, what of evil report in their eyes, with very much more which it can never be unprofitable to know.
To begin, then, with the proverbs of Greece. That which strikes one most in the study of these, and which the more they are studied, the more fills the thoughtful student with wonder, is the evidence they yield of a leavening through and through of the entire nation with the most intimate knowledge of its own mythology, history, and poetry. The infinite multitude of slight and fine allusions to the legends of their gods and heroes, to the earlier incidents of their own history, to the Homeric narrative, the delicate side glances at all these which the Greek proverbs constantly embody, [39] assume an acquaintance, indeed a familiarity, with all this on their parts among whom they passed current, which almost exceeds belief. In many and most important respects, the Greek proverbs considered as a whole are inferior to those of many nations of modern Christendom. This is nothing wonderful; Christianity would have done little for the world, would have proved very ineffectual for the elevating, purifying, and deepening of man’s life, if it had been otherwise. But, with all this, as bearing testimony to the high intellectual training of the people who employed them, to a culture not restricted to certain classes, but which must have been diffused through the whole nation, no other collection can bear the remotest comparison with this.
Roman proverbs.
It is altogether different with the Roman proverbs. These, the genuine Roman, the growth of their own soil, are very far fewer in number than the Greek, as was indeed to be expected from the far less subtle and less fertile genius of the people. Hardly any of them are legendary or mythological; which again agrees with the fact that the Italian pantheon was very scantily peopled as compared with the Greek. Very few have much poetry about them, or any very rare delicacy or refinement of feeling. In respect of love indeed, not the Roman only, but Greek and Roman alike, are immeasurably inferior to those which many modern nations could supply. Thus a proverb of such religious depth and beauty as our own, Marriages are made in heaven, it would have been quite impossible for all heathen antiquity to have produced, or even remotely to have approached. [40]
In the setting out not of love, but of friendship, and of the claims which it makes, the blessings which it brings, is exhibited whatever depth and tenderness they may have. [41] This indeed, as has been truly observed, [42] was only to be expected, seeing how much higher an ideal of that existed than of this, the full realization of which was reserved for the modern Christian world. Yet the Roman proverbs are not without other substantial merits of their own. A vigorous moral sense speaks out in many; [43] and even when this is not so prominent, they wear often a thoroughly old Roman aspect; being business-like and practical, frugal and severe, wise saws such as the elder Cato must have loved, such as must have been often upon his lips; [44] while in the number that relate to farming, they bear singular witness to that strong and lively interest in agricultural pursuits, which was so remarkable a feature in the old Italian life. [45]
Number of Spanish proverbs.
It will not be possible to pass under even this hastiest review more than two or three of the modern families of proverbs. Let us turn first to the proverbs of Spain. I put these in the foremost rank, because the Spanish literature, poor in many provinces wherein other literatures are rich, is probably richer in this province than any other in the world, certainly than any other in the western world; and this I should be inclined to believe, both as respects the quantity and the quality. [46] In respect of quantity, the mere number of Spanish proverbs is astonishing. A collection I have been using while preparing these lectures, contains between seven and eight thousand, and yet does not contain all; for I have searched it in vain for several with which from other sources I had become acquainted. Nay, it must be very far indeed from exhausting the entire stock, seeing that there exists a manuscript collection brought together by a distinguished Spanish scholar, in which the proverbs have attained to the almost incredible amount of from five and twenty to thirty thousand. [47]
Spanish characteristics.
And in respect of their quality, it needs only to call to mind some of those, so rich in humour, so double-shotted with homely sense, wherewith the Squire in Don Quixote adorns his discourse; being oftentimes indeed not the fringe and border, but the main woof and texture of it: and then, if we assume that the remainder are not altogether unlike these, we shall, I think, feel that it would be difficult to rate them more highly than they deserve. And some are in a loftier vein; for taking, as we have a right to do, Cervantes himself as the truest exponent of the Spanish character, we should be prepared to trace in the proverbs of Spain a grave thoughtfulness, a stately humour, to find them breathing the very spirit of chivalry and honour, and indeed of freedom too;—for in Spain, as throughout so much of Europe, it is despotism, and not freedom, which is new. Nor are we disappointed in these our expectations. How eminently chivalresque, for instance, the following: White hands cannot hurt. [48] What a grave humour lurks in this: The ass knows well in whose face he brays. [49] What a stately apathy, how proud a looking of calamity in the face, speaks out in the admonition which this one contains: When thou seest thine house in flames, approach and warm thyself by it; [50] what a spirit of freedom, which refuses to be encroached on even by the highest, is embodied in another: The king goes as far as he may, not as far as he would; [51] what Castilian pride in the following: Every layman in Castile might make a king, every clerk a pope. The Spaniard’s contempt for his peninsular neighbours finds its emphatic utterance in another: Take from a Spaniard all his good qualities, and there remains a Portuguese.
