Part 2

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 spontaneous 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 utterance the author did but _precipitate_ the floating convictions of the society round him; he did but clothe in happier form what others had already felt, or even already uttered; for often a proverb has been in this aspect, “the wit of one, and the wisdom of many.” And further, its constitutive element, as we must all now perceive, is not the utterance on the part of the one, but the acceptance on the part of the many. It is _their_ sanction which first makes it to be 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 for 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.[11]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Not all proverbs figurative.]

Let us now consider if some other have not sometimes been proposed as essential notes of the proverb, which yet are in fact accidents, such as may be present or absent without affecting it vitally. Into an error of this kind they have fallen, who have claimed for the proverb, and made it one of its necessary conditions, that it should be a figurative expression. A moment’s consideration will be sufficient to disprove this. How many 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 belongs certainly to very many proverbs, and those oftentimes the best and choicest, and transferring it, as a necessary condition, to all. This much of truth they who made the assertion certainly had; namely, that the employment of the concrete instead of the abstract is one of the most frequent means by which it obtains and keeps its popularity; for so the proverb makes its appeal to the whole man—not to the intellectual faculties alone, but to the feelings, to the fancy, or even to the imagination, as well, stirring the whole man to pleasurable activity.

By the help of an instance or two we can best realize to ourselves how great an advantage it thus obtains for itself. Suppose, for example, one were to content 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 be likely to go half so far, or to be remembered half so long, as the vigorous comparison of this proverb: _He who waits for dead men’s shoes may go barefoot_?[12] Or again, what were “All men are mortal,” as compared with the proverb: _Every door may be shut but death’s door_? 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 let it be put in this shape: _More are drowned in the beaker than in the ocean_;[13] or again in this: _More are drowned in wine and in beer than in water_;[14] (and these both are German proverbs,) and the assertion assumes quite a different character. There is something that lays hold on us now. We are struck with the smallness of the cup 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 made here to the imagination,—an appeal and challenge which, unless it be responded to, the proverb must remain unintelligible to us,—in all this there is a process of mental activity, oftentimes so rapidly exercised as scarcely to be perceptible, yet not the less carried on with a pleasurable excitement.[15]

[Sidenote: Rhyme in proverbs.]

Let me mention now a few other of the more frequent helps which the proverb employs for obtaining currency among men, for being listened to with pleasure by them, for not slipping again from their memories who have once heard it;—yet helps which are evidently so separable from it, that none can be in danger of affirming them essential parts or conditions of it. Of these rhyme is the most prominent. It would lead me altogether from my immediate argument, were I to enter into a disquisition on the causes of the charm which rhyme has 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 circumstance that into this rhyming form a very great multitude of proverbs, and those among the most widely current, have been thrown. Though such will probably at once be present to the minds of all, yet let me mention a few: _Good mind, good find_;—_Wide will wear, but tight will tear_;—_Truth may be blamed, but cannot be shamed_;—_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_;—with many more, uniting, as you will observe several of them do, this of rhyme with that which I have spoken of before, namely, extreme brevity and conciseness.[16]

[Sidenote: Alliteration in proverbs.]

Alliteration, which is nearly allied to rhyme, is another of the helps whereof the proverb largely avails itself. Alliteration was at one time an important element in our early English versification; it almost promised to contend with rhyme itself, which should be the most important; and perhaps, if some great master in the art had arisen, might have retained a far greater hold on English poetry than it now possesses. 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 greatest, 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_;—_Like lips, like lettuce_;—_Meal and matins minish no way_;—_Who swims in sin, shall sink in sorrow_;—_No cross, no crown_;—_Out of debt, out of danger_;—_Do in hill as you would do in hall_;[17] that is, Be in solitude the same that you would be in a crowd. I will not detain you with further examples of this in other languages; but such occur, and in such numbers that it seems idle to quote them, in all; I will only adduce, in concluding this branch of the subject, a single Italian proverb, which in a remarkable manner unites all three qualities of which we have been last treating, brevity, rhyme, and alliteration: _Traduttori, traditori_; one which we might perhaps reconstitute in English thus: _Translators, traitors_; so untrue, for the most part, 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 _overturning_, it from one language to another.[18]

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 to procure attention, and to make 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 ruin he extricates himself not merely without harm, but with credit and with gain, the Arabs say: _Fling him into the Nile, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth_; while of such a Fortunatus as this the Germans have a proverb: _If he flung a penny on the roof, a dollar would come down to him_;[19] 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_.

[Sidenote: Transplanting of proverbs.]

