The proverb has not changed its character in the course of history; but has retained from first to last a precisely definite type. The proverbial sayings recorded among the higher nations of the world are to be reckoned by tens of thousands, and have a large and well-known literature of their own. But though the range of existence of proverbs extends into the highest levels of civilization, this is scarcely true of their development. At the level of European culture in the middle ages, they have indeed a vast importance in popular education, but their period of actual growth seems already at an end. Cervantes raised the proverb-monger’s craft to a pitch it never surpassed; but it must not be forgotten that the incomparable Sancho’s wares were mostly heirlooms; for proverbs were even then sinking to remnants of an earlier condition of society. As such, they survive among ourselves, who go on using much the same relics of ancestral wisdom as came out of the squire’s inexhaustible budget, old saws not to be lightly altered or made anew in our changed modern times. We can collect and use the old proverbs, but making new ones has become a feeble, spiritless imitation, like our attempts to invent new myths or new nursery rhymes.
Riddles start near proverbs in the history of civilization, and they travel on long together, though at last towards different ends. By riddles are here meant the old-fashioned problems with a real answer intended to be discovered, such as the typical enigma of the Sphinx, but not the modern verbal conundrums set in the traditional form of question and answer, as a way of bringing in a jest à propos of nothing. The original kind, which may be defined as ‘sense-riddles,’ are found at home among the upper savages, and range on into the lower and middle civilization; and while their growth stops at this level, many ancient specimens have lasted on in the modern nursery and by the cottage fireside. There is a plain reason why riddles should belong only to the higher grades of savagery; their making requires a fair power of ideal comparison, and knowledge must have made considerable advance before this process could become so familiar as to fall from earnest into sport. At last, in a far higher state of culture, riddles begin to be looked on as trifling, their growth ceases, and they only survive in remnants for children’s play. Some examples chosen among various races, from savagery upwards, will show more exactly the place in mental history which the riddle occupies.
The following are specimens from a collection of Zulu riddles, recorded with quaintly simple native comments on the philosophy of the matter:—Q. ‘Guess ye some men who are many and form a row; they dance the wedding-dance, adorned in white hip-dresses?’ A. ‘The teeth; we call them men who form a row, for the teeth stand like men who are made ready for a wedding-dance, that they may dance well. When we say, they are “adorned with white hip-dresses,” we put that in, that people may not at once think of teeth, but be drawn away from them by thinking, “It is men who put on white hip-dresses,” and continually have their thoughts fixed on men,’ &c. Q. ‘Guess ye a man who does not lie down at night: he lies down in the morning until the sun sets; he then awakes, and works all night; he does not work by day; he is not seen when he works?’ A. ‘The closing-poles of the cattle-pen.’ Q. ‘Guess ye a man whom men do not like to laugh, for it is known that his laughter is a very great evil, and is followed by lamentation, and an end of rejoicing. Men weep, and trees, and grass; and everything is heard weeping in the tribe where he laughs; and they say the man has laughed who does not usually laugh?’ A. ‘Fire. It is called a man that what is said may not be at once evident, it being concealed by the word “man.” Men say many things, searching out the meaning in rivalry, and missing the mark. A riddle is good when it is not discernible at once,’ &c.[[97]] Among the Basutos, riddles are a recognized part of education, and are set like exercises to a whole company of puzzled children. Q. ‘Do you know what throws itself from the mountain top without being broken?’ A. ‘A waterfall.’ Q. ‘There is a thing that travels fast without legs or wings, and no cliff, nor river, nor wall can stop it?’ A. ‘The voice.’ Q. ‘Name the ten trees with ten flat stones on the top of them.’ A. ‘The fingers.’ Q. ‘Who is the little immovable dumb boy who is dressed up warm in the day and left naked at night?’ A. ‘The bed-clothes’ peg.’[[98]] From East Africa, this Swahili riddle is an example: Q. ‘My hen has laid among thorns?’ A. ‘A pineapple.’[[99]] From West Africa, this Yoruba one: ‘A long slender trading woman who never gets to market?’ A. ‘A canoe (it stops at the landing-place).’[[100]] In Polynesia, the Samoan Islanders are given to riddles. Q. ‘There are four brothers, who are always bearing about their father?’ A. ‘The Samoan pillow,’ which is a yard of three-inch bamboo resting on four legs. Q. ‘A white-headed man stands above the fence, and reaches to the heavens?’ A. ‘The smoke of the oven.’ Q. ‘A man who stands between two ravenous fish?’ A. ‘The tongue.’[[101]] (There is a Zulu riddle like this, which compares the tongue to a man living in the midst of enemies fighting.) The following are old Mexican enigmas: Q. ‘What are the ten stones one has at his sides?’ A. ‘The finger-nails.’ Q. ‘What is it we get into by three parts and out of by one?’ A. ‘A shirt.’ Q. ‘What goes through a valley and drags its entrails after it?’ A. ‘A needle.’[[102]]
These riddles found among the lower races do not differ at all in nature from those that have come down, sometimes modernized in the setting, into the nursery lore of Europe. Thus Spanish children still ask, ‘What is the dish of nuts that is gathered by day, and scattered by night?’ (the stars.) Our English riddle of the pair of tongs: ‘Long legs, crooked thighs, little head, and no eyes,’ is primitive enough to have been made by a South Sea Islander. The following is on the same theme as one of the Zulu riddles: ‘A flock of white sheep, On a red hill; Here they go, there they go; Now they stand still?’ Another is the very analogue of one of the Aztec specimens: ‘Old Mother Twitchett had but one eye, And a long tail which she let fly; And every time she went over a gap, She left a bit of her tail in a trap?’
So thoroughly does riddle-making belong to the mythologic stage of thought, that any poet’s simile, if not too far-fetched, needs only inversion to be made at once into an enigma. The Hindu calls the Sun Saptâsva, i.e. ‘seven-horsed,’ while, with the same thought, the old German riddle asks, ‘What is the chariot drawn by the seven white and seven black horses?’ (the year, drawn by the seven days and nights of the week.[[103]]) Such, too, is the Greek riddle of the two sisters, Day and Night, who gave birth each to the other to be born of her again:
Εἰσὶ κασίγνηται διτταί, ὧν ἡ μία τίκτει
Τὴν ἑτέραν, αὐτὴ δὲ τεκοῦσ ὑπὸ τῆσδε τεκνοῦται;
and the enigma of Kleoboulos, with its other like fragments of rudimentary mythology:
Εἷς ὀ πατήρ, παῖδες δὲ δυώδεκα· τῶν δέ γ’ ἑκάστῳ
Παῖδες ἔασι τριήκοντ’ ἄνδιχα εἷδος ἔχουσαι·