We may too, I think, remark how a nation will occasionally in its proverbs indulge in a fine irony upon itself, and show that it is perfectly aware of its own weaknesses, follies, and faults. This the Spaniards must be allowed to do in their proverb, Succours of Spain, either late, or never. [52] However largely and confidently promised, these succours of Spain either do not arrive at all, or only arrive after the opportunity in which they could have served have passed away. Certainly any one who reads the despatches of England’s Great Captain during the Peninsular War will find in almost every page of them that which abundantly justifies this proverb, will own that those who made it read themselves aright, and could not have designated broken pledges, unfulfilled promises of aid, tardy and thus ineffectual assistance, by an happier title than Succours of Spain. And then again what a fearful glimpse of those blood feuds which, having once begun, seem as if they could never end, blood touching blood, and violence evermore provoking its like, have we in the following: Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills thee. [53]
The Italians also are eminently rich in proverbs; and yet if ever I have been tempted to retract or seriously to modify what I shall have occasion by-and-bye to affirm in regard of a nobler life and spirit as predominating in proverbs, it has been after the study of some Italian collection. “The Italian proverbs,” it has been said not without too much reason, though perhaps also with overmuch severity, “have taken a tinge from their deep and politic genius, and their wisdom seems wholly concentrated in their personal interests. I think every tenth proverb in an Italian collection is some cynical or some selfish maxim, a book of the world for worldlings.” [54] Certainly many of them are shrewd enough, and only too shrewd; “ungracious,” inculcating an universal suspicion, teaching to look everywhere for a foe, to expect, as the Greeks said, a scorpion under every stone, glorifying artifice and cunning as the true guides and only safe leaders through the perplexed labyrinth of life, [55] and altogether seeming dictated as by the very spirit of Machiavel himself.
Proverbs on revenge.
And worse than this is the glorification of revenge which speaks out in too many of them. I know nothing of its kind calculated to give one a more shuddering sense of horror than the series which might be drawn together of Italian proverbs on this matter; especially when we take them with the commentary which Italian history supplies, and which shows them no empty words, but the deepest utterances of the nation’s heart. There is no misgiving in these about the right of entertaining so deadly a guest in the bosom; on the contrary, one of them, exalting the sweetness of revenge, declares, Revenge is a morsel for God. [56] There is nothing in them, (it would be far better if there were,) of blind and headlong passion, but rather a spirit of deliberate calculation, which makes the blood run cold. Thus one gives this advice: Wait time and place to act thy revenge, for it is never well done in a hurry; [57] while another proclaims an immortality of hatred, which no spaces of intervening time shall have availed to weaken: Revenge of an hundred years old hath still its sucking teeth. [58] We may well be thankful that we have in England, at least as far as I am aware, no sentiments parallel to these, embodied as the permanent convictions of the national mind.
How curious again is the confession which speaks out in another Italian proverb, that the maintenance of the Romish system and the study of Holy Scripture cannot go together. It is this: With the Gospel one becomes an heretic. [59] No doubt with the study of the Word of God one does become an heretic, in the Italian sense of the word; and therefore it is only prudently done to put all obstacles in the way of that study, to assign three years’ and four years’ imprisonment with hard labour to as many as shall dare to peruse it; yet certainly it is not a little remarkable that such a confession should have embodied itself in the popular utterances of the nation.
Italian proverbs.
