PROVEUBS 



457 



remark is one which must have l>een made at first 

 hand in many a tongue on many a spring day. 

 ' Summer ! ' cries the young man, ' Lo, a swallow ! ' 

 ' Nay,' says the old one, with that repression of 

 youthful optimism which is the privilege of age, 

 ' One swallow,' &C. But undoubtedly in most cases 

 of widely distributed proverbs the probability is on 

 the side of a common ancestor. It is not easy, for 

 instance, to see how that one about the gift- 

 horse's mouth, which was, as we know, ' a vulgar 

 Iiroverb ' in the time of St Jerome, could ever have 

 >eeu independently produced. That two minds 

 should hit upon precisely the same illustration for 

 the same thought may be within the bounds of 

 iMi-isiliility, but that in each case a proverb should 

 be the fruit of it pushes the coincidence to the 

 utmost limits of chance. 



It is obvious that the greater number of these 

 proverbs which seem to be common property must 

 be of eastern birth. If we lind a proverb in Eng- 

 lish, German, Italian, and Spanish, and also in 

 Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, which is the 

 more likely that it has passed from Europe to 

 Asia, or from Asia to Europe? A wide distribu- 

 tion argues antiquity, for necessarily the proverb 

 travels slowly ; and, go back as far as we may, we 

 find the proverb, the fable, and the parable work- 

 ing together in the East. When David appealed 

 to Saul it was with 'a proverb of the ancients," 

 and it was with proverlm that the prophets drove 

 home their words, proverbs that are, many of them, 

 in use there to this day, like ' As is the mother, so 

 is her daughter,' and 'The fathers have eaten sour 

 grapes, ami the teeth of the children are set on 

 edge.' The sayings of ' them of old time ' cited in 

 the Sermon ou the Mount 'Judge not that ye be 

 not judged,' 'The straw in another's eye thou 

 seest, but not the )>eam in thine own,' and others, 

 are still current in Syria. 'One sows and another 

 reaps ' and ' Who makes a trap for others falls into 

 it himself are Turkish, and 'Where the corpse 

 is there the vultures will be ' is a Bengali proverb. 

 The proverbs that are strictly national have an 

 interest of another kind. Coming directly from 

 the people, the chosen vehicles of their sentiments 

 and opinions, they naturally reHect the habits of 

 iboogtit, the turn of mind, the way of looking at 

 things, that prevail among those who use them. 

 Any one at all versed in comparative parcemiology 

 will be able for the most part to make a shrewd 

 guess at the original language from a translated 

 specimen. They reflect other things too often 

 the history of the nation thev come from. The 

 Spaniard, as he was l>efore Ferdinand and Ximenez 

 bridled Aragon and Castile, makes himself heard 

 in ' The king goes as far as he may, not as far as 

 he would ; ' there are Teutonic proverbs older than 

 Luther, in which his very spirit seems to speak ; 

 there are Italian proverlis that, in their cynicism, 

 distrust of mankind, and open advocacy of lying, 

 are more eloquent on the state of society in 

 iiifili.-rval Italy than any of her historians. And the 

 differences they suggest are often curious. The 

 devil figures prominently in the proverbs of Europe ; 

 but in those of the Latin races he is always treated 

 with respect, or at any rate credited with astute- 

 ness, the only exception, perhaps, being the Italian 

 one that accuses him of weaving a coarse web. In 

 Teutonic proverbs, on the other hand, he is held 

 up to ridicule on the score of his amazing sim- 

 plicity. He tries to get wool off his pigs ; he takes 

 a donkey for a cow, and remarks how soft its horn 

 IB ; he sits down on a swarm of bees, because 

 where there is singing going on one may make 

 one's self easy ; and so on through a host of pro- 

 Terbs that give a very poor idea of his intellect. 



Of the national groups the Spanish is unquestion- 

 ably the most remarkable. The number of Spanish 



proverbs is prodigious. In any other language 

 5000 or 6000 would be a large collection, out a 

 Spanish MS. by Yriarte, the Royal librarian, which 

 was in the Heber library, contained between 

 25,000 and 30,000, a number which, however 

 incredible to others, is not at all surprising to 

 those who know the proverbial aptitudes of the 

 people and the language. In Spain almost every- 

 thing has its proverb ; every village of the plain, 

 every herb of the field, has its virtues or vices put 

 in a compendious shape for general circulation. 

 And they are as racy as they are numerous, full of 

 shrewd sense and knowledge of human nature, and 

 rich in that grave, dry Spanish humour which 

 never compromises itself by a descent into facetious- 

 ness. The Spaniard is, no doubt, naturally senten- 

 tious, but the facilities offered by his rich, sonorous 

 Castilian should not be overlooked ; and among 

 them must be reckoned its wealth in rhymes, con- 

 sonant and assonant, of which there is such strik- 

 ing proof in the number and excellence of the 

 Spanish rhyming proverbs. Language, it may be 

 observed, plays an important part in proverbs. 

 Take, for example, the Scotch 'Better a toom 

 house than an ill tenant.' Compared with the 

 English 'empty,' how much more effective is the 

 Scandinavian ' toom,' to say nothing of the allitera- 

 tion or inverted rhyme. The Basque proverbs, 

 from which several of the Spanish are obviously 

 derived, are of much the same character ; and in 

 both, but especially in the Basque, the resemblance 

 to the proverbs of the East is very distinct. The 

 Basque proverbs have not been as carefully collected 

 as they deserve, and of course form only a small 

 group ; but, relatively to the Euskara-speaking 

 population of a little over half a million, their 

 numbers indicate a propensity to the use of 

 the proverb as strong as the Spaniard's. The 

 Italian proverbs, only less 1 numerous than the 

 Spanish, are more remarkable for wit, often bitter, 

 than for humour ; in the French, on the other 

 hand, there is little or none of that brilliant wit 

 and epigrammatic neatness of expression which 

 distinguish French literature. But this is only 

 what might be expected. French wit is the pro- 

 duct of French culture, and proverbs are natural 

 productions. Our own, including the Lowland 

 Scotch, must be regarded as simply a subdivision 

 of the great Teutonic group comprising the Ger- 

 man, the Plattdeutsch, the Dutch, the Danish, the 

 Swedish, and the Norwegian. Each of these has, 

 of course, its own peculiar proverbs, but in each 

 case the main body, it will be seen on comparison, 

 belongs to a common stock. Next to Spain, the 

 region richest in proverbs in Europe is probably 

 that watered by the lower Elbe, and including 

 Oldenburg, Hanover, Holstein, and Mecklenburg 

 the Anglo-Saxon country, in fact. Compared 

 with other groups, the Celtic proverbs must be 

 rated as poor. The Gaelic proverbs, as Nicol- 

 son's admirable collection shows and he himself 

 admits, have been largely recruited from Norse and 

 Lowland Scotch sources ; and the purely Celtic are 

 to a great extent made up of sayings in praise of 

 Fingal, or expressive of the opinion which one clan 

 has of another, or of itself. The Welsh proverbs 

 gathered by Howell are very flat ; and of the Irish 

 Dr Nicolson observes that the wonder is they are 

 so few, and those few so remarkably deficient in 

 the wit for which our Hibernian cousins are 

 specially distinguished a remark certainly borne 

 out by the specimens usually given, in which moral 

 truisms of the copy-book order, like ' Virtue is 

 everlasting wealth,' ' Wisdom excels all riches,' 

 ' Falling is easier than rising,' have a decided pre- 

 dominance. Among the oriental proverbs the 

 Arabic hold the first place in respect of quantity, 

 and perhaps quality likewise, but the Persian and 