In all this 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 elsewhere, or in rhymes which it is hard to reproduce, or in alliterations which do not easily find their equivalents, or in other verbal happinesses such as these, lies the difficulty which is often felt, which I shall myself often feel in the course of these lectures, of transferring them without serious loss, nay, sometimes the impossibility of transferring them at all from one language to another.[20] Oftentimes, to use an image of Erasmus,[21] they are like those wines, (I believe the Spanish Valdepeñas is one,) of which the true excellence can only be known by those who drink them in the land which gave them birth. Transport them under other skies, or, which is still more fatal, empty them from vessel to vessel, and their strength and flavour will in great part have disappeared in the process.

Still this is rather the case, where we seek deliberately, and only in a literary interest, to translate 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 heart and affections of a people, in such a case one is continually surprised at the instinctive skill with which it has found compensations for that which it has been compelled to let go; it is impossible not to admire the unconscious skill with which it has replaced one vigorous idiom by another, one happy rhyme or play on words by its equivalent; and all this even in those cases where the extremely narrow limits in which it must confine itself allow it the very smallest liberty of selection. And thus, presenting itself equally finished and complete in two or even more languages, the internal evidence will be quite insufficient to determine which of its forms we shall regard as the original, and which as a copy. For example, the 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 täglich neu_;

and in French,

_Tendresse maternelle Toujours se renouvelle_;

appears to me as exquisitely 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 have survived its transfer to the second language, whichever that may be, wherein it found an home. Having thus opened the subject, I shall reserve its further development for the lectures which follow.

Footnotes

[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 honnêtes gens.

[2] Compare with this Martial’s so 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.”

[3] The very 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: Χρήματ’ ἀνήρ;—Sus Minervam;—Fures clamorem;—Meretrix pudicam;—Amantes amentes.

[4] This is what Aristotle means when he ascribes συντομία—which in another place he opposes to the ὄγκος λέξεως—to it.

[5] Let serve for further proof this eminently witty old German proverb, which, despite its apparent length, has not forfeited 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 dürfte einer nit 6 bis 7 Pfruenden; an Adelichen, sonst wollte nit jeder Bauer ein Junker sein; an Huren, sonst würden die Handwerk Eheweiber und Nunnen nit treiben; an Juden, sonst würden Christen nit wuchern.

[6] When Erasmus, after discussing and rejecting the definitions of those who had gone before him, himself defines the proverb thus, Celebre dictum, scitâ quâpiam 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 (_Sprichwörter des Deutschen Volkes_, Friburg, 1840, p. x.): Das Sprichwort ist ein mit öffentlichem Gepräge ausgemünzter Saz, der seinen Curs und anerkannten Werth unter dem Volke hat.

[7] It suggests, however, the admirable Spanish proverb, spoken no doubt out of the same conviction: Dios me dè contienda, con quien me entienda.

[8] Chi non può fare sua vendetta è debile, chi non vuole è vile.

[9] Quintilian’s words (_Inst._ 5. 11. 41), which are to the same effect, must be taken with the same exception; Neque enim durâssent hæc in æternum, nisi vera omnibus viderentur; and also Don Quixote’s: Paréceme me, Sancho, que no ay refrán que no sea verdadéro, porque todas son sentencias sacadas de la misma experiencia, madre de las ciencias todas.

[10] 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.

[11] The name which the proverb bears in Spanish points to this fact, that popularity is a necessary condition of it. This name is not _proverbio_, for that in Spanish signifies an apothegm, an aphorism, a maxim; but _refrán_, which is _a referendo_, from the frequency of its repetition; yet see Diez, _Etymol. Wörterbuch_, p. 284. The etymology of the Greek παροιμία is somewhat doubtful, but it too means probably a _trite, wayside_ saying.

[12] The same, under a different image, in Spanish: Larga soga tira, quien por muerte agena suspira.

[13] Im Becher ersaufen mehr als im Meere.

[14] In Wein und Bier ertrinken mehr denn im Wasser.

[15] Here is the explanation of the perplexity of Erasmus. Deinde fit, _nescio quo pacto_, ut sententia proverbio quasi vibrata feriat acrius auditoris animum, et aculeos quosdam cogitationum relinquat infixos.