But while it must be freely owned that the charges brought just now against the Italian proverbs are sufficiently borne out by too many, they are not all to be included in the common shame. Very many there are not merely of a delicate refinement of beauty, as this, expressive of the freedom in regard of thine and mine which will exist between true friends: Friends tie their purses with a spider’s thread; [60] of a subtle wisdom which has not degenerated into cunning and deceit; but also of a nobler stamp; honour and honesty, plain dealing and uprightness, have here their praises too, and are not seldom pronounced to be in the end more than a match for all cunning and deceit. How excellent in this sense is the following: For an honest man half his wits is enough, the whole are too little for a knave; [61] the ways, that is, of truth and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those that walk in them; the ways of falsehood and fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein. How often and how wonderfully has this found its confirmation in the lives of evil men; so true it is, to employ another proverb and a very deep one from the same quarter, that The devil is subtle, yet weaves a coarse web. [62]
Again, what description of Egypt as it now is, or indeed generally of the East, could set us at the heart of its moral condition, could make us to understand all which long centuries of oppression and misrule have made of it and of its people, what could do this so effectually as the collection of Arabic proverbs now current in Egypt, which the traveller Burckhardt gathered, and which, after his death, were published with his name? [63] In other books, others describe the modern Egyptians, but here they unconsciously describe themselves. The selfishness, the utter extinction of all public spirit, the servility, which no longer as with an inward shame creeps into men’s acts, but utters itself boldly as the avowed law of their lives, the sense of the oppression of the strong, of the insecurity of the weak, and, generally, the whole character of life, alike outward and inward, as poor, mean, sordid, and ignoble, with only a few faintest glimpses of that romance which one usually attaches to the East; all this, as we study these documents, rises up before us in truest, though in painfullest, outline.
Thus only in a land where rulers, being evil themselves, feel all goodness to be their instinctive foe, and themselves therefore entertain an instinctive hostility to it, where they punish but never reward, where not to be noticed by them is the highest ambition of those under their yoke, in no other land could a proverb like the following, Do no good, and thou shalt find no evil, have ever come to the birth. How settled a conviction that wrong, and not right, was the lord paramount of the world must have grown up in men’s spirits, before such a word as this, (I know of no sadder one,) could have found utterance from their lips. [64]
Irish proverb.
I have taken a wide circuit of nations; with the proverb of a people nearer home I must bring this branch of the subject to an end. It is one, and a very characteristic one, which the poet Spenser, who long dwelt in Ireland, records as current in his time among the Irish; in which were contained their offer of service to their native chiefs, with a statement of what they expected in return: Spend me, and defend me. Their leaders in all times have taken them only too well at their word in respect of the first half of the proverb, and have not failed prodigally to spend them; although their undertakings to defend have issued exactly as must ever issue all promises on the part of others to defend men from those evils, from which none can really protect them but themselves.
Other families of proverbs would each of them tell its own tale, give up its own secret; but I must not seek from this point of view to question them further. I would rather bring now to your notice that even where they do not spring, as they cannot all, from the centre of a people’s heart, nor declare to us the secretest things which are there, but dwell more on the surface of things, in this case also they have often local or national features, which to study and trace out may prove both curious and instructive. Of how many, for example, we may note the manner in which they clothe themselves in an outward form and shape, borrowed from, or suggested by, the peculiar scenery or circumstances or history of their own land; so that they could scarcely have come into existence, not certainly in the shape which they now wear, anywhere besides. Thus our own, Make hay while the sun shines, is truly English, and could have had its birth only under such variable skies as ours,—not, at any rate, in those southern lands where, during the summer time at least, the sun always shines. In the same way there is a fine Cornish proverb in regard of obstinate wrongheads, who will take no counsel except from calamities, who dash themselves to pieces against obstacles, which with a little prudence and foresight they might easily have avoided. It is this: He who will not be ruled by the rudder, must be ruled by the rock. It sets us at once upon some rocky and wreck-strewn coast; we feel that it could never have been the proverb of an inland people. And this, Do not talk Arabic in the house of a Moor, [65]—that is, because there thy imperfect knowledge will be detected at once,—this we should confidently affirm to be Spanish, wherever we met it. So also a traveller with any experience in the composition of Spanish sermons and Spanish ollas could make no mistake in respect of the following: A sermon without Augustine is as a stew without bacon. [66] German proverbs. Thus Big and empty, like the Heidelberg tun, [67] could have its home only in Germany; that enormous vessel, known as the Heidelberg tun, constructed to contain nearly 300,000 flasks, having now stood empty for hundreds of years. As regards, too, the following, Not every parish-priest can wear Dr. Luther’s shoes, [68] we could be in no doubt to what people it appertains. And this, The world is a carcase, and they who gather round it are dogs, plainly proclaims itself as belonging to those Eastern lands, where the unowned dogs prowling about the streets of a city are the natural scavengers, that would assemble round a carcase thrown in the way. So too the form which our own proverb, Man’s extremity, God’s opportunity, or as we sometimes have it, When need is highest, help is nighest assumes among the Jews, namely this, When the tale of bricks is doubled, Moses comes, [69] plainly roots itself in the early history of that nation, being an allusion to Exod. v. 9–19, and without a knowledge of that history would be unintelligible altogether. The same may be said of this: We must creep into Ebal, and leap into Gerizim; in other words, we must be slow to curse, and swift to bless. (Deut. xxvii. 12, 13.)
But while it is thus with some, which are bound by the very conditions of their existence to a narrow and peculiar sphere, or at all events move more naturally and freely in it than elsewhere, there are others on the contrary which we meet all the world over. True cosmopolites, they seem to have travelled from land to land, and to have made themselves an home equally in all. The Greeks obtained them probably from the older East, and again imparted them to the Romans; and from these they have found their way into all the languages of the western world.
Much, I think, might be learned from knowing what those truths are, which are so felt to be true by all nations, that all have loved to possess them in these compendious forms, wherein they may pass readily from mouth to mouth: which, thus cast into some happy form, have commended themselves to almost all people, and have become a portion of the common stock of the world’s wisdom, in every land making for themselves a recognition and an home. Such a proverb, for instance, is Man proposes, God disposes; [70] one which I am inclined to believe that every nation in Europe possesses, so deeply upon all men is impressed the sense of Hamlet’s words, if not the words themselves:
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.”
Proverbs compared.
Sometimes the proverb does not actually in so many words repeat itself in various tongues. We have indeed exactly the same thought; but it takes an outward shape and embodiment, varying according to the various countries and periods in which it has been current: we have proverbs totally diverse from one another in their form and appearance, but which yet, when we look a little deeper into them, prove to be at heart one and the same, all these their differences being thus only, so to speak, variations of the same air. These are almost always an amusing, often an instructive, study; and to trace this likeness in difference has an interest lively enough. Thus the forms of the proverb, which brings out the absurdity of those reproving others for a defect or a sin, to whom the same cleaves in an equal or in a greater degree, have sometimes no visible connexion at all, or the very slightest, with one another; yet for all this the proverb is at heart and essentially but one. We say in English: The kiln calls the oven, “Burnt house;”—the Italians: The pan says to the pot “Keep off, or you’ll smutch me;” [71]—the Spaniards: The raven cried to the crow, “Avaunt, blackamoor;” [72]— the Germans: One ass nicknames another, Long-ears; [73]— while it must be owned there is a certain originality in the Catalan version of the proverb: Death said to the man with his throat cut, “How ugly you look.” Under how rich a variety of forms does one and the same thought array itself here.
Let me quote another illustration of the same fact. We probably take for granted that Coals to Newcastle is a thoroughly English expression of the absurdity of sending to a place that which already abounds there, water to the sea, faggots to the wood:—and English of course it is in the outward garment which it wears; but in its innermost being it belongs to the whole world and to all times. Thus the Greeks said: Owls to Athens, [74] Attica abounding with these birds; the Rabbis: Enchantments to Egypt, Egypt being of old esteemed the head quarters of all magic; the Orientals: Pepper to Hindostan; and in the middle ages they had this proverb: Indulgences to Rome, Rome being the centre and source of this spiritual traffic; and these by no means exhaust the list.
Various proverbs.