[16] So, too, in other languages; Qui prend, se rend;—Qui se loue, s’emboue;—Chi và piano, và sano, e và lontano;—Chi compra terra, compra guerra;—Quien se muda, Dios le ayuda;—Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen; and the Latin medieval;—Qualis vita, finis ita;—Via crucis, via lucis;—Uniti muniti.—We sometimes regard rhyme as a modern invention, and to the modern world no doubt the discovery of 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 of it may have been. For instance, there is a Greek proverb to express that men learn by their sufferings more than by any other teaching: Παθήματα, μαθήματα (Herod., i. 207;) one which in the Latin, Nocumenta, documenta, or, Quæ nocent, docent, finds both in rhyme and sense its equivalent; to both of which evidently the inducement lay in the chiming and rhyming words. Another rhyming Greek proverb which I have met, Πλησμονή, ἐπιλησμονὴ, implying that fulness of blessings is too often accompanied with forgetfulness of their Author (_Deut._ 8. 11-14,) is, I fancy, not ancient—at least does not date further back than Greek Christianity. The sentiment would imply this, and the fact that the word ἐπιλησμονή does not occur in classical Greek would seem to be decisive upon it.

[17] So in Latin: Nil sole et sale utilius; and in Greek: Σῶμα, σῆμα.

[18] This is St. Jerome’s pun, who complains that the Latin versions of the Greek Testament current in the Church in his day were too many of them not _versiones_, but _eversiones_.

[19] Würf er einen Groschen aufs Dach, fiel ihm Ein Thaler herunter;—compare another: Wer Glück hat, dem kalbet ein Ochs.

[20] Thus in respect of this German proverb:

_Stultus_ und _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_ soll nit sein eine _Ausfrau_; or again of this beautiful Spanish one: La _verdad_ es siempre _verde_.

[21] Habent enim hoc peculiare pleraque proverbia, ut in eâ linguâ sonare postulant in quâ nata sunt; quod si in alienum sermonem demigrârint, multum gratiæ decedat. Quemadmodum sunt et vina quædam quæ recusant exportari, nec germanam saporis gratiam obtineant, nisi in his locis in quibus proveniunt.

LECTURE II.

THE GENERATION OF PROVERBS.

In my preceding lecture I occupied your attention with the form and definition of a proverb; let us proceed in the present to realize to ourselves, so far as this may be possible, the processes by which a nation gets together the great body of its proverbs, the sources from which it mainly derives them, and the circumstances under which such as it makes for itself of new, had their birth and generation.

And first, I would call to your attention the fact that a vast number of its proverbs a people does not make for itself, but finds ready made to its hands: it enters 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 gathered 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 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 past. Thus, and through these channels, a vast number of Greek, Latin, and medieval proverbs live on with us, and with all the modern nations of the world.

[Sidenote: Antiquity of proverbs.]

It is, indeed, oftentimes a veritable surprise to discover the venerable age and antiquity of a proverb, which we have hitherto assumed to be quite a later birth of modern society. Thus we may perhaps suppose that well-known word which forbids the too accurate scanning of a present, _One must not look a gift horse in the mouth_, to be of English extraction, the genuine growth of our own soil. I will not pretend to say how old it may be, but it is certainly as old as Jerome, a Latin father of the fourth century; who, 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 great favourites in the middle ages:

Si quis dat mannos, ne quære in dentibus annos.

Again, _Liars should have good memories_ is a saying which probably we assume to be modern; yet it is very far from so being. The same Jerome, who, I may observe by the way, is a very great quoter of proverbs, and who has preserved some that would not otherwise have descended to us,[22] speaks of one as “unmindful of the _old_ proverb, _Liars should have good memories_,”[23] and we find it ourselves in a Latin writer a good deal older than him.[24] So too I was certainly surprised to discover the other day that our own proverb: _Good company on a journey is worth a coach_, has come down to us from the ancient world.[25]

[Sidenote: Rhymed Latin proverbs.]

Having lighted just now on one of those Latin rhymed verses, let me by the way guard 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, a great many proverbs have reached us. I should greatly doubt it. This much we may conclude from the existence of proverbs in this shape, namely, that since these rhymed or leonine verses went altogether out of fashion at the revival of a classical taste in the fifteenth century, such proverbs as are found in this form may be affirmed with a tolerable certainty 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. Oftentime the proverb in its more popular form is so greatly superior to the same in this its Latin monkish dress, that the latter by its tameness and flatness betrays itself at once as the inadequate translation, and we cannot fail to regard the other as the genuine proverb. Many of them are “so essentially Teutonic, that they frequently appear to great disadvantage in the Latin garb which has been huddled upon them.”[26] 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 its versification? 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_ 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 dextrâ melior quam quatuor extra;

and also in this:

Capta avis est pluris quam mille in gramine ruris.

Who can fail to see here two independent attempts to render the same saying? Sometimes the Latin line confesses itself to be only the rendering of a popular word; thus is it with the following:

_Ut dicunt multi, cito transit lancea stulti_;

in other words: _A fool’s bolt is soon shot_.