Let me adduce some other variations of the same descriptions, though not running through quite so many languages. Thus compare the German, Who lets one sit on his shoulders, shall have him presently sit on his head, [75] with the Italian, If thou suffer a calf to be laid on thee, within a little they’ll clap on the cow, [76] and, again, with the Spanish, Give me where I may sit down; I will make where I may lie down. [77] They all three plainly contain one and the same hint that undue liberties are best resisted at the outset, being otherwise liable to be followed up by other and greater ones; but this under how rich and humorous a variety of forms. Not very different are these that follow. We say: Daub yourself with honey, and you’ll be covered with flies; the Danes: Make yourself an ass, and you’ll have every man’s sack on your shoulders; while the French: Who makes himself a sheep, the wolf devours him; [78] and the Persians: Be not all sugar, or the world will gulp thee down; [79] to which they add, however, as its necessary complement, nor yet all wormwood, or the world will spit thee out. Or again, we are content to say without a figure: The receiver’s as bad as the thief; but the French: He sins as much who holds the sack, as he who puts into it; [80] and the Germans: He who holds the ladder is as guilty as he who mounts the wall. [81] We say: A stitch in time saves nine; the Spaniards: Who repairs not his gutter, repairs his whole house. [82] We say: Misfortunes never come single; the Italians have no less than three proverbs to express the same popular conviction: Blessed is that misfortune which comes single; and again: One misfortune is the vigil of another; and again: A misfortune and a friar are seldom alone. [83] Or once more, the Russians say: Call a peasant, “Brother,” he’ll demand to be called, “Father;” the Italians: Reach a peasant your finger, he’ll grasp your fist. [84] Many languages have this proverb: God gives the cold according to the cloth; [85] it is very beautiful, but attains not to the tender beauty of our own: God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.
And, as in that last example, so not seldom will there be an evident superiority of a proverb in one language over one, which however resembles it closely in another. Moving in the same sphere, it will yet be richer, fuller, deeper. Thus our own, A burnt child fears the fire, is good; but that of many tongues, A scalded dog fears cold water, is better still. Ours does but express that those who have suffered once will henceforward be timid in respect of that same thing from which they have suffered; but that other the tendency to exaggerate such fears, so that now they shall fear even where no fear is. And the fact that so it will be, clothes itself in an almost infinite variety of forms. Thus one Italian proverb says: A dog which has been beaten with a stick, is afraid of its shadow; and another, which could only have had its birth in the sunny South, where the glancing but harmless lizard so often darts across your path: Whom a serpent has bitten a lizard alarms. [86] With a little variation from this, the Jewish Rabbis had said long before: One bitten by a serpent, is afraid of a rope’s end; even that which bears so remote a resemblance to a serpent as this does, shall now inspire him with terror; and the Cingalese, still expressing the same thought, but with imagery borrowed from their own tropic clime: The man who has received a beating from a firebrand, runs away at sight of a firefly.
Rabbinical proverb.
Some of our Lord’s sayings contain the same lessons which the proverbs of the Jewish Rabbis contained already; for He was willing to bring forth even from his treasury things old as well as new; but it is very instructive to observe how they acquire in his mouth a dignity and decorum which, it may be, they wanted before. We are all familiar with that word in the Sermon on the Mount, “Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” The Rabbis had a proverb to match, lively and piquant enough, but certainly lacking the gravity of this, and which never could have fallen from the same lips: If thy neighbour call thee ass, put a packsaddle on thy back; do not, that is, withdraw thyself from the wrong, but rather go forward to meet it. But thus, in least as in greatest, it was His to make all things new.
Sometimes a proverb, without changing its shape altogether, will yet on the lips of different nations be slightly modified; and these modifications, slight as often they are, may not the less be eminently characteristic. Thus in English we say, Progress of ingratitude. The river past, and God forgotten, to express with how mournful a frequency He whose assistance was invoked, it may have been earnestly, in the moment of peril, is remembered no more, so soon as by his help the danger has been surmounted. The Spaniards have the proverb too; but it is with them: The river past, the saint forgotten, [87] the saints being in Spain more prominent objects of invocation than God. And the Italian form of it sounds a still sadder depth of ingratitude: The peril past, the saint mocked; [88] the vows made to him in peril remaining unperformed in safety; and he treated something as, in Greek story, Juno was treated by Mandrabulus the Samian; who, having under her auspices and through her direction discovered a gold mine, in his instant gratitude vowed to her a golden ram; which he presently exchanged in intention for a silver one; and again this for a very small brass one; and this for nothing at all; the rapidly descending scale of whose gratitude, with the entire disappearance of his thank-offering, might very profitably live in our memories, as so perhaps it would be less likely to repeat itself in our lives.
